Sometime during the Red Moon, 937

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

I listen to music on my iPhone all the time. I ride a bus about twelve hours a week, much of which is spent with Spotify or iPod or something else keeping my ears entertained. I also use it for phone calls or, more often, voice commanded web searches. I’d been using my iPhone headset for this, but it’s not very durable, and gets tangled up in other stuff.

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.