I didn’t get out of bed in time to hear the talks in the first session. I think that 9:00am is too early a starting time for the third day of a conference. Especially as everyone stays out so late in the evenings. So, the first talk I saw was Marty’s Perl6 ideas stolen from Japanese. I did say yesterday that it makes me really nervous to watch Marty speak but I knew that he wasn’t going to try and code during this one. I was a bit concerned about the talk as he had submitted a 20 minute talk which was given a 40 minute slot but it went really well. It was one of the best talks that I saw at the conference (though I could be a bit biased).

After this I went to see Jo Walsh speak on the Porn0graph. The questions asked at the end did make me wonder if I’d missed the point entirely but it seems that I hadn’t. I liked both the talk and the concept. After this I went to hear Elaine speak on the CPAN followed by Arthur speaking on Ponie.

I went to the start of Greg’s talk and then realised that we had forgotten to bring Dominus’ underwear. So, Marty and I rushed back to the hotel to get this and arrived back in time to see nearly all the lightning talks. There seemed to be about 16 of these which was far to many for one session. There is no doubt that the funniest of these was given by Philippe but my favourite one was given by Ettore Vecchione. I’m always interested in talks that demonstrate ways to improve systems. Ettore talked about his use of Win32::OLE and SpreadSheet::WriteExcel to automate a process which used to take the administrative staff, at the University he works at, 4 – 6 weeks to complete. Ettore managed to find a way to reduce this to 15 minutes. Excellent!

After this the auction took place. It was supposed to finish at 6pm but how anyone thought that Greg would be able to complete the auction in 45 minutes is beyond me. I did think that the auction was too long. The problem may be with the multiple items of books and T-shirts that get donated. These items are worth selling but seem to take up to much time. Greg had wanted to sell Marty’s hair and I’m quite glad that this didn’t go ahead. I’ve got used to the curls.