The first conference I’ll be attending in 2010 is Perl Oasis and it’s taking place in Florida next weekend.  I won’t be speaking.  It will probably take me until April to have new talks written for 2010.  I had also wanted to go to Frozen Perl, but I’ve decided that it’s a bit expensive.  Not the actual conference, it’s low-cost at $100 (US), but the flights and hotel would cost me more than $1000.  As well as the cost there is the cold.  It is being held in Minneapolis, which is expecting a low of -23°C today.  In the past this has appealed to me but I’ve already had enough travel hassle in the past month due to cold weather to make me want to avoid this where I can.

This year I’m not going to attend OSDC.tw.  I enjoyed the conference last year but the four days I spent in hospital with food poisoning after the conference has put me off, even though I know it wasn’t the conference that caused the illness.  I do want to attend some non-Perl conferences again this year but I’m not sure which ones yet.  Gabor has been organising an events team on behalf of TPF to attend FOSDEM and CeBIT but I’m going to be in America during FOSDEM and won’t be able to travel to Germany at the start of March for CeBIT.

The main Perl conferences of the year take place between June and September.  So far, there is no information on YAPC::NA apart from the fact that it will be held in Columbus, Ohio.  I’m hoping that it takes place some time in June as this year family commitments will prevent me from attending conferences in July and early August.  This means I won’t be going to OSCON and I won’t be able to attend YAPC::EU.  I’m disappointed that I will miss YAPC::EU as I’ve been to the past 9.

As for the rest of the year I haven’t decided yet.  There’s been noises made about a Vancouver Perl Workshop and I really enjoyed OSDC in Australia this year.  But I think I’ll wait until I finish my next trip before I make any more decisions.

I always mean to write up the interesting talks I hear but it’s actually quite hard to explain a talk in a blog post.  For example my notes from Martin Fowler’s QCon talk on Domain Specific Languages contain 1500 words and a couple of diagrams.  This is probably far too long for a blog post.

I will, however, try to write up something about each conference.  This would be easier if I had a working Internet connection.  I didn’t have a connection at QCon and whilst OSDC.tw has one it’s so slow it’s basically useless.  I have attended many conferences in the past without a computer and didn’t care that I had no Internet connection.  But here in Asia, since I understand only a little Japanese and no Chinese, there are many talks that I can’t understand.  It seems acceptable at a technical conference to use a computer during a talk but I think the speakers would find it off-putting if I read a book.

I still haven’t got used to the fact that I live in Asia and that I should be paying more attention to what’s on in my local area.  There are some disadvantages, as I won’t be able to understand all talks, but I will understand enough of them to make it worthwhile going.

I’m looking forward to hearing Martin Fowler speak at QCon and to attending Paul Bakaus’ jQuery tutorial at OSDC.tw.

It does mean that I am now going to go and register for the other conferences I am planning to attend before I get the flights.

Going to the OSDC in Taiwan may be quite expensive.