use Perl

In no particular order, I learned...

• to love the new features in ACT, especially the "Personal Schedule" and the fact that the regular schedule now defaults to the current day. (act_hackers)++
• how to cheat^Wdeal with code that cannot be covered, by inserting special comments.
• that it's better to only do the one talk you really care about than to submit (and even hold) boring old talks.
• that the BBC has way too much money, so the need to spend it by blowing up cars after launching them a few hundred meters into the air on some rockets.
• that there are places in Copenhagen where the beer is even more expensive (and where oversized urinals are considered art (as seen in the courtyard of Den Tatoverede Enke))
• about load_namespaces and restrict with object in DBIx::Class
• how to set up the 3GB flat fee no roaming umts card koki lend me, to get network despite flaky wireless (and how get into the office vpn over umts)
• that other people are also suffering from updating database schemas
• how to smuggle a few bottles of coke into the attendees dinner
• that other people are also suffering from the fact that firefox 3 resets you zoom-level after opening a new page, which really sucks if you present HTML slides (BTW, because of this I had to use firefox 2, which is very broken on my laptop. Of course it crashed during one of my presentations. At least the resume-feature worked, so I hadn't have to click through hundreds of slides again..)
• Perl is used to (re)write history (at least the history of the ~11th century(?))
• that to set up a login system re-using PAUSE accounts is nothing more than a dirty little hack involving https and LWP (but why was I not surprised by that?)

And of course, I was again reminded that the Perl community is a bunch of lovley and brilliant people, and that YAPC is one of my favourite times of the year.

A big THANK YOU to the orgas, the sponsors, the speakers, the attendees, and to Larry Wall, how started it all!

P.S.:

If I was cog, here are a few more things I'd say during the opening talk, How to get the most out of a YAPC:

• Besides beer, another good way to make friends is by bringing an extension cord with multiple power plugs. Share electricity!
• Don't hang around (only) with your local pm group. You see them all the time, anyway. Meet new people!