Well the 11th German Perl Workshop is over, and you missed the free beer. That's right - there was free beer at the social event, which came as a bit of a surprise, and may not be repeated next year...
Wherever next year is, which might be interesting. The only firm offer to organise was from pepl in Salzburg, which causes some problems, because whilst it walks like Germany and quacks like Germany, er, I mean is inside the Schengen area, takes Euro, and speaks German*, it isn't actually Germany. Which causes problems for many attendees, as they are at the workshop as a business trip, and their employers have "about 20 forms to fill in" if they want to make a foreign trip. In particular, "If I die, what happens to my corpse?" Well, we don't think that your corpse could care less. And if your employer cares, well, that's easy too - four of us, one on each corner, and we'll simply carry it just over the border and drop it in Germany. Problem solved.**
Except that this doesn't quite seem to be deemed an adequate solution. So pepl suggested Passau but that's starting to sound complex to organise. Instead, I hope they strike lucky and find a suitable venue in the towns a few km away from Salzburg, over the border in Germany.
* ish.
** My father, now retired, said that at his employer, two of the anti-fraud people were ex policemen. One was ex-Met, one ex-City, and they'd constantly bicker about how the others messed something up. e.g. "you let $x bank robbers get away". "but you didn't give us enough warning that they were coming our way". And that one of their tricks was, on a particular road that was on the boundary between their jurisdictions, that the Met patrol would come along in the wee small hours, and roll the sleeping drunks across the road to the City side. About an hour later, the City patrol would walk by, and roll the drunks back to the Met side. S.E.P. in action.
