I submitted my 10 Things To Do With A Conference T-shirt talk to YAPC::Asia.  I could give this talk in English, but I’ve been in Japan for over three years now and I think it’s time to attempt a Japanese talk.  There is no way that I am ready to give a full-length talk in Japanese but I should be able to manage 5 minutes.

I have written the talk description in Japanese, which I will include in this post, and today I started translating the talk.  There is no way that I can ad lib in Japanese so this is going to be my most prepared talk I have given since I stopped doing public speaking competitions!

会議のTシャツでできる10の事。

私は今までにYAPCの二十の会議に出席してきました。ですから会議のTシャツが山のようにあります。今からお話するのは、そのTシャツを私がどうしたかについてです。

The tickets for this year’s YAPC::Asia have just gone on sale.  The conference will held in Tokyo on the 15th and 16th of October with pre-conference events on the 14th.  The theme is “Welcome Perl”, and the guests speakers are Larry Wall, Jesse Vincent, and Miyagawa Tatsuhiko.

Most of the Perl grassroots conferences use the ACT system for running their events, but this year YAPC::Asia has decided not to use it.  I don’t know why they made this decision but I am missing the functionality.  I like seeing who else has registered for a conference and even though I don’t think that the ACT wiki is great, it’s certainly better than no wiki.

One of the reasons I’m writing this post it to let a friend know when the conference is running, as he hadn’t been able to work that out from the web-site.  The information is there but you have to scroll down to find it, when you expect the dates to be somewhere near the top of the page.

For the past couple of years YAPC::Asia has been the most attended YAPC and it could sell out, so I know that it’s important to buy tickets as soon as possible.  The ticket for both days costs only 4,000 円 ($47, £30), but speakers don’t have to pay and I don’t know if I will submit a talk or not.  Last night I began to submit a lightning talk but I had problems with translation and decided to give myself a bit more time to to think about it.  The concept of speaking in Japanese fills me with dread, but I’m not sure it’s anymore dread than I usually feel at the thought of speaking, so I may well give it a go.

By the time I finally got to Pisa the conference was well under way.  At the start of any conference it usually takes me a while to work out where everything is, as I have absolutely no sense of direction, but since I was staying at the conference venue getting around was incredibly easy.  Just as well really as I didn’t want to waste any time getting lost.

I don’t get to see many talks at a YAPC as it’s a great opportunity for me to work on projects with people in person.  I usually manage to see a couple of talks  a day and I was disappointed that I had missed some of the talks on previous days.  These were talks that I had also missed at YAPC::NA with the thought that I would get to see them in Pisa.  I also didn’t get to spend enough time working with other people.  I had a whole list of things I wanted to discuss in my notebook and I maybe touched on half on of them.

I managed to see José Castro’s talk on how he runs jobs interviews.  It was an interesting mix of technical questions and trying to work out how the person being interviewed will react when they are faced with a problem they can’t easily solve.  Mind you I hope he wasn’t hoping to recruit at the conference as he probably scared off any potential employees with the amount of glee he showed at the thought of how difficult the whole process was!

I also got to see most of Matt Trout’s “State of the Velociraptor” talk.  I had seen this before at YAPC::NA and it was an excellent upbeat keynote.  It would have been a great way to end the conference, as the talk was a celebration of the good things in Perl, but in Europe the conference finishes with lightning talks and the auction.

I attended the lightning talks, but since I was speaking I found it hard to focus on the talks that went before mine.  I gave a talk called “10 Things to do with a Conference T-Shirt“, which involved making something new out of 10 t-shirts.  It was a five minute talk that required more than 20 hours of preparation but it was worth it.  I’m going to find it difficult coming up with something equally creative for next year.  (I have been asked to put up the pictures of the modified t-shirts but I’m probably going to give this talk at YAPC::Asia, so I want to wait until after that conference.)

The conference finished with the auction.  It was much too long, which tends to happen every year, but I did like the new format.  Usually we have one auctioneer but this year the auction was carried out by three teams.  It was planned to be much faster than usual, as there were only 12 lots, but as the teams were competing against each other to raise money some of the lots did take a long time.

The teams were from the U.K., U.S.A, and Europe.  I loved how the different cultures were evident in the styles used to sell and also thought that the different accents helped keep it interesting.  All the auctioneers were good but the Daves were my favourite as Dave Cross has one of those accents I could listen to all day and Dave Rolsky really can sell.

I enjoyed the conference and was sorry that I had seen so little of it.  Next year I’m going to have to plan to arrive days before the event to allow enough time to cope with travel delays, as I seem to be plagued by these no matter where I go.

I finally arrived in Pisa on Thursday evening.  My rescheduled flight was supposed to arrive around lunch time but when we got to Pisa there was a storm.  It looked really beautiful above the storm but the propeller plane was not able to fly into it.  This meant that the flight was diverted to Genova and after a lot of chaos I ended up on a bus to Pisa.  Surprisingly  I had met up with some friends on the flight so the whole thing felt more like an adventure than a disaster.  I had also come to terms with the fact that I was going to miss the second day of the conference and ended up quite enjoying the drive along the coast.

I was a bit bedraggled when I arrived at the conference venue.  The lightning talks were about to start but I decided that a shower was a much better idea.  Once I was finally wearing clean clothes I ventured out to catch-up with some people.  There is no doubt that I enjoy the social aspects of the conference.  There are so many fascinating people to chat to in the Perl community that the part of my brain that was still alive at 2am was buzzing with thoughts when I finally went to bed.  It was not the best start I have ever had to a conference but at least I ended the day smiling and looking forward to the next day.

I’m fairly fed-up tonight.  Instead of being at Pisa for YAPC::EU I’m in a hotel at Munich airport.  My plane from London was delayed and I couldn’t get a flight out tonight.  The airline staff did try to find a way to fly me somewhere close to Pisa so that I could have gotten a bus or taxi but it wasn’t possible.

As it was the airlines fault they have put me in a hotel.  I don’t have my suitcase and the thoughts of wearing the same clothes tomorrow that I’ve been wearing from 8 this morning are not cheerful ones.  Tomorrow will be the fifth day in a row that I have had to go to an airport.  I’m exhausted and the things I had hoped to do during the conference are becoming more and more unlikely.  I hoping that tomorrow is a better day.

I’m finally on my way to YAPC::EU.  I’ve been travelling since Sunday and I’m really tired.  Part of me thinks that I’m crazy to try to make this conference but I’ve been at all of them since 2001 and now that I live in Asia I miss the European Perl Mongers.  The conference started this morning, so I’m missing the first day.  I’m also going to miss the conference dinner but I’ll still have two days of talks to attend and hopefully enough time to catch up with people.

As I wasn’t sure that I would make the conference I only submitted a five minute lightning talk called 10 Things To Do With A Conference T-Shirt.  This has been scheduled for tomorrow afternoon and is completely prepared as I gave it at YAPC::NA earlier in the summer.  I have been considering translating this into Japanese for YAPC::Asia but I don’t know if I’m brave enough to get up and talk in Japanese.

I’ve another couple of hours before my first flight so I’m going to try to catch up on some of the backlog of email that I have.  It’s going to be a busy week!

I’m involved with a couple of Perl organisations and from time to time I am asked to blog about the things that I am doing. The problem though is that a lot of what I do isn’t overly interesting and can simply be incredibly dull administration.   This week I decided to make some notes on what I have been doing, but I don’t plan to do this every week.  At the minute I am trying to fit my volunteer work around doing fun things with my house guests and I’m having to schedule in the time, which means I’ve a much better idea of how long everything is taking.

I’m on the YEF venue committee and at this time of the year we work on choosing the venue for next year’s YAPC::EU.  We have two proposals this year and I spent an hour or so on each, going through them to see if I had any queries about the proposals.

I’m working on a legal matter for TPF that I unfortunately I can’t discuss the details of yet.  I spent about 4 hours on this on Sunday, 1 hour on Monday, 1 hour on Tuesday, 3o minutes on Wednesday, 30 minutes on Thursday, 1 hour on Friday, and 1 hour on Saturday.  It’s exceptional for me to spend quite so much time on one thing but it looks like I will be spending quite a bit of time on this matter throughout the summer.

I’m the TPF grant manager for Dave Mitchell’s grant and I spent around an hour on this.

I spend a lot of time reading and responding to email.  This week I have sent 61 emails either as responses to queries or initiating new conversations.  If I take out the emails that are related to tasks that I already mentioned this took up about 7 hours.  The main categories of emails at the minute seem to be Hague Grants, general administration, volunteers, and YAPC. I have also spent time chatting to people about projects and dealing with blogs.

All in all this week I spent around 20 hours, which is about usual for me.

I’ve spent a couple of hours reading about the Perl 5.12.0 release.  My favourite article was posted on the ActiveState blog and it includes a nice summary of the history of Perl 5 development.

I can’t help but be impressed at the things that can be achieved by volunteers.  Jesse wrote:

Perl 5.12.0 represents approximately two years of development since version 5.10.0 and contains over 750,000 lines of changes across over 3,000 files from over 200 authors and committers.

The Perl development team rocks.

I have often heard people ask conference organisers if they’ve started to have nightmares about the event yet.  I organised a conference and I didn’t have nightmares.  But last night I had my first nightmare about being president of TPF.  The dream involved mutant rats, freaky flying creatures, and black goo.  Thankfully I woke up at the point where the rat people were trying to turn me into a man…

(I imagine when mst is encouraging people to blog about Perl that this isn’t the sort of post he is expecting.  But the dream has been on my mind all day.)

It’s been one of those days when time just seems to get eaten up.  It’s nearly 7pm and my todo list is growing instead of getting smaller.

I’ve spent a few hours today contacting people about TPF’s participation in this year’s Google Summer of Code.  The deadlines for this project are so tight.  Students only have from March 29th to April 9th to apply.  Now if this was something that was worked on full-time it might not feel like such a rush but it’s a lot of work for the volunteers involved.  I’m really impressed with the dedication given to this project by Jonathan and his team.

I’ve been trying to get my email under control.  It’s hard to believe that only two weeks ago I managed to get my inbox to zero.  I have gotten much better at managing this but I still haven’t found a good way to deal with the emails that contain difficult or time consuming issues.

I’ve also wasted quite a bit of time waiting on my laptop to catch up with my brain and fingers.  I think the time has come to buy something faster.  It’s not just the time spent waiting on it that causes me problems, it also makes me feel agitated. This change in my mood makes me less productive and more likely to sound irritated when I am responding to something.  When it comes to machines patience is a virtue I lack.