On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, Eris Reddoch wrote:

Too bad it costs $160 to buy, but I suspect we, Phoenyx users, could raise that money for you if you wanted to go the VBulletin route.

Oh, and thanks. But if I really wanted to beg users to raise money for something (put your wallet away, Mike, you've done above and beyond already), it'd probably be to send me to YAPC::NA again (last year, Carl's company paid for him to go, and I rode along and stayed in his hotel room, so pretty much it only cost us $100 for my conference admission).

$85 early-bird admission (through Wednesday), so it's a cheap conference, but then I'd have to get there. Amtrak is $225 round-trip to Chicago (which is about the cost of gas these days, and less of a civil-liberties issue than flying these days), and the housing prices haven't been posted yet, but if it's like last year it should run $40/night if I can get a roommate. (Considering that all of about five women attend the conference, this might actually be a problem.) So... a bit more than buying vb+VBA, somewhere between $500 and $600. Of course, since I'm bordering on going *without* being funded, obviously the Phoenyx membership wouldn't have to come up with all of that.

On the plus side, though, it'd be *great* incentive to get a 1.0 release done by June...

In practice, though, having looked at the recently-published conference lineup, I'd *only* be going for the recruiting (there's a good Moose track, but I'm already sold there), which I could do almost as well by having a 1.0 release ready and just hanging out in the #perl IRC channels during the conference (and especially the hackathon afterward). So I'm not entirely sure it's worthwhile, even if someone else is paying.