use Perl

Tuesday. At 8am we arrived in Katakolon, Greece. Several of us had booked an excursion to the ancient ruins of Olympia. It was quite something to see, and I would recommend it as a spot to go and visit if you have never been. The whirl started again in the afternoon for me with Marty's talk on 'Writing Better Perl'. Soon after it begins, Randal fell asleep. Thankfully not because of Marty, but due the heavy night last night. Randal did perk up to question whether $#+ and $#- would ever not be equal. Marty then got all excited and took great delight in proving that they could be different. Its always the little things ;) It was a shame that Dave Cross' 'Idiomatic Perl' was on at the same time, as the two talks do compliment each other very well. After a short break the evening session began. The first hour was taken up by a sales pitch by an IBM sales person. Maybe someone found it useful, I started to fall asleep. Thankfully Marty was up next to do his Kangoogo piece. If you saw it in Paris last year, you know what it was. The difference here was that Larry Wall was in the audience :) Robert then went on to do a short CVS Tutorial, which I elected to skip to prepare for dinner ... sorry Robert. Tonight was the first formal night. Despite not having a suit, I thought I'd give the black jeans and smart dark grey shirt a try. Not a flicker from the staff.

Wednesday. Another early dock, this time in Izmir. I discovered on returning to work, that the wife of one my coworkers is from Izmir, and was there at the time we docked too! Today was a lengthy stopover, so that we could take an excursion to Ephesus, the site of the Temple of Artemis. It was an awesome place and again well worth a visit. I ended up taking about 180 photos of the ruins alone. As the trip back was at least an hour I took some time to have a rest. After all I'd missed breakfast. For the afternoon I attended Casey's 'Building Web Applications with Perl (Part 1)'. I think it proved to be the most popular of the Perl talks, and was full of great hints and tips. Casey even managed to explain Class::DBI properly to me and suggested a great Perl module in the guise of SQL::Translator. I never have to use Visio again :) The evening talk was by Randal explaining the benefits of mod_perl ... at breakneck speed. It was basically a 90 minute talk condensed into 60 minutes. Some good pointers and ideas, and a good quick introduction to mod_perl. Dinner tonight had an Italian theme, not quite sure what all the napkin swigging was all about, but I've always liked Dean Martin singing 'That's Amore!'. More card games (Fluxx & 6 Nimmt), baileys and cocktails followed.

Thursday. Despite arriving in Istanbul at 8am, due to another late night (it was all Karen's fault ;)), today we had a lie in. 7 of us arranged to meet at 10am, with the intention of heading in to Istanbul for a wander. I'm not sure what we were aiming for when we started walking, but after walking through the kebab district, we had definitely started to get hungry. We found a great restaurant, and ended up with a 4 course meal. After another bit of walking and we eventually found the Grand Bazaar. The place is huge inside and I was completely taken aback by the place. Robert managed to find a shop selling rugs and decided he need to buy one. The rug seller was obviously good, as he managed to get Robert to buy two. I picked up a hat for DanDan, which he loved when I got back. Finally we headed back to the boat. Karen was supposed to be studying all day, but we later discovered that Anna had persuaded her to come a take a quick trip to the city. The evening session featured a humorous talk by Marty called 'GnuGuerrilla', which although more about taking over a Windows network, did fill me with ideas for something we could do for a much more serious task here at MessageLabs. This was then followed by Robert talking about 'Managing Your Own Open Source Project'. This was something of interest for me, as this is something I'm hoping to do in the future. By listening to someone who already has done it and notice some of the pitfalls was extremely useful. The talk could actual change Open Source to online and still be relevant, as there are some commercial projects that could benefit from what was discussed. On arriving for dinner we discovered Neil had decided to mix things up. Unfortunately for him, Casey and myself sat with Marty, Karen and Dave before he had a chance to move us. Still we did get to chat with some new people too. After dinner, while sitting by the disco, Karen and Casey were trying to persuade each other and the rest of us to go in and dance. With reluctance we did go in. But as you would expect from a bunch of geeks, the first thing we do is sit in the dark and order more drinks. The music was dreadful and dancefloor was not exactly packed. However, one of the geeks, Chris, who unfortunately wasn't the best dancer, was having a great time cutting a rug on the floor. He did try and get Casey up, but he was having none of it, choosing to use Karen as a shield from any further advances. Eventually Karen having failed herself to get myself or Casey to dance, took another new friend, Ted, out on the floor. Though Ted's eye was on another young lady. Unfortunately, he failed to notice she was with her parents, and got a very curt no when he asked her for a dance. Poor lad. They eventually kicked us out of the disco, not that there was much incentive to stay, and headed for bed.