Got us (at least D'Arcy and I, possibly Ian) a hotel room this morning. All told it's about $1000CDN for the 5-night stay (including everything but parking). That's $100CDN/night for each of us, or around $70USD, which isn't spectacular, but triple occupancy is included in the price, and $66CDN/night is fairly good. I was strongly tempted to go for the hostel ($22USD/night), but I didn't figure D'Arcy would enjoy staying there.

Altogether, the cost of going to PyCon is around $150 (transportation) + $250 (registration) + $500 (lodging), with another $200 or so on food and miscellaneous details. It's not free, but it's pretty darn inexpensive for a 3 day conference (with an extra day for sightseeing).

Unfortunately the Best Western Key Bridge was sold out for the first night we needed, so no go for that. Don't know why the prices are so much higher this year than last, maybe this time we're overlapping the apple blossom festival? www.hotels.ca was somewhat annoying in that they quote the pre-tax-pre-fee prices on the web-site, which means that you have to figure in a 15% hike in prices versus everyone else.

I charged through the rest of the PyCon paper this evening, roughing out the various areas. Should have done that earlier, as it's shown that lots of the detail early in the paper is just going to get in the way of the flow. Maybe I'll make some appendices. Tomorrow I need to go back in and work on the paper again, then start the presentation proper.