Well, getting drunk it would seem, in the case of Perl Mongers' social meetings. You wait a month for a Perl Mongers' meeting and then two come along at once. Well, that?s not strictly true, but I'll get onto that later.
On Thursday (yes, I know that was five days ago, but I'll get onto that later too) the London Perl Mongers had their usual day-after-the-first-thursday-of-the-month social meet. Kake had booked us all into the Three Cups with out own little room, which was fun.
Davorg (with dumrats' help) managed to flog a load of Perl Monger hats he'd found in his basement to the unsuspecting crowds. People talked about RSI, doctors, and various books were shown around. Robin and Joe and I chatted briefly about the Chomsky classification of grammars and what Perl regular expressions are capable of with and without back references. Blech talked us through what had happened in the previous week with our beloved server the person in the black hat. Quite a lot of talk about the job market and general unemployment was banded around and would have been really depressing if we hadn't been drinking the reportedly wonderful chocolate beer (I don't consume chocolate, but I consumed some Guiness to compensate.)
The next day I managed (amazingly, given First Great Western's track [sic] record) to get from London to Bath in one piece. Hotels were checked into and after watching some 15-1 on the TV ("what's the name for a horse under 14hands in height" - acme and muttley similtaniously "Pony!") we staggered off to our old Bath.pm haunt, The Hobgoblin. Again beer was consumed. Various Bath.pm people popped in by chance and we said hi to them and then got them to consume alcohol. This could have been more organised, but we accidently left Magnus in charge and he forgot to tell anyone about anything. Not much Perl was talked about apart from Fatman's tale of circular references and 200MB and growing processes (use Weakref Pete, that's what it's for.) Despite Magnus' attempts at not inviting anyone I declared it a Perl Monger meeting. It had beer, people, discussion of Buffy, the Job Market and war stories - and even a ickle bit of Perl talk. What more do you need?
I've been hanging around Bath for the weekend seeing old friends (though not enough, I ran out of time.) Managed to see TeeJay for a bit, go Ice Skating, have lunch on a cannel boat, go see Enigma at the cinema (two thumbs up, highly recommended,) go to Old Orleans and drink a white russian, tequilla, and aftershock one after the other at five to 11 (two thumbs down, not at all recommended.) Finally got back to London today, and am now able to write a journal at last. Oh bandwidth (and wireless,) how I've missed you.
