I’m signed up for two conferences this summer–Gnomedex in Seattle in late June, and OSCON in Portland in late July.

I’m looking forward to both conferences. I’ve never been to Gnomedex before, but I’ve been kicking myself for missing the past two years, and decided months ago that I wouldn’t miss this year’s conference. Besides, I owe Chris for buying me dinner last summer, so the least I can do is attend his conference.

OSCON is another conference that I’ve never quite managed to attend. I drove down for “FOSCON” last year, when the Portland Ruby Group had most of the OSCON Ruby speakers give their talks for free. I had a really good time, but I couldn’t afford to take the week off and attend the real OSCON conference. Fortunately, Google is going to have a big presence there, so I get to spend a week at the conference in exchange for spending a bit of time pretending to be a recruiter. Feel free to ask me about working for Google :-).

I have one question for readers who have been to OSCON before–it is worth staying in the official conference hotel, the Doubletree in Lloyd Center? Unfortunately, the Doubletree isn’t actually all that close to the conference center, and I’d hate to spend a lot of time commuting back and forth between the hotel and the convention center. For FOSCON last year, I stayed at the Jupiter Hotel which was really cool. I’ve also stayed at the Red Lion a block or so from the convention center. The Jupiter and Red Lion are both closer to the conference, and the Jupiter is just cooler. The big thing about conferences is that the conference sessions themselves aren’t really all that important–everything interesting really happens in the hallways and afterhours during BoFs. So, does anything actually happen at the Hotel during OSCON, or is everything at the convention center?