I’m flying to San Francisco to spend some a couple of days with our friends in Cupertino. There is much work to be done on our WWDC talk, so Keith and I are heading out today. Chandler will join us tomorrow.

As much as I want to see friends out there, the workload and short duration of the trip might limit me to dinner on Thursday evening.

I hate flying, but at least I’ll be on JetBlue and will have a few hours of podcasts (Rachel Maddow, Intelligence Squared) to catch up on.

Chandler, Keith and I were just given clearance to promote the fact that we are speaking at the Apple developer conference (WWDC) this year. You can read about our session here.

We’re doing the Hybrid Web/Cocoa Application Development Lab and Designing and Developing Hybrid-Web/Cocoa Applications session.

Lately, I’ve been flooding Craigslist, posting many of my toys for sale. In my manic desire to scrape up half of one percent of the trillion dollars required for a down payment in the greater NYC area, I’ve decided that sacrificing gadgets and gizmos is just and noble.

Thus far, I’ve sold off a beautiful Nikon 17-55/2.8 DX lens.

Also on the chopping block are:

• My restored 1979 Vespa P200E
• My Nikon D200

Unposted items are:

• My insanely amazing custom Tim Scruggs pool cue
• My Dual 867 G4 and 17” Cinema Display
• Quite possibly, my Liberty LO100 biscuit-cone resonator (think Dobro)
• Very possibly, my Konica Minolta DiMAGE 5400 II 35mm film/slide scanner

Who knows what else I’ll dig out.

The point of this post is not only to take inventory (and to get a bit more attention on these items), but to point out that, should each item sell for its asking price, I’ll have added only $7200 towards the cause. That’s 1/10th the price of a down payment for a decent house in Jersey.

One tenth.

Ten percent.

Ten percent of twenty percent of a house.

Some folks say you are a ‘real’ New Yorker the day you start talking endlessly about getting out of the city.

I’m the mayor of this motherfucker. I’m the Statue of Liberty.

ADDED I decided against selling the scanner. The cue, I’m sending off to Tim Scruggs for a refinish and rewrap. I sold the G4.

Earlier this month, I managed to do something I’ve wanted to do for around five years: I attended the Cocoa Boot Camp at the Big Nerd Ranch in Georgia.

I first picked up Aaron Hillegass’ book, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, back in 2001, immediately after it was published. I’d been on OS X since the earliest public builds, and loved it. The underlying tech – from the kernel to the app frameworks – was exciting to me as a relative newbie to both the Apple world and desktop app development.

I’ve since owned every edition of the book, and almost every other Cocoa/Obj-C book out there, but have never taken a class on the subject. I did attend WWDC last year, but the topical sessions aren’t the same as an in-depth classroom experience (though they are quite valuable).

One of the benefits of a session at BNR is that all distractions are removed for a week. Students are taken away from their families, comfy chairs, favorite bourbons, loud offices, DVRs and insane clients and locked away at a remote facility for five days. They are forced to learn, taking breaks only for meals comprised of fried food and iced tea so sweet the supersaturated sugars crystallize in plain site.

Another benefit of the Cocoa Boot Camp is that Aaron guides you through his book from start to finish, lecturing and answering questions as he goes. The structure, immediate feedback, and question sessions are worth the cash on their own.

Three of us from The Barbarian Group attended (Ashley Holtgraver, Keith Butters, and myself) and I think we all found the class inspiring, educational and fun. I’d recommend any of the BNR courses to folks without a second thought.

I’ll write a more in-depth review of the class soon.