I left the pubcrawl at 0:30 last night and thought I could grab a metro back to the Hogeschool, where I left my car. Boy was I wrong. Public transport stops at 0:25. So I had to take a cab to the Hogeschool and started driving my car at 1:00. Got home around 2:00 and fell asleep somewhat after 2:30....That blasted alarmclock had the nerve to go off at 6! So you might imagine I'm even more tired than I was yesterday.
I did however manage to be at the Hogeschool on time again, in fact I'm writing this now at the venue's computerlab. In the room next to this Hugh Daniels gives his speech, filling the gap that Tim O'Reilly had to leave behind unfortunately. Kudo's to Hugh!
When I came in I immediately went to the Iterative Software room where I will give my own talk about pVoice at 10:00. I was right to assume that it would take a while to set everything up. It took me 45 minutes. If I would have done that when I had to start the speech when the time was up ;-). I'm getting a little nervous now. It's probably the least technical speech that's being given at the conference, because it's mainly about the interface of pVoice. Everything under the hood is really simple. At least at the moment.
Yesterday I had quite a long talk with Kevin Lenzo about Festival and Festvox and it looks really promising how Festvox can build the voice I need from the pre-recorded voice I already have. The only issue that's left is to build a general purpose voice rather than a limited domain voice. The latter can only be used for certain sets of words which have been predefined. A general purpose voice should be able to pronounce every word with the voice you built. I'm really looking forward to diving more into it.
After my talk with Kevin I went to Brian Ingersons Inline talk. That was really good fun. The first part was "serious" and when he came to the point of reversing the Inline stuff and creating a C interpreter which uses Perl inline which uses Inline::C it became hilarious.
After that I listened to some lightning talks, of which some were good, some were less good. I especially liked Dave Cross' "Why Perl Advocacy is Bad". Really, I LMAO :).
After the regular schedule we were to go to have some dinner with the Perlmonks. It turned out that a lot of people thought everyone was just going to find a location to eat so many more non-Perlmonks joined. However we had a lot of fun and at 21:00 we joined the Pubcrawl which started very nearby the restaurant where we ate.
I'm going to walk around a bit and try to lose my feeling of nervosity...I don't think I'll manage ;-)
