I realized that I forgot to mention a bunch of stuff from YAPC. For one, I partook of “Lunch with a Perl Celebrity” and had lunch with Tommy Stanton, Andrew, Frew, and Geoff, followed by ice cream at the Chocolate Shoppe, which was great. I went there twice, and I would’ve gone there again if I was a little weaker-willed. I had some surprisingly good pizza from Ian’s with Paul Fenwick. Our D&D plans fell through, but that was okay because we hung out in the lobby and talked to whoever was around. I learned that the -b switch is better than -w for whitespace-ignoring diffs in git, most of the time. I found out that Steffen was an exchange student in Connecticut for a year and that Tom’s Wisconsin experiences were even weirder than I’d known. I saw Breno talk about Data::Printer, which looked really useful, except for the ugly-to-me defaults. I had a good discussion about “eating blood” in various world cultures, but tried not to let it run too long in deference to Dave Rolsky, who was sitting right there. I learned that the new big Unicode book is paperback and cheap (yay!) but not purple (boo!). I saw that one of my modules got its own badge ribbon, which made me feel inordinantly pleased. I got lunch at the Chicago airport at the Billy Goat tavern, which is where “cheezborger cheezborger no coke, pepsi” came from, more or less. I ate about a zillion mocha mousse cups and did my best to convince a few dieting people to try them too, despite their vows. Sorry. I got a few swag decks of cards from The Game Crafter, my favorite of which has a Perl Foundation-y onion on the reverse. I accidentally slept through the Thursday lightning talks. I had a really good garlic and plantain empanada. I saw two talks about exceptions, in which Throwable was mentioned, and felt like I should probably go look much harder for bugs in it before more people use it.

Earlier this month, I was at YAPC::NA in Madison, Wisconsin. It was my ninth YAPC! I’m still something of a newcomer compared to a lot of the folks I talked to, who have been YAPCing since 1999. Still, I feel like YAPC::NA is a regular part of my year, these days, and I was looking forward to it. I enjoyed it, too!

At YAPC North America this year, swag included Campaign Secrets, a card game about the US presidential election. This game was also swag in 2006, and I played quite a few games of it with Dieter Pearcey and John Cappiello, many of them at the airport waiting to go home.

Ever since I got my iPad, I’ve felt like it should be possible to use it to take down a lot of ideas for my D&D campaigns. Unfortunately, nearly every time I’ve tried to do so, it’s been a big disappointment.

It is traditional for each release of perl to be announced with a form letter beginning with a quote, or epigraph, chosen by the release engineer. For Perl 5.16.0, I chose the penultimate stanza from W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939.

Sunday, the 15th day of the Red Moon, 937

Year 28 of the 7th Imperator, 13th of Declarations

Saturday, the 14th day of the Red Moon, 937

In October 2011, Jesse Vincent handed me the patch pumpkin, meaning that it’s now my responsibility to keep Perl development on track and moving apace. One of the biggest parts of this responsibility is making sure that we release new versions of perl, and that they’re fit for human consumption!

Thursday, the 12th day of the Red Moon, 937