Kevin's Weblog

By and large things have improved since Monday, thanks to Advil and a more regular schedule of meals. I am having the problem of talks I’m interested in being piled up together, and other times of the day having nothing with real interest to me. Also, lunch yesterday went long and I missed one of the most intriguing sounding talks on the schedule: Regular Expressions for Syllabaries.

I spent a fair amount of time yesterday hanging out with the Vancouver contingent, making some contacts in preparation for next month’s visit. Also, it looks like I’ll be giving my talk to Vancouver.pm while I’m there, and I have an invitation to come talk to Sophos / ActiveState although given the apparent overlap, I might decline that invite, or try to come up with something different to talk about there.

Oh, yeah, I should say something about how my talk here went. I got a pretty decent turnout, and people seemed interested. I got a few questions after the talk, and a number of people who wanted to talk to me afterwards. So, I’ll consider it a success. I was a little dissatisfied with how little I could cover in the 20 minutes I was allotted, but hopefully I gave some people some ideas to think about and some modules to investigate.

I arrived in Toronto late yesterday afternoon and so far things are not auspicious. I’ve had a slowly growing headache most of the time I’ve been here, and probably not nearly as much food as I should have.

The arrival dinner last night was very well attended, which was unfortunate as the restaurant was not well prepared to handle us and the table I was at didn’t get any food at all until almost 2 hours after we sat down. Afterwards, we went to see Batman Begins, which was good, but by the time it finished I had a decent headache going and not enough hours until I needed to get up. Then I tossed and turned for a couple hours.

I dragged myself out of bed in time for the opening remarks and keynote, which was probably a mistake. I barely stayed awake, then crawled back to my room and proceeded to sleep through lunch. I wandered over to a Thai place a block away, picked at my food, then returned for a far too packed session.

(This is giving me a preview of the room that I’ll be talking in. Apparently, there’s a full-on podium and a fixed microphone. Ugh.)

I can also tell that I’m going to have network issues on this trip. I paid the extra $5 for internet access in my room. They gave me a modem, but forgot to give me the authorization code I apparently need. Down on the conference floor, the wireless seems a bit unreliable. To make things worse, it appears that there are two cron bombs that have been going off for the whole weekend, and I have about 5000 new main messages which are very, very, very slowly getting downloaded. Some day I might actually be able to find out if I have some real email that needs attention.

Late afternoon update: Acquired Advil; headache much improved. Network still iffy, but snagged someone else’s wireless from my room and left my computer alone for a couple hours to sort out the mail situation.