Somehow on a three day trip, I managed to do two double days. I'm not sure how that's physically possible.
Due to logistics, I didn't eat for 24 hours the first day. I had a light snack for breakfast, hopped on the plane, landed, met Beppu at the airport, hopped the 28X, walked to the hotel, took a cab to the arrival dinner, found we missed dinner (that's okay, we didn't pay, only wanted beer), had beer, stumbled upon a group of people including mst, drank until late... talk about drinking on an empty stomach.
I gave two talks. The second undid the good karma from the first. I'm a malcontent. I always want better. Sorry. But just because I'm a malcontent doesn't mean I'm an ingrate. Despite griping about which of my lightning talks they picked, I'm grateful for the chance to talk and for all the festivities provided for my amusement. Talks everyone! Awesome job! Yeah, the badges need to be double sided and have the nicks on them and coffee first thing in the morning is a really good idea because the little cafe upstairs cannot cope with hundreds of nerds in withdrawl who don't want to be up that time anyway, but I'm still impressed and grateful.
We had hand built rubber band powered airplanes launched into the main stadium. We saw traveling salesman solved in SQL and SQL do the Mandelbrot set. What else... I'm really sad I missed the SNOBOL talk.
Beppu and Awwaiid both talked. Beppu gave a lightning talk trying to introduce people to Coro and Squatting in 5 minutes. Awwaiid gave two talks, one on pop-up debugging back-door for CGI scripts that lets you inspect and change state and do a REPL and view the stack and then another on his HtmlUnit bindings.
The logic of Iron Man didn't convince me, but mst's sheer enthusiasm did. So I need to repost a hopefully less wearily written version of this elsewhere.
Like I grumped about, and like I've blogged about in the past, Perl programmers are obsessed with mucking about in Perl rather than *doing* things with Perl. I'm all for building tools to scale up your development and Perl is a fantastic language for that, but we have to, at some point, do something we these tools we've built -- something beyond just demo them. PHP spends very little time tooling up and goes straight for the kill with good results. I'm not saying it takes an idea tack on it, just that our lopsidedness here is revealing.
