This morning the conference started properly. I had no problem getting up (jetlag is still confusing my body, I think; it's not sure if it's 6am, noon or some time in between, but it's definitely not going back to sleep). Anyway, thankfully this meant I was in plenty of time to pick up croissants, eat muffins and get a seat well before Lenzo introduced us to the people who'd organised it (thanks Sarah and the others, especially for handling panicky emails from stoopid Europeans) before handing over to Larry for the keynote.
Despite the difficulties with projection Larry had it was an excellent keynote, even if you didn't get all the subtleties of the Lord of the Rings books he was using to build his allegory (despite reading from the intro to FotR where Tolkien explicity rejects reading his novels as an allegory for the Second World War. On the other hand, I suppose that doesn't rule out building an allegory from them. Anyway, I digress). One of the analogies I liked comparing learning Perl before C to reading LotR before the Hobbit; there were many others, and if there's audio of the talk online (and I hope there will be) you should have a listen, although it works less well without the slides.
There was a choice of talks after this, and unlike most of the people who've written journals so far, I opted for Jos Bouman's POE talk, since I've played with it a little and wanted to understand it better. Jos did a good job of building up from the core of POE through sessions, wheels and components, with a couple of versions of an example TCP serving application. I'll only be using POE through components, I suspect, but even so it was useful to get to grips with the underside of the system.
Lunchtime brought a nice box of food, a very strange card game based on the dot com bubble that Shane Landrum brought down from Boston (I think) and a chance to write this. So far I'm planning to see mjd's talk, after davorg and others recommended passing on Damian's talk.
Weather? Sunny, warm, and hence I'm avoiding it like the plague...
