Nathan Torkington has sent us in this great report of life on the road with O'Reilly's University of Perl.
I arrived on Saturday, jetlagged to hell from the flight from London. I got into the hotel around 10pm, decided not to risk waking Damian, and had a quiet pint in the hotel bar before retiring. I was trying the Irish cure for jetlag: a pint of Guinness before bed. (The Irish cure for anything is a pint of Guinness, preferably followed by another.)
Sunday I mooched around the hotel, watching the O'Reilly folks set up the rooms and pack bags. In the evening we had a speaker dinner at a very fancy restaurant. I tell you, taking geeks to a fancy restaurant is *not* a good idea. Between Mark-Jason heckling the waitress, Randal taking pictures of his food, and Dan spouting random factoids about the names of barrels (!) we definitely brought down the tone of the place. The food was excellent, though, and despite having a traveller's cold, I could definitely identify the steak as perfect. The restaurant also offered an excellent port after dinner. Port wine is one of my vices.
Today (Monday) was the first day of classes. I was teaching Tom Christiansen's "Advanced Perl", covering References, Objects, Modules, Process Management, and a wee bit on locking and Databases. It's a huge class, and Tom wasn't able to cover it in six hours at TPC4. He had to burst into the break time. I only went about 15 minutes over at the end of the day, but knew I'd failed to keep on time when I heard the applause from Damian Conway's audience in the next room over. Damian has a reputation for going horrendously over-time, trying desperately to stuff as much knowledge as possible into his students' brains, and it was a great embarrassment for me to finish after he did. He even popped his head into my classroom and laughed at me.
Damian was giving a new class he's written, "Practical Extraction and Reporting". It's all about getting data out of files and generating fancy reports. He talks about the nasty ways your data could be packaged (uuencoding, MIME, gzip) and how to pull out just the data you want (regexps, parsers, etc). It's a monster course, playing to all of Perl's strengths, and went down well. We mustn't have marketed it well, though, because he didn't get many people in it. Still, I can't think of a better way to spend a day than having Damian teach. Tomorrow he's doing his Object-Oriented Perl class, which has a much higher signup. I even had one of my students threaten to bail on my mod_perl class and defect to the Way of the Damian (all power to him!).
brian d foy gave his "Perl 101", which has the best attendance of all the classes. It's a two day Introduction to Perl, and apparently that's what people have been jonesing for. He said it all seemed to go well. Dan Klein also seemed happy with his "Practical Website Maintenance" tutorial. I ran into him at one of the breaks and asked him whether he was running short or long, and he said "I never know until I have 20 minutes to go". Fair enough. I try to guess how on-time I am based on the number of slides, but given that some sections are dense (lots of explanation required for each slide: hello, references!) while some are very frothy (hello, SQL!) anything based on slide count isn't really accurate. MjD wasn't teaching today, and I didn't see him at all. Michel arrived from France last night and periodically wandered through the tutorial signup area looking disgustingly chipper.
Brian, Amelia (the Perlmongers retail queen), Damian, Michel, and I went to a nearby Thai restaurant ("River Kwai") for dinner. Topics ranged from movies (universal acclaim for Kevin Spacey) to pot smoking in Amsterdam. The food was good, but definitely not up to the conversation. There's nothing like spending a relaxed hour or two with good people just shooting the breeze. Michel told us the great name of a Mexican restaurant he'd seen: C.O. Jones. (think about it)
Over lunch, Damian came up with the idea of giving his Quantum::Superpositions talks, and at 7pm he did that. Once again, not many people turned up (possibly because many of the attendees were local, and driving home and then back again wasn't practical for them). I was there, though, and loved it. The Q::S is so bloody clever, I picked up things on the second run through that I hadn't picked up when I heard it first at YAPC. Damian's just a teaching monster: "sure, I'd love to teach some more!" The rest of us were too exhausted after the first day to do anything (well, except for Randal, who headed off to Hooters with Bill). Damian's giving the Perligata (Latin Perl) talk to the Seattle Perlmongers tomorrow night, so it might be a while before we get to have a dinner chat together again.
I'm amazed at how many of the O'Reilly staff are here. I've seen Mark Jacobsen (who is currently running the conferences group and was probably here to check it was all going well), Madeline Schnapp (who manages the Research group, trying to work out what's hot and what's not), Tim Allwine (who works for Madeline and was asking about large repositories of historical Usenet records--they want Usenet archives for groups like comp.lang.perl.misc for the last two years, and the commercial vendors of such things are apparently asking comically high prices), and others. Not all are taking classes, I think they're here to pick the brains of Seattle's finest (insert obligatory Microsoft bash here). Either that or the good weather in Sebastopol got too much for them and they just *had* to catch some drizzle and clouds.
Tomorrow I have a morning meeting with Mark Jacobsen, with whom I'm
working to put together content for the Open Source Convention next
year. Then in the afternoon I'm teaching my mod_perl class. This
will be the first time I've taught the class for real (I did have a
quick run-through in Colorado for a few of my former coworkers to
beta-test the class, but I don't count it as a real presentation).
Sometime before midday tomorrow I have to set up the examples so I can
show them off live. Right now Damian's going through his slides
fixing filenames of images after moving his presentation. These are
the exciting lives that we glamorous jetsetting trainers lead
Cheers;
Nat
