I was attending the Perl Whirl with Marty. I hadn’t registered for the conference as I heard quite a few of the speakers before – and don’t really spend very much time working with Perl. The structure of the conference was strange as the talks had to be fitted in around the times the ship was docking. On Monday the ship docked at Bari at around 11am, the first session of the conference running between 8.30 and 11. Marty wasn’t speaking on the Monday so we both went out and had a quick look at Bari. A very quick look at it seemed that this was really only a technical stop to let on more passengers and that there wasn’t anything exciting to see within easy walking distance of the boat.

In the afternoon I went to look at the rooms that the speakers had to speak in. I was really surprised to see that two of the talks, Casey’s and Robert’s, were taking place in the same room – just at opposite sides. Casey had wanted to get set up early but he had to wait until Neil arrived with the sheet that they were going to hang in place of a screen. Some of the rooms on the ship didn’t really seem very suited to the needs of the speakers. It turns out that a poker tournament had gotten the better rooms. However, speaking to Casey and Robert afterwards it seems that their talks went well.

We developed a pattern for our evenings that involved meeting the bar before dinner and hoping that 21:30 would come around sooner as everyone was hungry. Barbie had brought Fluxx with him – which we spent quite a bit of time playing. I really like the card that lets you set the hand limit to 0.