Nathan Torkington continues with his daily journal of the
University of Perl.
First the Advanced Perl class. It went well, despite a minor hitch. I'd been teaching the class in a slightly different order than the printed class notes, to get a better flow from topic to topic. This time I went one step further and taught the module section in a different order. This was one step too many, and I ended up having to teach that unit twice. And this to the largest class any of us had taught on these tutorials!
Despite that, we were only about 15 minutes overtime at the end.
After lunch I'd seen Jon in the class, but he left after about half an
hour. He came back at exactly 4:30, the time I was to have finished,
walking deliberately down the middle aisle with a pint of Guinness in
his hand. What was I to do? I drank it, obviously. The next 15
minutes of class were hopefully not impaired, but as I told the class:
"this may be unprofessional, but what are they going to do? Fire me?
This is the last class!" Hopefully their evaluation forms weren't
full of comments like "get this lush off the stage" and "his
unprofessinalism disgusted me."
Jon and I left for the Daily Show studios, across town. It was a good brisk walk, through some parts of town that were at times somewhat dubious. We got there in time to get two of the last three or four seats. It was a great show, seeming very different in real life from how it appears on screen. If anyone's a fan and planning on visiting NYC, I recommend it. We happened on a taping without an interviewed guest or commentator segment, but otherwise I have no regrets. And the tickets were free!
After that we walked back roughly towards civilization, through a good food area. We stopped at a Brazilian restaurant, disappointed that they didn't have Rodizio, a Brazilian meat dum sim. We enjoyed what we did have, though, and were soon back on the streets with a bottle of wine under our skins.
Around the Rockefeller centre, Jon got a call from Dave Adler saying where the Mongers were. We tried to catch a cab there, but all the cabs were full. However, we did manage to hail a passing limo and for $10 we got to ride in incredible opulence. We were disappointed, however, that even thirty seconds after we'd stepped out of a limo in New York city, we had no groupies. We must work on that.
Dave was at a diner, with other mongers: Reuven, Schwern, and many others the memory of which alcohol has obliterated. I tried an Italian beer, which turned out to be the colour of Mellow Yellow. I rapidly moved onto a Brooklyn local brew, and enjoyed that much more.
From there the evening became a blur. I can remember a discussion at some point, about how nudity and good food appeared to be mutually exclusive, but otherwise it's rather blank. I remember ending up back at the hotel, and Jon saying he had to catch the 1am train back to Boston. On the cab to the train station I convinced him to stay longer, and we ended up back at the hotel until he left for the 6am train. I finally got to sleep around 4:30am.
In case you're thinking I'm an unconscionable alcoholic, I do have
some exculpatory points: Jon and I hardly ever get to meet in real
life; I don't drink like that every night (in fact, I haven't touched
alcohol since that night
Nat
