use Perl

Last night was our technical meeting. Richard Clamp came up from London and did a great talk on RSS. Richard Dawe did an interesting talk on 'strace & ltrace' and I gave my 'Preparing For CPAN' talk that I'm giving next week at YAPC::NA. It was good night out and a good round of talks.

One of the reasons for giving my talk, aside from the practice, was to get some feedback. I got lots, all good, the only downer being there was too much material. I've been figuring out what I can cut this morning, as I reckon I was 10 slides over! I've now lost 5 slides, but I'm still crammed full of information. I set myself a couple of time limits (per section and per page), so I'm hoping I can keep an eye on the time and not waffle too much.

My other task this morning was to help get The Birmingham Bid proposal site sorted. Originally I was going to submit a document to the YEF committee, but now we've put all the CSS in, I really want them to see the website. It looks tremendous. The movie is nearing completion too, and should be ready next week. The website and movie will only be available to the YEF committee, so I'm afraid many of you guys won't get to see either yet. But rest assured we will go public eventually.

So now I'm in the last throes of preparing to fly to Toronto. I have my slides sorted (I think) so I don't have to worry about those, and pretty much have all the documentation and money sorted now. I really just need to pack clothes. My biggest decision now is to figure out whether to take the Toshiba brick (Debian 800x600), the company laptop (WinXP 1024x768) or both! I'm used to doing slides on the Tosh, but having tried out the company laptop last night it worked much better, and was a lot faster too. But the Tosh is like an old friend and I'm really reluctant to leave it behind. It's been with me for each YAPC::Europe, the Perl Whirl last year, and the LPW. The bonus for not bringing the Tosh is that it'll mean less weight going out, thus more capacity for CDs on the way back! We'll see how much I can afford to leave out to let it come.

Will have to try and find my plug adaptor too and a decent 4-way power strip. Only a few of us from the UK ever seem to remember them at the European conferences, so I suspect I'll be the other London.pm'ers friend next week ... especially those who forgot their plug adaptors :)

I fly tomorrow and have a all-day trip ahead. I can't remember when I land, but I'll have been travelling for over 10 hours. I plan to have a quiet night. I have some plans for Saturday and Sunday, so probably won't see any Perl Mongers over the weekend, but I look forward to meeting lots of people I've only known online on Monday.

Oh ... and if you're expecting to meet a buxom blonde, you'll be sorely disappointed ;)