Nathan Torkington continues on his daily journal of the University of Perl.
I realized last night, while packing, that I'd left my bloody cellphone in the room where Damian was giving his evening talk. I'm such a moron. At least I didn't lose my wallet or something equally catastrophic. Then again, it's my wife's cellphone, and losing *anything* is 10 times worse when it's really the missus's.
I spent the entire day with Damian, more or less. We had breakfast, flew to LA, went for a 7 mile walk around Venice Beach, and finally had dinner (with Dan Klein) before heading off to bed. The man is incredible. He didn't saw off his own head from the boredom of talking to me, and he was interesting the whole time. And he is in incredibly good shape: I was helped by being used to walking at high altitudes, but Damian had no trouble keeping up my speedy walking pace (and in fact handled it better than I did).
We talked about teaching, what we do right and how we could do better. We talked about the classes, wondering why the signups for his Practical Extraction and Reporting classes have been so low, even though it's a killer class with all the data extraction clue you could ever want, from regexps to recursive descent parsing in it (all we could think of is that the title wasn't sexy enough: perhaps it needs to be "Client-Server Active Parsing with Proactive Regular Expression Synergies"?). The classic marketing problem: while we can talk to people who *did* come to the tutorials, we can't ask folks who *didn't* "why didn't you like the sound of this class?". We talked about marriage and country life and the pain of trans-Pacific flights.
I'd been told that Venice Beach was the home of all the freaks in LA, but I think that must only be on the weekends. On weekdays they're apparently holding down 9-5 jobs, as our 4:00-6:00 walk didn't turn up many weirdos at all. Well, except for the guy painted silver pretending to be a statue. And the guy with the afro riding rollerblades while playing the electric guitar (he had a portable amp slung around his shoulder) was pretty cool. By the end, though, my feet were pretty sore and I was looking forward to dinner.
The hotel is very fancy. Huge white feather bed, a chair the size of a couch, and a pretty impressive view. The rooms for the talks are nice, although we didn't get net access. The Seattle hotel had ethernet in the classrooms, while all we'll get here is a phone line. Oh well, can't have it all. The luxury of this is quite overwhelming to this random bloke from New Zealand.
I'm knackered after the walk, and have to get some sleep. I'll write again tomorrow after the first day of classes here.
Nat
Thanks,
Nat
Should I do this again for the Atlanta and New York tutorials?
Sure. I'll never get out to any of these events, and it's great to live vicariously through the accounts and descriptions of others. If the question is more an expression of concern about the number of commentators using use.perl.org in general, I'd point out that the most glorious days of Usenet (and maybe even Slashdot) were when people did not feel compelled to respond to everything, but kept in mind that the whole world was watching their words. There hasn't yet been very much activity on use.perl.org, but that might well change. And someday, old-timers born in the 80's will be as crotchety about the fall of useperl as I am about the current "gimme" culture of Usenet.
