All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Your Humble Correspondent

gnat on 2005-02-11T16:05:59

After a several month hiatus due to several job travails, I'm now settling into a new role at O'Reilly. This is the new new role, for those of you keeping score at home. I'm in the Conferences group full-time, working on OSCON, Euro OSCON (no web site yet, as the contract negotiations with the venue seem bloody endless), and a new conference we'll announce by the end of the month. So my life is a crazy whirl of schedules, topics, and speakers, into which I've added a metric crapload of travel.

I'll have been gone pretty much every other week of the first quarter of this year:

  • Jan 10th: speaker training, MacWorld, IBM Almaden.
  • Jan 30th: OSDL Linux Summit in San Francisco, then a bunch of companies around the new conference.
  • Feb 8th: VSLive in San Francisco, speaking on open source and patents.
  • Feb 15th: LinuxWorld in Boston.
  • Feb 28th: EclipseCon in San Francisco.
  • Mar 13th: ETech in San Diego.
I've been resisting more trips, but I think there might be a European conference trip in my future. One reason for all the travel is to build relationships with people so that I can move back to New Zealand and still be effective in the job.

Yup, I've finally convinced Jenine (or, rather, the election finally convinced Jenine :-) to move to New Zealand. It's all butterflies and suppressed fears at the moment (will we make friends? will our kids enjoy school there? will it ever stop raining?) but I think we're all ready for a slower pace of life. I've told my bosses my plans to move, and so far they've made no noises about it not working for them, so I'm going to attempt to continue doing my conferences job from home in New Zealand instead of from home in Colorado.

If it doesn't work out, who knows--I might yet do open source conferences in New Zealand! I'm sure you'd hate to be an invited speaker to the land of Hobbits and Kong :-)

--Nat

Going Home?

Ovid on 2005-02-11T16:41:57

Congratulations. That's a huge step and I hope it works out well for you and Jenine. It also sounds like it might be quite relaxing as opposed to flying all over the world constantly.

Hmm ... hobbitses.

Re:Going Home?

gnat on 2005-02-11T18:26:14

Thanks! Yes, definitely less expensive for me if I live in NZ and my employer pays to fly me to the US for conferences, rather than living in the US and my having to pay to fly my entire family to and from NZ. And not having a US house will mean an end to mortgage hell. I can't tell you how anticipated that is ...

--Nat

NZ

Dom2 on 2005-02-11T17:10:02

NZ rocks. I wish I could get back there. I only spent 3 weeks there, and I loved the place.

-Dom

My advice

mir on 2005-02-11T18:27:14

Having changed countries a few times already, I have just one word of advice: learn the language before you get there.

I Keed

mir on 2005-02-11T18:30:33

Oh yes, that was a joke, and congratulations!

Re:I Keed

gnat on 2005-02-12T04:44:07

:-) Thanks! I had trouble learning to speak American when I first moved here. I still sometimes have trouble. I think native Spanish speakers have an accent that eludes me still, and vice-versa. When Jenine and I were in El Paso trying to get my work permit from the INS office in Mexico (not recommended, btw) we had dinner one night and Jenine had to translate English to English between me and the waitress. It was very amusing.

--Nat

European conference trip?

cog on 2005-02-14T12:28:04

I sure hope you come to our YAPC O:-)