Last week I went to YAPC::Asia in Tokyo. One of the many good things about this conference is the amount of blogging that happens around it, but I have been finding it difficult to think of anything to write. This was the seventh YAPC::Asia that I have attended and the conferences have been incredibly consistent. Having a core group of people who are involved in the conference every year does mean that some things just work. The registration is efficient, the signs are wonderful, and the talk schedule runs like clockwork.

There were a number of things that I really liked. This conference, like the other YAPC conferences, is very cheap to attend. My “two day pass with t-shirt” cost me 5,000 円 (40 GBP, 64 USD). But it was also possible to become an individual sponsor of the conference by buying a ticket that started at 10,000 円 (79 GBP, 127 USD). I think that this is a great way to show support and help with the conference costs. These sponsors also received a special t-shirt and a conference mug.

The registration process was so well organised that having another category of people registering didn’t cause any problems.  Making everything look so easy has to be a combination of the experience of the organisers and also the fact that there were 43 people helping out with this conference.  I know that when I was involved in running a European conference that we maybe had 10 people volunteering during the event.  Mind you, this YAPC in Asia was a much bigger event with 798 attendees.

There was also a professional photographer at the event.  This means that there are now good quality photographs of all the speakers and of the general conference that are nice to have but can also be used in the creation of promotional material or to show future sponsors.

It’s not the photographers fault that I was pulling silly faces early in the morning.

I do like that there are prizes for the top three talks.  I believe this year that the third prize was a set of books, the second prize was funding to attend three local Perl Monger events in Japan, and the first prize was funding to travel to either YAPC::NA or YAPC::EU.  The attendees of the conference use a web-based system to pick the best talks.

It was also the first time that I have seen a Lightning Talkathon.  My Japanese language skills are not good enough for me to have quite worked it out on my own.  I could see that a group of people were giving lightning talks but my first thought was that it was an area that allowed people to practice their talks before giving these before the entire conference.  It turned out to be a mini-conference running inside the main one where all the talks were lightning talks.  It was not as well attended as the main sessions but there were still a fair number of people involved and it is certainly an interesting concept.

Larry Wall was the opening keynote speaker, so I’ll finish with a quote from his talk:

There are many computer languages in the the world and they all they think they  are perfect.  With Perl 6 we are not trying to make it perfect, but right next to perfect, so the next generation can make it perfect. 

I was born in a country that’s well known for being green.  It’s not something that I hear said about Japan, but once you get outside the big cities you quickly become surrounded by green.

 

I find it hard to travel with my Canon camera.  It takes great pictures, but it is heavy and not as important as my laptop or my kindle.  I took it with me this summer but it was often left in a bag in my room.   I have been trying to remember that my phone, which is always with me, also has a camera.  It’s nowhere near as good as the Canon but it’s often better than I expect.

There once was a Braga Perl man

In Frankfurt he thought of a plan

Because he was missing

Some good air conditioning

He tried to run off with the fan!

I leave Frankfurt this morning and I will be happy to say goodbye.  I did not see much of the city but what I did see was not special.  The service in the restaurants and bars was so bad that when I had to eat by myself I just bought something in a supermarket.  I usually don’t mind eating out on my own but then I usually don’t have to wait more than an hour to be served food.

I was attending a conference and the venue was not great.  It was unbearably hot.  There was no air conditioning, very few windows that opened, and it was about 36 C outside.   The first day was the hottest and it is very hard to listen to talks or to even speak to people when all you can think about is the heat and how you need to cool down.

Last impressions also count.  It was difficult to check out of the hotel and the taxi ride to the airport made me fear for me life.  When the driver arrived he complained at length about the construction as if it was somehow my fault that there were roadworks.  I can handle grumpy but I could do without road rage.  He got so angry on the way to the airport that he banged his fists off the dashboard, beeped his horn, and started to chase the car that had overtaken him incorrectly.  He nearly crashed on a bend on the way into the airport because he kept impatiently changing lanes and accelerating wildly.

I hope it’s a while before I need to come back to this city.

Thanks to the wonder that is Akismet I get to see very few spam comments on my blog.  For the past while the comments I have seen have stated how brilliant and insightful my blog is.  Today they were all about how terrible it is.  I love this progression.  I’m not ever going to believe the “best article I have ever read” comments, but comments about how I make no sense seem much more plausible.

Physiotherapy is hard work.  I spent an hour on Wednesday trying to get my body to do things it’s not built to do.  It’s easy to get embarrassed when I can’t even work out how to sit down correctly, but my therapist is kind and has a sense of humour.  I think I’m finding it easier because I learnt to ice skate as an adult.  I took lessons with tiny children who glided over the ice while I was a unsteady mass of fear attempting to cling to the ice by clenching my toes inside my boots.  I overcame my fear and awkwardness and I learnt how to skate.  I also learnt that it’s OK to look stupid and to fall on your ass.

I don’t like to look stupid, but I’m getting better at it as I get older.  Just as well really as so many of my new exercises involve attempting to stick my bottom out.  It really does not want to do that.  I find it hard to even understand that.  Instead my waist bends, or my shoulders bend forward, but my bottom refuses to obey.  And when it does obey it hurts!  I have all these underdeveloped muscles that don’t want to be used.  Thankfully my body can do some things.  I am able to stand on one foot with my eyes closed for more than 15 seconds. I did not know that this was a thing that people should do but now I am working on improving my balance.

The thing that I really like about physiotherapy is that you can measure progress.  I think that I am feeling less pain in my legs than less week, but I know that I can bend my knees a whole extra centimeter.

I should be at the gym.  I should not be writing blog posts.  But I don’t want to go to the gym.  I don’t want to go so badly that I spent the last thirty minutes cleaning the inside of the washing machine. I was motivated earlier this week.  I have been completing two gym sessions a day. My morning cardio workout and an afternoon stretching and hill walking workout I was given by the physiotherapist. The afternoon workout is tiring but worthwhile considering I have slept for three nights without waking with leg pain.  I’m sure that I will do that again this afternoon, but this is morning and typing is not a good substitute for my cardio workout.

I am aware that my morning workout is beneficial but beneficial is such a dull word.  It doesn’t excite me today to think about the health benefits of exercise.  My fluctuating thyroid hormones mean that I don’t get to see many physical signs that the exercise is making a difference.  There is part of me that knows that it has to be making a difference but it’s not like I can run an experiment with another Karen who doesn’t do exercise and then compare the differences.  I can read about it, be told about it by experts, but awareness is not enough.  As adults we are aware of all sorts of things.  We know we should watch what we eat.  We know that we should do at least 30 minutes of exercise a day.  We know!  If you say to someone who asks about their health, “you should exercise more”, they will probably respond with, “I know!”.  But what is the point of knowing if it doesn’t produce change and it doesn’t motivate us to do anything at all?

I will go to the gym.

 

I have been writing in this blog for 10 years.  I still don’t write as often as I think I should, but I’m glad that I have a record of some of the things I have been doing.  When I first starting writing the blog I wondered who I was writing for, now I see that I write for myself.

After years of problems with my ankle joints and calf muscles I decided it was finally time to go and see a physiotherapist.  I have pain in my muscles every day and it’s getting harder to ignore this at night.  I made a half-hearted attempt to do something about this years ago when I was at university but all I can remember is the horror I felt at the suggestion of corrective surgery and the pain I felt after trying the stretching exercises.

Today I got to feel bliss caused by someone who knows what they are doing massaging my aching muscles.  To have no pain in my calf muscles was such a strange sensation.  I was taught a number of stretching exercises and given a program to follow which was also sent to me in email complete with video instruction.  It turns out I don’t walk correctly when on my toes or my flat feet, but first I need to lengthen my muscles, learn how to stand correctly, and then work on my walking.  This could take a while.

I also managed to squat in the proper form with my feet on the floor, something I thought was impossible.  This was done using a swiss ball and was a great way to show me that the problem is not in my knees.  It was a very good use of an hour and something I should have done a long time ago.