After a gruelling 20 hour journey I made it to the hotel in San Diego for RubyConf 2005.

The fun started with the Northern Line being completely shut down. Hilarity ensued with vegetarian meals being not specified by the travel agent. Of course the extra hour sitting like veal at the gate at Newark waiting for ice to be loaded was just what I needed.

However, I eventually arrived and checked in. From the trio sat on the sofa (iBook, Powerbook, Powerbook) I figured I was in the right place.

Nearby was a group standing and chatting. I spotted Jim Weirich quite easily. I think James Britt was there too, but I was somewhat star struck as Matz introduced himself. He is much younger than I thought. The conference agenda is full of goodies.

Panels I'm keen on:

• Jim Weirich's Creating Domain Specific Languages in Ruby
• Brent Roman's Embedding Ruby into a Robotic Marine Laboratory
• Karlin Fox's System Testing in Ruby with Systir

Of course, Matz's roundtable and keynote speech, along with DHH's Rails workshop will be of great interest too.

Seeing as it's 4am now and I think it's lunchtime, I think I'll go download Ruby Classifier in preparation for Lucas Carlson's Advanced Classification in Ruby and Rails.