As I wrote earlier, I had a hard time falling asleep last night and it was really bright outside before I did. So I got up just in time to sorta, but not really catch lunch. Great!
Afterwards I sat in the speakers registration room and worked a bit on my slides. Nathan asked if I could give my CVS talk tomorrow at 2.30, but I can't because by then I'll be in the middle of the mod_perl talk. So I handed over the pod file and tools to make it into slides to Robert Spier and he is going to give it.
Jim Winstead was there, which was fun. Well, lots of people were there, but most I had talked to already. Justin Erenkrantz and Aaron Bannert walked by just as I couldn't get the new mod_cache in apache 2.0 to work. I wanted to demo it a bit in my talk. They have not been involved in it, so they told me to write to Ian Holsman.
Christopher Solomon from ValueClick arrived in the afternoon and came by and said hello before going to catch the last minutes of mjd's last (third!) tutorial on Tim's and my recommendation. Later he said he liked it, surprise surprise. (Mark, you should do more tutorials, you could have done four!)
Dinner
I'm not sure where the time went, but suddenly we figured out that it was time for dinner if we were going to make it back to the State of the Onion. So we jumped in the cars, Tom Phoenix, Hugo van der Sanden, Chip Salzenberg, Tim Bunce, Robert Spier, Dan Sugalski and myself. Nothing like that to remind you that you don't know much about Perl. Oh, and Chip is really really entertaining. We went by a few places that looked nice, but incompatible with our "need to eat and get back in less than an hour" schedule, so we ended up at a faster Mexican place. It was nice and the company was great.
Larry's State of the Onion
We got back in time for the Onion talk, where Larry Wall used a table of contents from Scientific American to relate various things to Perl. He talked about how the Perl 6 and Parrot efforts has been good for the perl 5 community and the perl 5 development. (And lots more, of course).
He talked about how Uncertainty and Doubt is a part of life, and being human. Fear is the evil part of FUD, because it plays on the other two to make us afraid of the unknown. (Or that's the short version of how I understood it).
In the end he talked about how the world is better off if people people are tolerant about and even embracing other languages. The title from Scientific American was "The Death of Languages" or some such. Not that Perl is dying. It was about how it is that languages die; what stages they go through. And he talked about There Is More Than One Way To Do It; also when it comes to choosing language. Not that we should all go and use Python, but he mentioned how parrot so far has been a place where people have been playing with odd and old languages. And how it's a good thing to have the diversity.
It's true that the perl community in the last years has been becoming increasingly clued that Perl is good and Python is good. And Ruby. And Lisp. And C. And probably VB too (although we wouldn't know when or how). And Intercal (okay, okay, I'll stop). Our community is aware that advocacy sucks. In particular when it's clueless and bashing other languages. It's great. It makes me happy to be part of this.
Quiz Show
Afterwards was the quiz show. Derek Balling and the rest of the usual team won as usual. Ian Holsman was very helpful over irc (he's sadly not here) helping me with the mod_cache stuff. Graham Barr arrived just in time to get a well deserved white camel award for search.cpan.org. I was too tired and unfocused to really have fun with the quiz show. Tim, Chris and I left a bit before to go outside and get a beer. Uuuhmn, much nicer.
Outside
Outside were Hugo, Jarkko, Elaine and a bunch of other great people. Justin and William Rowe came by to say hello. I never met Will Rowe before (or Justin before this afternoon) and it's always great to put a face to the name. I also said hello to Chromatic from #perl in person for the first time. Fun fun.
Just like last year Tim helped me polish my slides over a few beers on the patio (last time it was more like getting them from notes into powerpoint though). It was very good going through them again with someone else. Tomorrow after my talk I'll take time to put the photos up. But for now I'm back in my room, ready to crash. Actually, I already crashed on the bed... ZzzZZZZZ .... Good night.
