Unfortunately, despite plans, I wasn't able to attend OSCON this year even though my husband, Paul Fenwick has made it. It would have been my first time out of Australia, but I'll have to wait for that.
Still, I asked him to bring me home a present, and last night he sent me:
You asked me to bring you home a nice present. I'm actually bringing home a present from the entire Perl community for you!
You're the recipient of one of the three White Camel awards!
I struggled at first to take him seriously.
Wow.
Really, Wow.
I didn't even know I was nominated. Thankyou to the unknown person or persons who nominated me.
Someone asked me what a white camel award was; and I struggled to answer the question to my satisfaction. So I searched and found:
The White Camel reward recognises the Perl community's "unsung heroes"--those who have devoted extraordinary creativity, energy, and time to the non-technical work that supports Perl's active and loyal user community.
I think originally it was divided into three areas: Perl Advocacy, Perl User Groups, and the Perl Community with one award each; but I suspect that distinction has since been dropped.
I join a very short list of very impressive people who've also earned one of these awards and share this year with Gabor Szabo and Tatsuhiko Miyagawa who most certainly deserve their awards.
Thanks again to those who nominated me; to the judges who've honoured me; to Paul for accepting the award on my behalf and to everyone else who's offered me such lovely and sincere congratulations!
Congratulations! It couldn't have been awarded to a more deserved person.
Congratulations, Jacinta
The combination of
quality product
love for the product
interest in sharing that love
will do a lot for both Perl and the local IT community
Perl Training Australia seems to embody some of the ideas that make Perl so helpful: that of helping real people (those who are not Linus, Eric, and who don't make a living from building software) to get some value from a computer by helping with the useful things that most people find difficult.
