YAPC::Asia is really popular this year. At the minute there are 448 people who will be attending and there was an announcement made recently saying that another 50 tickets will go on sale sometime this week. The final schedule hasn’t been released yet but I am looking forward to hearing Schwern give his “Perl is Dead” keynote.

I’m thinking about Perl related things tonight. I’ve recently joined TPF and volunteered to be part of the crew at YAPC::Asia. I’m considering submitting a talk for YAPC::NA as they have extended the deadline.

I am not coming up with any decent talk ideas this year. I’ve been reading a lot about organisations and communities and considered putting together a semi-serious talk called “The Bluffers Guide to the Perl Community” – but I can’t decide if anyone is interested in organisational theory and whether I want to put together a talk that will need to use humour to get the point across. I also considered writing something about the reasons why we hate managers but really need them – this would be based on the writings on Charles Handy and an analysis of the sort of people who are involved in open source projects.

Hopefully I get inspired soon.

The deadline for talk submissions for YAPC::Asia is tomorrow. I won’t be submitting a talk. Usually at a YAPC I talk about communication or management – things I don’t have any experience of in an Asian context. I did think that Marty would submit a talk but he doesn’t use Perl much anymore and doesn’t think he has anything to talk about.

I am considering not speaking at any conference this year. Part of me loves to speak but the part that hates it is stronger tonight.

I am finally over the flu!

Today was a national holiday. Marty was off work so we decided to go out for a walk. The snow has gone and it felt like spring. He wanted to explore the local area and to show me the Tokyo Institute of Technology. I can see why he was amused that I didn’t know where it was. The Midorigaoka section is less than a minute from our apartment. We aren’t sure where in the campus YAPC::Asia will be but it took under 15 minutes to walk to the main entrance and we weren’t exactly rushing.

From there we walked through Ōokayama and on to Kita-Senzoku. We stopped walking when Marty got hungry, hopped on a train, and had dinner at Okusawa After dinner we went to Big Echo for a couple of hours and then home to watch “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”.

Tomorrow evening we are going to see the WWE Royal Rumble tour. Not so sure how I feel about that but Marty assures me that it will be fun…

I should really start to work on my travel plans for 2008. There are a number of conferences that I hope to attend as well as some family events I want to go to. At the minute I am planning on attending the following:

• OSDC Taiwan
• YAPC:: Asia
• Portuguese Perl Workshop
• YAPC::NA
• YAPC::Europe

Marty has just pointed out to me that the venue for YAPC::Asia is within walking distance of our apartment. This surprised me as the Tokyo Institute of Technology is supposedly really big and I have never seen it. Seems I need to go exploring.

This will be good news for our house guest.