Today wasn’t exactly productive, but I think it set me up for greater productivity. I helped one of our engineers with some Perl things. We’d had another engineer who learned quite a bit of Perl and wrote some medium-sized SPC code in it. Then he left, so this guy is taking over maintenance. The code is pretty unfriendly toward being maintained, so it’s going to be fun; the guy is also learning Perl as he goes! I’m hoping I can be helpful.

Work was so-so, today. I poked a few projects with sticks, making some progress on one or two. I moved all our web applications to a newer server, exposing a number of internal distributions that really need proper Makefiles and prerequisite lists. I told my boss that it would be really convenient to make the use of CPAN.pm easier. PPM is the pits.

I’m happy to be home! YAPC was a good experience, although I think OSCON was on the whole better, for a number of reasons. Most of them, though, boil down to location. The other tracks at OSCON, of course, meant that there was always something I found really interesting, but I mostly stuck to the Perl track. There were more people at OSCON, but I didn’t have time to meet everyone at YAPC! Anyway, I’m glad I did YAPC, glad I’ll be doing OSCON, and hope to keep on doing both.

I can’t write down today’s events in detail. I am incredibly full of pasta, and I had enough wine that it’s had some effect. Here are the basics:

Last night, just as I was shutting my lid, Ian sent me a message following up on something we’d talked about at the Kwiki BOF. This reminded me that I’d said nothing about it.

Today was better than yesterday, I think. There was less going on, so everything was more manageable. I had another waffle at breakfast, and it was good. I didn’t do a first lecture, and instead tried to get some work things done. I owed someone at work some notes for a meeting, but it turns out that the meeting had been cancelled in part due to the lack of notes from me. I was mildly annoyed, because I had hours until the meeting. Still, it was not unreasonable on the organizer’s part. I just felt like I was going to end up taking blame for not doing something that I was really doing. I’m not worried about it.

What a long, long day it’s been!

YAPC starts tomorrow, so all the immediately pre-YAPC stuff occurred today. I’ll start with last night, though: Bryan came to town last night, and Gloria and I went to pick him up around 1810. It was really hungry out, so we went right home and Gloria got to fixin’ a giant muffeletta. It was a fine, huge, tasty sammich. Bryan and I had a game of go. I was sure he was going to win, until a little past halfway through, when I felt pretty sure I would win. Rather than go through the pain of scoring, we agreed that I seemed to have won and let it go. We also agreed that maybe next time we’ll play on a 13x13 board, not a full 19. It was good.

I got a lot of stuff done today:

I’m not sure whether the AirPort Express is totally cool or just sort of mildly interesting. For the most part, $130 is too much for the use I’d expect to be able to get: I imagine I’d use it to turn a wired connection into a wireless one in situations where I’m a guest somewhere: someone else’s house or a hotel. Neither seems very likely. Those friends to whose houses I’d bring a laptop probably have 802.11, and at a hotel I’m probably fine with an ethernet cable. Most hotels I’ve been to don’t have reasonable internet, anyway.