Andy and Bill suggested a few books in their “getting a great job” talk, and I picked up two of them last week: “The Brand You 50” and “Ask the Headhunter.” They’re full of good advice, but I wouldn’t really suggest either of them, especially if you can get your hands on the slides from the talk or, better, can witness the talk itself. It condenses all of the useful information in the books (and more) into one sitting.

I admit it. I have licked my PowerBook.

I’m a real newbie to Class::DBI. I’ve known about it for quite a while, but I never used it until OSCON, when I attended Casey’s crash course. I got a nice crash course once I got home, too, when I had to figure out how to make Class::DBI work with MSSQL and ODBC. Some of the problems I had were self-inflicted, like when I didn’t realize I had to include default options (like DBIx::ContextualFetch) if I subclassed db_Main. A few others were caused by ActiveState’s apparently broken Class-DBI ppd, which claimed to be 0.96 but was really 0.95. I did find a nice little bug in Class::DBI itself, though, which apparently only mattered with ODBC+MSSQL. I’m hoping to see my name in the changelog for 0.97; I’ll settle for seeing 0.97 at all, though. I’m trying to avoid needing custom versions of CPAN modules at work.

So, I really like Module::Starter. There are a number of little things in it that bug me, but mostly they only bug me because of the way they’re coded or because of the way I want to extend them. In other words, they’re things that wouldn’t bother users (I think).

I had the week off from work. Gloria and I stayed at home, ignored Musikfest as much as possible, and relaxed. We saw a lot of movies, ate some good food, and avoided the downtown area.

I’m back to my normal life, which has created quantum superposition of emotions within me: I’m relieved to be off the hectic OSCON schedule, I’m very happy to be back home with Gloria, and I’m uninspired to be back at work trying to get things done with stone knives and bearskins.

I slept later today than I have all week. Well, I stayed in bed longer, anyway. Staying in bed when you could get up is a strange thing. Sometimes, you feel incredibly relaxed, and sometimes you just feel lazy and bored. Once I started to go from relaxed to lazy, I got up and headed down to the lobby, without time for my usual muffin-and-juice breakfast. I headed right to the keynotes, which were not very interesting. The first keynote was a presentation of some incredible software for relating and browsing geo-locational data. While the software was wild, the talk was tame, and I felt like it was too easy to get distracted by my laptop screen. Of course, I can’t entirely blame the speaker, but I guess he was mostly interested in showing off the technology, and not talk about the ramifications of the freedom of his data. In fact, I’m still not sure what parts were free and what (if any) were not.

The morning started with Freeman Dyson engaging in a “moderated discussion” with Tim O’Reilly and the audience. While Dyson was very charming and is cool, the talk was sort of uninteresting. This was followed by a guy from HP whom I completely ignored, basically because he was completely ignorable.

I really should have blogged yesterday yesterday. Instead, I fell asleep, and now I remember nothing.

Yesterday was all Damian, today was no Damian. Well, that’s not true. Damian gave a talk at the Tuesday Night Extravaganza, but it wasn’t so much a tutorial as a bit of entertainment. The tutorials I actually attended had good points and bad points. I will try to summarize them, below.