After a comment at Lee Daemon's effective system administration tutorial today, I joined another Perl IRC channel to bring the count of Perl channels I'm idling on to three.
I now have to massage my volunteering schedule so that I can go to the tutorials I reallly want to see. First, I really want to see Mark Jason Dominus' talks on regular expressions and fixing Perl. Seeing MJD's explanations of regexps will surely help me when teaching them in my own class. Second, I really want to see David N. Blank-Edelman's talk on "over the edge" system administration. (Not to brag, but I have a feeling one of my scripts might be one of David's examples. Not sure though.)
I already saw Tom Christiansen's advanced Perl talk at USENIX/Boston so I don't feel bad about missing it. Between coincedentally guzzling beer with Tom here in Atlanta and Randal Schwartz back in Boston, I now know more about photography and the Nikon D70 than I could ever imagine. What an incredible camera! Way over my head, but interesting nonetheless.
Thanks to former Crew member Rob who's allowing me to room with him. The organizers squeezed four of us into a two-bed room, but the hotel only allows one extra cot per room of our size due to fire codes. Instead of sleeping on the floor like Saturday night, I actually get a real bed.
Back to the tutorials. What I love about these conferences is being able to meet and chat with people are authors of papers, articles, books and code I've read. Conferences remind me that small fish like myself can make a difference.
I'm almost 22. By the time I'm 25 I hope to have done something to this planet that makes a large number of people's lives easier like these people have done.
