use Perl

Friday. Today was a full day at sea, and as a consequence a 12 hour session of talks (minus lunch and coffee breaks). I started with Marty's 'Template Toolkit for Non-Web Applications' talk. There was some good ideas here, and some cool tricks with TT that he highlighted, even writing Java code. However, in retrospect it might have been better to go deeper with TT, especially seeing as one of the authors of the Badger book was on board, and do a more involved talk on TT. But having said that, it should be noted that Marty does some great rants during his talks, and this was no exception. In fact the rants actually spawn some interesting ideas and examples. For the afternoon session I attended Dave's 'Tieing and Overloading Objects in Perl' talk. Some of this I had already seen, but the tie-ing side of things did help to clarify some misunderstandings I had of tie. His example with Tie::Hash::Cannabinol, which works on so many levels, proved very illuminating :) The evening session featured a PHP Q&A by Rasmus Lerdorf and a look at Perl 6 by Larry Wall. As always Larry is both off-the-wall and entertaining with his presentation, especially dressed in his red tuxedo for the second formal dinner later. For dinner that night, 8 of us (Marty & Karen, Casey, Robert, Allison, Geneva Wall, Dave and myself) decided to go up to the more exclusive restaurant. Ted T'so and his partner also had the same idea. Geneva couldn't face eating her lobster, so named him Fidel and placed him in a glass. The waiters looked on very bemused. We headed down for drinks. Once they closed our bar (at 2am) we headed to the Casino bar with Randal and some Norwegians. Randal invented a new drink entitled the Schwartzian Transform.

Saturday. Today was the last day of talks. I took on Marty's 'Playing Together', which looked at some common tools to enabled networks to talk to each other. So DNS, DHCP, Samba and printing were all covered among others. It was interesting to hear Marty's experiences of setting up networks, some of which carries on from his 'GnuGuerilla' talk. He also aimed the talk at small networks, and as such some of the tools mentioned, such as dnsmasq, were quite new to me. By lunchtime we had docked in Dubrovnik. Several of the geeks had planned to meet up with several Coartian Linux geeks and go for a meal in a really nice restaurant. I went with them, just to check out the restaurant, but the news that it was going to be expensive proved true, so I opted for a walk arount the city. I'm glad I did, as there were several interesting buildings, not least of which was the Irish Pub I found in the back streets. Having survived without Guinness for a week, I thought I owed it to myself to have at least a pint .. or two :) Once back on the boat I did as much packing as I could, as the luggage had to be outside the room by 1am. The last night of dinner found us more or less sitting back on our original tables. There's obviously something in the idea of 'birds of a feather, stick to together'. After dinner we once again headed for our favourite bar. The story that had been unfolding for us, came to a very amusing conclusion. I will have to write down the tale, as if it doesn't get posted, then I'm sure to forget. As it was the last night on board the boat, it also meant it was Karen's last chance to get us into the disco and dancing. To her credit, she managed it, even me and Casey! I have to confess I was more interested in documenting the event than participating. By the time we'd finished it was gone 2am, and definitely time for bed as we had to be out of the rooms by 8am.

Sunday. Going home day. At least for some. We were out of the rooms and waiting around for most of the morning. Some of us had problems sorting out bills, and the queue for paying was horrendous. About 100 people in line and each of the cashiers taking around 5 minutes per person. There were a few that had problems leaving on time, and 2 guys actually missed their flight because of the cockup with registering credit cards. It transpired later that their network was screwed and couldn't process any credit cards. Thankfully Marty, Karen and I were on the second wave off the ship, and quickly found our bags and headed for the airport. My flight wasn't until the afternoon, so I had plenty of time to sit and wait. I'm glad I did, as the two guys who had missed their flight, were not getting a good deal from the Costa representatives. I managed to step in and explain a few things as to the lack of communication and general disorganisation of the admin staff on board. Unfortunately the reps couldn't authorise payment for a hotel and another flight the following day, so the two guys were faced with paying over €1150 & €500 respectively to get home. Money they didn't have. On further investigation, it appears that Costa in their infinite wisdom, had booked a flight that required those that were travelling on it, to get off the boat and arrive at the airport with precision timing. No room for error. Given the cockup with the credit cards, if the flight had been even 30 minutes later, they would both have made the flight. I had to leave them and catch my flight, which thankfully went without a hitch, but I was concerned they were going to end up stuck in the airport. However, they did manage to get home safely. Costa have not made a good impression on anyone, although the bar staff, entertainment staff and some of the waiting staff were wonderful. From what has been said, Neil wants to come back to Europe for a Geek Cruise, but it is highly unlikely that he'll be using Costa again.

All in all I enjoyed the Geek Cruise side of things, the excursions and the company I kept. I'd certainly like to do it again, but may have to wait until 2006. I'll have to see if we can afford a family holiday in the Caribbean next year ;)