I didn't get around to posting an update on the World Tour last week, so here it is.
On Wednesday we took in our 3rd date on the Birmingham.pm World Tour of UK Perl Monger user groups. Alan, Phil and I travelled up to Nottingham for the joint LUG/PM technical meeting. Having suffered the drive up to Nottingham via the M42 several times, it wasn't a trip that was eagerly looking forward to. Particularly between the M40 and the M6 Toll, where there are traffic calming measures that although manage to slow traffic down, do nothing to calm the raging tempers at the frustration of cars coming to a stand still for no apparent reason. Phil and I picked up Alan from Birmingham International train station at 5pm, and being rush hour I fully expected it to take 90-120 minutes to get there. We did indeed come to a complete stand still on a couple of occasions, but thankfully traffic did clear and we were cruising most of the way. It also helped that I came off a junction too early on the M1 and headed into Nottingham directly from the south, discovering I had saved about 15-20 minutes on the journey time. We were parked up in a side street at 6.02pm, just as the free parking metering came into operation. Perfect timing.
The Navigation Inn, is a very nice little pub, and the food was also well worth it. We weren't the first to arrive, as a couple of regulars were already settled in. As the evening drew on more and more people turned up, including Jono Bacon, who was the speaker for the night. As Nottingham.pm and Nottingham LUG are not big groups, they tend to merge their meetings, as such they have quite a decent turn out. Michael Eskine did the introductions, including announcing the YAPC::Europe::2006 event, which we were very grateful for. Jono then did his advocacy talk, as per the Birmingham.pm technical meeting the week before, but with a slightly different dialogue. In particular his faux pas over one of his slide quotes :) The humour continued on from there and the talk was very well received. There was quite a long questions session afterwards, that raised some interesting thoughts and references. Once the talk was over, people headed for more beer and more discussions.
It was a most excellent evening, and we met some really friendly folk. We enjoyed our trip so much, we're planning to go back again, either later in the year for a day trip, or may be as part of the 2007 World Tour! Next time though they've intimated that I might be asked to do a Perl talk as well :)
