Alright, I've been thinking this for nearly a decade, and it's high time I shared.

The opening lick on the solo to Pearl Jam's "Alive" sounds a lot like the one on "Five to One" by The Doors.

Judge for yourself (mp3).

The Zend conference this week has been lots of fun. Here's a rundown of some of my personal highlights from the Zend Conference.

• Finally meeting my buddy Aaron Wormus in person.
• Finally meeting my buddy Jon Bauer in person.
• Meeting Ilia Alshanetsky, Sara Golemon, Christian Wenz, Shahar Evron, Sebastian Bergman, Chris Anderson, Matthew Weir O'Phinney, Eli White, Chris Jones, Paul Reinheimmer, and Wolfgang Drews.
  
• Hanging out with my other PHP friends.
• Having my work with the Google Data APIs shown off at the opening keynote.
• Seeing Dave Berlind show off my good friend Andrew Bidochko's MapBuilder service in his mashup keynote.
• Running into Nilesh Dosooye among thousands of crazy Halloweeners.
• Taking and passing the new version of the Zend Certification Exam. I'm a Zend Certified Engineer!
• It also turns out I'm the deuce of spades.
  

P.S. If you attend a conference session, glean the speaker's knowledge, and then decide you need to steal that speaker's personal property, it officially makes you a "punk ass."  May the  fleas from a thousand herd of buffalo infest your armpits.

Here in Pennsylvania, lots of people have trouble remembering the state abbreviation for Mississippi is MS. That's understandable, since there's eight states that start with 'M'. However, there are only two 'T' states, and the Monster ad I saw on Techcrunch today had Tennessee all wrong. Now if they just knew how to seek out a good copywriter...

In 5th grade, my class put on a play called "Fify Nifty United States" where one of the songs was the names of all the states in alphabetical order. I can still recite them to this day, and it's come in handy on several occasions.

It's frustrating the way we can remember things set to music. I'm amazed that I can recite every word to "Ice Ice Baby" but can't do integral calculus with a gun to my head.

For the last several months, I've been using this wheelie bag to carry around my laptop and other gadgets. While it's served me well, I'd like to buy a laptop-friendly messenger bag or backpack for when I'm places where it doesn't make sense to wheel around my crap.

Any suggestions? I've heard a lot about Timbuk2 bags. What makes them particularly popular?

Here are a few I'm considering.