On Tuesday, I gave my Patterns in Perl tutorial [*] in the morning, which kept me occupied me until 12:15. I was quite honored to see Paul Graham sitting in, but by the time I was going over idioms like open or die, he quietly walked out. I caught up with Paul during the evening speeches, and he very politely said that he thought it would be a talk about what Lispers call patterns, but the rest of the world calls regular expressions. When he realized that this was a design patterns tutorial, he realized his mistake and left.
At lunch, brian found me and we grabbed a bite to eat in front of the courthouse, and went to the Stonehenge offices to pick up 500 copies of TPR delivered for the conference. (We'll be walking through the conference distributing them for a $1 donation to cover costs. The friends-and-family rate is $2 an issue. Uri gets the extra special rate of $1/page. ;-)
I don't remember much of what happened that afternoon, but I did manage to find Chris Coleman of BSDMall, who is in the process of resurrecting his all-volunteer run print magazine daemonnews. He shared a good deal of tips for running a magazine like TPR. At some point, we started to filter out for dinner, and a group of four looking for a quick bite to eat quickly transmogrified into a group of 12 looking for a nice restaurant nearby. We found a place on the river that was quite nice, and able to handle all of us quickly enough so that we could get back to the hotel for this evening's speeches: Eric Raymond on his "open source nobel prize" medals, Larry's State of the Onion, Paul Graham on inequalities of wealth and programmer productivity, and Damian doing a repeat performance of Life, The Universe and Everything. (Jon Orwant was supposed to do the Internet Quiz Show, but he couldn't make it this week.)
After Damian, Ask, Vanni, Robert, Tim Bunce and I wandered upstairs to the bar. It was one of those nights at the bar when everyone is tired, but too tired to get up from the table, so the beer and fries just keep coming. It was fun, and we talked about a whole bunch of things, including Parrot, testing DBI. Mostly we were all in violent agreement, but too tired to realize it. But it was still fun to hang out again.
[*] Short synopsis: Dominus was right when he said Design Patterns Aren't. The GoF aren't the alpha and omega of pattern theory, and those specific patterns are not universally applicable. It's best to look at patterns as Christopher Alexander intended them -- as a framework for developing an open-ended vocabulary to describe the problem space.
