I blame Fluxx! - A YAPC diary
Table of content
- 28th of August: Planning
- 29th of August: Travelling to Birmingham
- 30th of August: First day
- 31th of August: Second day
- 1st of September: Third day
- 2nd of September: Travelling from Brimingham
- 3rd of September: Uhm...travelling from London
- Conclusion
- Links
28th of August: Planning
I don't plan what to pack in advance of a trip, and this time was no
different: I started packing the night on the 28th, while my flight was going
from Kristiansand
around noon the next day. While packing I realised that I
had forgotton my blazers back home (my birth home), from the weekend before.
So I desided to get a car and travel 50km (80 miles) to get my jackets in the
middle of the night. I went from Grimstad
at 0:00am and arrive in Laget at
...uhm... 0:35am (it usually take about 50 minutes). When I got to the house I
discovered that my father had locked the door from the inside, which makes it
impossible to get in from the outside. Even so, I tried to break in to the
house, since I felt kind of desperate. Unfortunatly I couldn't get in, but
fortunately I didn't break the lock... When I realised I couldn't get in, I
desided to sleep in my car, until my father woke up.
29th of August: Travelling to Birmingham
Around 7:00am the same morning I managed to wake my father, so I could retrive my blazers. I then drove back to Grimstad, where I completed packing my things. I completed in good time before going to the bus. The trip to the airport in Kristiansand went flawless, and so did the actual flight to Birmingham. The only downside was that I of course was quite sleepy...
When I arrived in birmingham, my laptop and phone was almost out of power, so I wanted to charge them. This was not easy, since of course United Kingdom has their own electrical interfaces, opposed to the rest of Europe. Luckely I got a tip, which enabled me to "hack" into the system (Please contact me, if you have the same problem). This night was supposed to be a let's-complete-my-talk-night, but instead I went down to the bar at the hotel, and drank some beer while meeting up with some of the other attendants.
30th of August: First day
The conference opened this day, and I was actually at the
right place
to the right time. Here is a short summary of the day on the conference:
(Talk names in italic)
- Opening Ceremony and How to get the Most of a YAPC: Quite funny introduction to the YAPC, especially since I've never been to one before.
- Keynote: Kind of strange seeing Larry for the first time in real life. Good talk anyway.
- TPF talk at YAPC::Europe: Interresting to get some inside information. I'm not really the Perl-guy that actively search and read stuff like this off the internet
- DBI and DBD from and end-users perspective: I think I chose the wrong talk here. I didn't really get all that much out of it
- Perl hacks you may not know: Pretty cool. This is what makes me really like Perl: There's so many options, and there's so many funky ways of doing stuff. Not all are suggested, but the options are there
- Accessible applications in Perl: Not really what I thought it was, but still an interresting talk
- Searching with Perl: Uhm... I hope I get better on selecting what talk I should go to :-P
- POE - a field guide: Very interresting. I think I have to rewrite my server for eAdmin now.
Later this night some of us went to
All bar one
were we desided to go to an italian restaurant. The food was
quite good,
and there were interesting topics and nice people. After eating, we went back
to the hotel bar for some more beer. This is also where the night ended.
31th of August: Second day
This was the second day at the conference. (Talk names in italic)
- What's new with Perl DBI?: Interresting talk about DBI. I think I better rewrite parts of my DBIx::JanHaa to use placeholders, bind values and callback for errors.
- Testing WEB Applications: Nice test-suit. Maybe I better look into it, and use it with eAdmin.
- Excel on the command line: I'm not sure when to use this, but it was still quite interresting to see how to read excel-documents from within Perl.
- More vurnerable code: Can't say I learned all that much here, except what I already know: Never trust user input! The only problem is how to not trust it...
- The Acme Namespace, 20 Minutes, 60 Modules: This was a funny, funny talk :)
- Advanced Perl DBI: There are more to DBI than what meats the eye. Thanks Tim for giving more indepth information. I might even buy the DBI book, even though it's outdated.
This evening was dedicated to a dinner for all attendant. The
conference meal
was booked at Second
city suite. We had to walk a bit to get there, and when we finally came to
the destination, I remembered that I had forgotten my
insuline, so i had to go all the back
to the hotel. On my way back, I got a phonecall from one of my customers which
had an issue I had to resolve. All of this made me about half an hour late, but
it didn't really matter, since the 300 attending the dinner was still not done collecting
the food. After eating and chatting a while, Geoffrey came over and introduced
a card game called Campaign secrets.
Quite a funny game, which I can recommend. After playing,
we talked and drank some more before going back to the hotel. After spending
some time at the hotel, I went to my room where I prepared my talk. Earlier
this day, I had allready prepared my slides (!), so I only had to do some
thinking about what to say...
1st of September: Third day
This was the third day at the conference. (Talk names in italic)
- SNMP for the masses: beatnik had prepared a general talk on SNMP and it's various uses. This was nothing new to me, but I was at the talk, since I was next up. The talk was good even so, and I'm pretty sure it was educational for the attendants.
- Speeding up SNMP queries: My own talk
- rsnapshot: Very interresting backup system. I will definetly look into this when I get time.
- Neuro Linguistic Hacking: Yet another funny talk. It was about how different people interperate what is beeing said to them. The talk didn't contain any solutions, but the bottom line there's a lot of ways of interperating what you is beeing said.
Today was the day for my talk. I really wanted to be prepared for this, but
because of various reasons, I wasn't really prepared at all. As I wrote in
previous paragraph, I actually started preparing the day before, by making
slides and running through what to say. Even so, I was pretty pleased with the
result: I had a 20 minute talk about
"Speeding up SNMP queries",
and I finised in 18 minutes! The last bit about the inner workings went pretty
fast, but I wasn't really planning on spending a lot of time on this part
either. After the talk, I got some questions from the attendants and later I got
a mail from another guy that also was interrested. Summed up: It was fun.
Information for people who was interrested: I will inform on
my homepage when I have created a CPAN
account. You can also search
CPAN
for SNMP::Effective from time to time. I've requested a
Pause account now, so It's just a matter
of time. Please contact me, if
want insight earlier.
The lightning talks
was fun! I've never experienced anything like it before:
There where 18 lightning talks and they where not allowed to be longer than
five minutes. When the current had spoken for four minutes, the next speaker
would get prepared, so he/she could continue talking right after the current
speaker.
All the talks where quite good, but some stood out:
- Google Maps Tilting: Even though it was created for windows, I still liked it, and that means it was cool!
- undef isn't: This was probably the most nerdy talk, which again made it the most interresting. Juerd gave us the recipe to really make undef; undef! His argument that undef; wasn't really undef was that it was well documented and defined. What he did was to make undef either return undef; or 42. That way it would not be defined any more.
- RRD tool: This was my lightning talk. It wasn't any fun or interresting, but it stood out to me since I gave it.
The conference ended with an auction. They auctioned away all kinds of stuff. I got Learning Perl, The Simpsons - 7th season, Campaign secrets and Minimal Perl.
So why do I blame fluxx? And what is fluxx?
These questions and more will soon be answered.
After the auction, I relaxed a bit, before going out for some food / beer.
I went to All bar one, where most of the remaining participants were. I met
various people there, and discussed / chatted about things like Perl (of
course), the lightning talks, conspiracy theories
and stuff like "how is the weather". After staying at the bar for a while a
group decided to go back to Jury's Inn,
where most of us stayed. When we couldn't take non-visitors into
the hotel we got invited to a private "party" instead. And this is where Fluxx
comes in: Fluxx is a kind of card game, which takes a loooong time. Of course
my judgement was taken over by Mr. Beer, so I thought it would be a good idea
to complete the game. Even though we stayed there too long, we still didn't
have time to complete it... I was quite tired when I got back to the hotel.
2nd of September: Travelling from Brimingham
I woke up by my self this day... When I wake up by myself I usually get quite stressed, but today I also had a reason for it. My alarm clock was "misconfigured", so I had overslept: My flight left at 10:15am, and I woke up 10:00am. I still drove to the airport, but of course got there too late. I desided to go on IRC, to get some ideas. "They" told me to go and rebook my flight or at least ask for a solution at the airport, and I did as told. There was a very nice and helping lady, who got me another ticket but I had to go to London (!). I complied, because this was the fastest way to get home to Norway. I then had to take a bus to Birmingham, a train to London and the subway to Heathrow to catch a plain with last check-in was at 7:10pm. After dragging my two too heavy bags all across England, I finally got to my destination - I thought. There was a loooong line of people at Heathrow, trying to check-in. The reason for this was that there had been a lot of delayed flights all day long. The police / ground personell wouldn't tell us what actually was going on, but I'm pretty sure It had something to do with terrorism, since all the resycle bins were removed... Anyway - my flight got cancelled, so I had to get a room instead.
3rd of September: Uhm...travelling from London
Today I had to rebook my flight. I woke up at 6:30am and called the airlines. After waiting for one hour I finally came through and could rebook my flight. I got a new flight from London to Oslo at 12:45. I got on this flight without any serious trouble. The flight back home was rather comfortable, and so was the rest of the trip, even though I was quite tired. I finally got home at 00:30am - pretty exhausted.
Conclusion
The time before travelling to Birmingham, and the time travelling back from Birmingham was no fun. Especially the travel back, with all the extra expenses was indeed bad. But the actually YAPC was great fun. I'm definetly going to YAPC::Europe::2007! If you're a Perl programmer, then I suggest you consider going too, weither you want to give a talk, or just be there.