TPC 5.0, Sunday/Monday

Elian on 2001-07-24T16:36:03

Okay, so this is a combined sunday/monday diary thing.

For reasons I don't quite understand, I arranged for a morning flight. An early morning flight. A really early morning flight. Nothing quite like rousting the kids out of bed at 4:30 AM to head off to the airport. (I really need to get the other car running) The first leg, from Bradley to Chicago, wasn't at all bad, probably because everyone was asleep. The Chicago to San Diego leg, though...

For some reason I don't understand, the woman in the seat in front of me didn't figure out that the reason I kept kneeing her seat was because she'd managed to set her seat back too far and was wedged against my knee. (I'm not huge--6'1" isn't, by any means, big, but planes are apparently designed to comfortably sit your average 10 year old kid) That was just loads of fun. My knees still hurt, and it apparently whacked my back some. Joys of getting old and creaky, I suppose.

I also noticed that I read too darned fast. I brought a volume of Ranma 1/2, three volumes of Maison Ikkoku, and four volumes of Fushigi Yugi on the flight with me, and I blew through all of them (the Maison Ikkoku stuff twice) before I was halfway through the second leg of the flight. I'd also brought along Angel Sanctuary and the first volume of Orphen with me on DVD. They would've been a good way to spend the rest of the flight, until I realized that they might not be the most appropriate things to be showing in public, at least in their entirety. (With subtitles no less, so everyone can see the dialog :) The question, of course, is what am I going to do on the flight home?

I did notice a couple of interesting things, though.

1. People, when their behaviour is taken as a group, are clueless fsckwits. It's got to take at least three times longer than really necessary to get everyone off the damn plane. (You notice these things from the very back row)
2. People, individually, are clueless fsckwits. I saw people who needed to go to the bathroom while they were serving lunch. These folks, from the very front of the plane, followed the food cart all the way to the back. And grumbled that the flight crew wouldn't get out of the way. (Like those carts had any place to go. Sheesh)
3. Planes are deceptively simple, until you look under the surface. Then they're amazingly complex. (And the simple things, like getting passengers off the damn plane, function the worst)

Dunno for sure what this means for perl 6, but it means something. I shall have to ponder it some.

Monday was actually kind of nice. I had a tutorial to give in the morning, and it felt like it went OK. That's always a releif, because I get really nervous before these things. (Being in the morning helps--I am not a morning person, and it apparently doesn't matter that I'm three hours west of home. 8:30 AM is 8:30 AM, no matter what the timezone difference from my local time) Got a massage in the afternoon (Best $20 I've dropped in a long time. Being cooped up in a plane with squished knees killed my back) and kicked around a bit.

Sat in on Simon's perl 5 internals talk. Now that is a good way to get queasy after lunch. :) The talk was great, it's the subject that's nasty. Met and chatted with some folks (I'm making an effort to socialize this time. And yes, if you've seen me around the conference, it does mean I'm even worse normally), then grabbed a light dinner and hit the p5p impressions night. The impressions of Damian were pretty amusing (crikey!) but things petered out pretty quickly. Perl geeks are apparently not all that funny.

After was the p5p meeting. Wasn't entirely a waste of time, but pretty close to it. (We didn't even have any glasses flung. I was disappointed) Not too surprising, as we didn't really have anything pressing to go over. This is a good thing, on the whole, but I think I should've cut out earler. I'll know better next time.