I think I’m officially giving up on beating Enchanter, but it has been a pretty interesting experience as far as my big replay goes. It’s not because the game is great, but because it has allowed me to get a better handle on what I don’t like about the early Infocom games.

Last year, I bought a Synology ds214play NAS. I posted about my horrible data migration, wherein I lost a whole ton of data, entirely because I was a bonehead. Despite that pain, I absolutely loved the Synology NAS. It frequently impressed me with how much it could do, how well it did it, and how easy it was to do. Even after I moved all of my media to it, all my old backups, and started using it as a Time Machine backup destination, I had a good terabyte of space left.

YAPC actually only runs two days, or three if you count “RejectConf” on day zero. So, this entry is not really about YAPC::Asia, but about what I did between the end of the conference and my trip home.

I woke up early again on the 22nd, some time before dawn, and did some preparation for the conference. It was my day for speaking, and I wanted to make another pass through my slides. Eventually, it was six thirty and I decided to figure out what I could do for breakfast other than Starbucks. I went to look up “breakfast near Sunroute Ariake Hotel” and found a bunch of reviews in which people praised the hotel’s breakfast. Marylou had said it was just soup and bread, and that’s when I realized my error: I had trusted someone from Pittsburgh.

I woke up really early on the 20th and did my best to kill time. I called home, I reviewed my slides and re-packed my bag. Part of my goal was to delay until breakfast was served, so I could eat something before heading to Ariake for the conference. I wanted to see whether the okayu had been relabeled, too! Around 6:20, though, I couldn’t stand any more waiting, and I headed out. This way, I figured, I’d avoid rush hour.

(Where’s day -1? Well, I left home on the 18th (day -2) and got to Tokyo on the 19th (day -1), but since I didn’t sleep between the two, they formed one virtual day for me. Day -1 was lost, like tears in the rain.)

YAPC::Asia starts on August 20th with “day zero,” with a talks that didn’t make the main two days. I probably won’t be there for much of that, since it’s mostly Japanese content. Despite two prior YAPCs in Tokyo, I still can’t understand Japanese. Go figure!

At work recently moved from our own office space to a coworking space. Bryan said, “remember to lock you laptop screen when you’re not using it.” I said, “I use Mobile Mouse so I can lock it with a hot corner from across the room.”

I am always baffled by the neverending stream of remarks of the form, “you people are playing D&D wrong.” Here’s one that particularly bugged me, today:

I use temporary files pretty often. There are a bunch of ways to do this, and File::Temp is probably the most popular. It’s pretty good, but also pretty complicated. A big part of this complication is that it’s meant to keep your filename around until you’re done with it, and to let you pick its name and location. Often, though, I don’t need these features. I just need a place to stream a whole bunch of data that I’ll seek around in later, or maybe just stream back out. In other words, instead of holding a whole lot of data in memory, put it in a file.