In Toronto for php|works

• Tue, 21 Sep 2004 at 21:24:31 GMT
• 3 comments
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I'm sitting in the atrium of the Holiday Inn Yorkdale in Toronto, enjoying the free wireless access. I'll be here all week for php|works, a conference hosted by the fine folks at php|architect. I'm giving a talk on PHP Session Security on Thursday, and I fly back to New York on Friday.

When filling out the card for customs, I paused when it asked whether my trip was for business or pleasure. It's pretty nice to do something you love - I felt like checking both boxes. Technically, I suppose this is a business trip, so that's what I went with. When I got to customs, the lady there inquired about the purpose of my trip:

What sort of business are you on, Mr. Shiflett?

I replied that I was attending a computer conference, which seemed descriptive enough, but she persisted:

What's the conference aboot?

(Yes, I misspelled about, but that's not how it sounded to me.) I explained that it was about PHP, a programming language. Then came the awesome question:

PHP? What does that stand for?

As you can imagine, the term recursive acronym came up shortly thereafter. I found it pretty amusing, even if she didn't.

(PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.)