I know - several people beat me to it..
I only really wanted to see the afternoon stuff, unfortunately, I actually wanted to several clashing talks, but I can't complain as ranguard gave me a CD of his slides, and I can ask him questions on irc later :)
After a hectic morning christmas shopping, I managed to get an ADSL splitter (rather than the presents for my wife I was looking for) and got back to Imperial college 5 minutes before the afternoon sessions started.
First I watched a very good talk on Testing, a lot was preaching to the converted - most of London.pm have drunk the testing Koolaid in the last 12 months. I am tempted to knock off a fake dbi to test some of my code, but this may be some time off.
Next I watched Alex Gough's talk on XS, after struggling for the first 30 minutes in the absence of examples and a quick pace, it came together for me in the last 10 minutes as I saw and understood examples of calling C from perl -- which is what I wanted for the talk. Given how much went above my head perl-internal's wise I decided to chicken out of simon wistow's later talk on XS and black magic and see the python talk instead.
I skipped Casey West's talk on Email, but I am sure somebody was glad of a vacated seat as it was standing room only well before it started, with probably 60-odd in the (small) room at the end of Alex's talk and at least another dozen people entering as I made my exit.
Downstairs I went to the bar and found Greg who had been acting as a landmark and ensuring that any lost or unwary looking mongers were soon imbibing alchohol and guarding peoples bags and coats.
I managed to escape the before Jonathon Stowe (with his new William Hague / Milwall FC fan hair cut) and Greg could ply me with Gin and Tonic.
The Python for Perl programmers talk was what it said on the Tin. It wasn't likely to win any converts but it gave me a good warning as to what I would like, dislike and watch out for if I ever had to code in Python.
Then I quickly said hello to the usual suspects in the union bar and headed off accross london to the leafy suburbs before the combination of Evil Dave, Greg and Jonathon could tempt me into an evening of drunken debauchary with their siren song of beer and spirits.
