..everybody's having fun.
Look to the future, Blech.
It's only just begun.
It was (the night before )x11 Christmas. And the London Perl Mongers had gathered in the Three Cups, for the annual Christmas "lets see what we can drink the pub out of this year" competition (Chocolate Double Stout it would seem.) Oh, and something about announcing the results of the election for our new leader.
Blech won. Reopen nominations came in second. The stuffed toy camel came in last.
Blech thanked everyone for voting, and the people who didn't vote, and Davorg for his great work up to date, and hoped he wouldn't break anything in the next year. He also threatened to go round and talk to all the people that have been organising things and ask them if they'd mind continuing to do that. Dave The Goth pointed out that Davorg's answer would probably be no....
I've taken a photo of Blech shortly after he was declared leader. I plan to take one a year later so we can count the extra gray hairs.
Muttley attempted to flog everyone in the room one (or five) of the Lovely London.pm T-shirts. Boxes full of T-shirts turned out to be quite heavy and Blech and Hitherto gave him a hand fetching them from islington half way though the evening.
Lots of other stuff was talked about. MBM told us that he'd had his laptop, phone and palm stolen during a mugging. We commiserated. Acme talked about his testing of Openframe on multiple platforms, going over what he'd recently discussed in his journal entry. I talked about the Template stuff I've been playing with (Inline::Template, Template::ModuleInstaller) and some of the testing suites I've been trying to get to grips with and develop with (Test::Builder.)
I got a few comments back on the Perl Advent Calendar. Barbie said that he'd shown it to someone who was relatively new to perl and they'd really liked it as it meant that they could get to grips with the vastness of CPAN in one go and cut 'straight to the vital stuff.' I'm not sure how vital Acme::Pony is but there you go. Richardc said that I'd picked really boring modules. There's several reasons for that (they're only boring because you know about them already, I'm saving the interesting ones for later on, the boring ones have universal appeal) but I think he was just smarting because he hadn't had one included yet. Davorg also suggested on of his not-so-serious modules for inclusion to lighten things up a little.
I talked to Davorg some more about Scalar::Approx::Sub, and the new module String::KeyboardDistance that popped up on CPAN yesterday. We're going to have to write a plugin.
It seems like everyone at the meeting was complaining about one of two things (or even both sometimes)
A large number of other random topics were covered: Running mod_perl on Zeus, Museums and CFT, CV technique and job interview questions, using catfile (from File::Spec) to do system independent path operations, burning beards, smb and firewalls, trips to wales, installing broadband, cam.pm, interior decoration, handcuffing snarfs and dragging them to meetings and finally What Are You Doing For Christmas.
And as a final thought to leave you with - remember: Why did we do that? Because Blech told Dave to tell us to.
