Last week, I was at YAPC::NA in Chicago. It was a good YAPC, and I’ll probably write a little more about it later, if I can think of anything worth relating. One thing came up, though, that I really wanted to mention.

I was sure that when iPhone 2 came out I’d get one. The new price makes it pretty attractive, too. Then again, one of the reasons I was so eager to get one was that I was stuck with that piece of crap Samsung. Now I have my RAZR back, which is a nice phone. Then again, just yesterday my five year old iPod finally gave up the ghost, so I have no portable music player.

After mumbling about doing so for ages, I finally bit the bullet and replaced our aging and ailing car. Our old 1997 Geo Prizm has been traded in for a 2006 Scion xB. We drove down to Harleysville to Fuzzy Dice with Steve R., our consultant and official Middle Aged Friend. We did nearly no haggling because the asking price was very close to KBB’s suggested retail and we just wanted to get the darn car and get home.

So, I finally own a pair of shorts, again. I owned about four, I think. I’ve put on a fair bit of weight (ugh) since I stopped going to the gym, and some of my shorts no longer fit. One pair lost a button, but was mostly wearable with a belt, and the other pair split up the back while I was doing yardwork. For weeks, I’ve been wearing trousers for everything. I nearly ruined a pair while wearing them to haul and lay down sod. Ugh!

I’ve, uh, been writing a lot of new general-purpose modules this week. This happens sometimes when I suddenly find myself writing a new program and I want to reuse mostly generic tricks that I wrote into an old program. I split a lot of things out of Rubric, eventually, and now I’m splitting things off of this and that. I broke Config::INI::MVP::Reader out of App::Addex::Config, Mixin::Linewise out of Config::INI, and this next module out of Software::License – although it’s something I’ve done in other ways, before.

I’ve been wanting to do some mucking around with POD. I started a little down this route a few weeks ago with Pod::Coverage::TrustPod, and what I found was that it was really a pain in the butt to easily say, “this file contains POD. Give me the content of hunks between =begin foo and =end foo. I’m sure it’s possible, and that if you understand Pod::Simple you can do it fairly quickly, but I just got too confused and side-tracked trying to figure it out. I really just wanted to get a hunk of data by saying something like:

I was almost led astray into the den of releasing a module with a name ending in ::Tiny, but then I saved myself.

Some time ago, I wrote about Addex’s config, which used a slight variation on INI files and really hit the spot for what I needed. It was possible because of the way Config::INI::Reader acts like a state machine, turning each line into a simple event that can be handled however you want. By default, of course, it mostly collects data and adds it to a structure.

Oh, Keynote. So simple, so pretty, so annoying.

Andy Lester posted his YAPC::NA schedule, so I thought I’d post my tentative plan. I often change my mind at the last minute, but: