Last week, Gloria, Martha, and I took our first official family vacation. It was great!

I’ve ended up with a bunch of new books recently. Gloria gave me quite a nice stack of them for my birthday. Her parents gave me an Amazon gift certificate which was used mostly for books. Some kind anonymous person gave me a copy of Red Alert, which I’d wanted to read. Many of the books have been pretty light reading, so I’ve gotten through a few already. It’s been very pleasant! Mostly I get my reading done when Martha is playing at the park, or while I’m walking through town, or waiting for the bus, or while I brush my teeth. I actually didn’t get much reading done at OSCON. I was busy, and during the trip home, I was trying to sleep!

This year was my eighth OSCON, all but one of which were in Portland. Portland is a fantastic place, and I would not be stretching things to say that I go to OSCON first for Portland and second for the conference. The conference was very good, though. This was also the second or third time that OSCON has meant that I was away from home for my birthday, and Gloria made sure that I would not miss out on enjoying my birthday. It ended up being a really good week on many fronts.

It’s that time again! The Perl Foundation has issued the Q3 2012 call for grant proposals, and you’ve got a few weeks to apply for one. Here are some things I’d like to see people do. Obviously, when you apply for a grant, you need to convince the grants committee that you’ve got a great chance of getting the work done, and done on time. “On time” probably means “pretty quickly” for these tasks.

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