There are times I wish that the world was a smaller place or that I lived closer to the conferences I want to attend.  Getting to Orlando took a long time.  I was flying from Tokyo via Seoul and New York.  The detour to Seoul added about 5 hours to the trip but it did mean that I was able to fly in business class.  I am willing to trade the extra time for the ability to sleep on the plane.   It was a bit horrifying though to fly over Tokyo 10 hours after I had left my apartment that morning.

I also wish that travelling was more pleasant.   To travel you have to be willing to queue for hours and to allow people to go through your luggage.  You have to be prepared to remove your shoes and belts and to let a stranger run their hands over your body.  You have to be pleasant while someone asks you questions about your intentions and takes your picture and finger prints.  And you have to be prepared to put up with whatever silly security precaution the airports are going to run with next.

The new procedures for flying into America seemed pointless to me.  All my hand luggage had been x-rayed so I don’t know what they expected to find by opening up my handbag and having a quick glance inside.

Thankfully, Perl Oasis was an excellent conference and worth the time spent travelling.

I attend a lot of conferences and I’m always on the look out for the things that improve the attendees experience.  At this conference I loved the basket of travel accessories that was at the registration desk.  The organisers had put together the sorts of things that people forget to bring with them and were giving them away for free.  It’s a lovely idea and I took a packet of anti-histamine tablets as I keep forgetting the air conditioners in hotels drive my sinuses mad.

After being home for just over two weeks it’s time to travel again.  Perl Oasis takes place this weekend in Orlando.  It’s smaller than most of the other conferences I attend and I’m glad.  It’s much easier to get to know people in a small group.  I’m looking forward to hearing Miyagawa talk on Plack, and Matt talking on trolls and mountains…

Marty is also talking but I am never sure how I feel about that.  He may be amazing or he may decide he wants to insult every member of the audience, who knows?  But I suppose if nothing else he won’t be boring.

And the thing that amuses me most about the conference?  At the minute the Perl Mongers group with the most confirmed attendees is the Japanese group Shibuya.pm.

Every time I knit something for myself I pick a pattern that contains either a new stitch or a new technique.  I want to improve and to eventually get to the stage where I’m an expert.  But I have a problem, I’m left-handed and I knit left-handed.  Knitting patterns are written for right-handed knitting.  If I want to follow a pattern, and I want my finished piece to match it, I need to be able to read things in reverse.   If I don’t, I will end up with something that is a mirror image of the original pattern.

I’ve been knitting lace and I have been trying to work out why people think that left-handed knitters should always reverse lace charts.  The patterns I’m knitting are symmetrical.  I haven’t reversed the current pattern I’m working on and it’s incredibly difficult to see that there is a difference in my finished product than the pictures of the design.  I also don’t know why following every pattern to the letter is so important.  Who cares if my beautiful piece of lace was created using left-slanting decreases instead of right-slanting decreases?

The problems come when I’m trying to match a diagram and I suddenly realise that my added on piece is on the wrong side.  I’ve been working on knitted on boarders and all the instructions are for right-handed knitters.  I need to try to reverse these pictures in my head and I am not good at doing that.  Even something simple like “my new piece will actually be on the left and not the right” isn’t an easy thing for me to understand.  I know what all those words mean in English but something about the words “left” and “right” makes my brain freeze and begin to panic.  If I try to read the written instructions it might use the words “left” and “right” 10 times in one paragraph. At that point I turn into a robot out of a bad sci-fi movie who just wants to say “does not compute” over and over again.  Thankfully I live with someone who can understand and reverse diagrams, even if he doesn’t knit.

I have been trying to get more information on left-handed knitting but often the only advice is that you shouldn’t do this.  I have tried to knit right-handed. Knitting was taught in the primary school I attended, when I was about 7 years old.  I was the only child in my class who couldn’t knit.  I can still remember how frustrating it was to not be able to produce squares like the rest of the class.  My teacher realised that my problem was that I was left-handed and taught me how to knit the basic left-handed stitches.  In no time at all, at least it appears that way in my cloudy memory, I was the best knitter in my class.

Recently I tried this again thinking that maybe my right hand will work better now.  It doesn’t.  I can’t even make the needle go through a stitch.  It would be comical if it didn’t confuse me so much.  I also can’t use a pen in my right hand.  I thought it would speed up my knitting if I used my right hand to record rows for me.  All I had to do was write tally marks or the number one on a sheet of paper.  I find it hard to hold a pen correctly in my right hand.  I also can’t draw anything that looks like a straight line and since it takes me about three attempts to write the number one it’s much quicker to set the knitting down and use my left hand.

I’m glad that I didn’t grow up in a generation forced to use their right hand for writing.  If I can still remember how frustrated I was with not being able to knit I dread to think how badly it would have affected my academic progress if I had felt the same way about writing.

I used to think of conferences as something that happened in the summer, and a northern hemisphere summer at that.  Now I know that there are conferences that I could attend in every month of the year, if I had the time, money, or inclination.

The first conference I’ll be attending in 2010 is Perl Oasis and it’s taking place in Florida next weekend.  I won’t be speaking.  It will probably take me until April to have new talks written for 2010.  I had also wanted to go to Frozen Perl, but I’ve decided that it’s a bit expensive.  Not the actual conference, it’s low-cost at $100 (US), but the flights and hotel would cost me more than $1000.  As well as the cost there is the cold.  It is being held in Minneapolis, which is expecting a low of -23°C today.  In the past this has appealed to me but I’ve already had enough travel hassle in the past month due to cold weather to make me want to avoid this where I can.

This year I’m not going to attend OSDC.tw.  I enjoyed the conference last year but the four days I spent in hospital with food poisoning after the conference has put me off, even though I know it wasn’t the conference that caused the illness.  I do want to attend some non-Perl conferences again this year but I’m not sure which ones yet.  Gabor has been organising an events team on behalf of TPF to attend FOSDEM and CeBIT but I’m going to be in America during FOSDEM and won’t be able to travel to Germany at the start of March for CeBIT.

The main Perl conferences of the year take place between June and September.  So far, there is no information on YAPC::NA apart from the fact that it will be held in Columbus, Ohio.  I’m hoping that it takes place some time in June as this year family commitments will prevent me from attending conferences in July and early August.  This means I won’t be going to OSCON and I won’t be able to attend YAPC::EU.  I’m disappointed that I will miss YAPC::EU as I’ve been to the past 9.

As for the rest of the year I haven’t decided yet.  There’s been noises made about a Vancouver Perl Workshop and I really enjoyed OSDC in Australia this year.  But I think I’ll wait until I finish my next trip before I make any more decisions.

I wish I was one of those people who can sleep on command.  The first train has gone by the apartment and I’m still awake.  I haven’t managed to adjust time zones.  I could try forcing myself to stay awake all through the night and day, but since I change time zones again in just over a week, I don’t think I’ll be able to drum up enough will power.

I also can’t work out why I think I should be sleeping at 4:30am.  Why does it matter to me?  I’m not doing anything tomorrow that’s tied to a particular time.  I was going to start the day by answering some TPF email, but I can just as easily do that now.  But I still feel that being awake all night and sleeping all day is a waste of the day.  Maybe it’s some silly thing I was taught as a child to try to make me get out of bed in the mornings. I need to lose this feeling though.  Feeling bad about being awake makes me go to bed where I end up gazing at the ceiling for hours, driving myself mad. And that is a complete and utter waste of time.

I’m cooking Irish Stew for dinner tonight.  Marty loves this though he has annoyed me before by suggesting that it’s an easy option for dinner.  The problem lies with the word “easy”.  It’s true that there are no advanced cooking techniques required but it just took me an hour and half to get it to the stage where everything is in the stew pot.  In about another hour and a half it will be ready to eat.  That’s not my idea of an easy dinner.

Yesterday evening I got out one of my new knitting books, Victorian Lace Today, as I was keen to try out some of the beautiful patterns it contains.  I decided to start with something marked as an “intermediate” pattern.  After about two hours I decided that it was too difficult and I would start with something marked “easy”.  I have knit expert patterns before and I have also knit lace before so I was surprised that I was having such difficultly.  But then the word easy doesn’t really tell me very much.

The lace I’m knitting, just like the food, doesn’t contain advanced techniques.  It does, however, involve concentration and precision.  If every stitch needs to be perfect is the pattern really easy?  And when I say it doesn’t contain advanced techniques I suppose that depends on who you ask.  I know quite a few knitters who wouldn’t have a clue how to knit the lace as it involves stitches that are not taught to beginners and you have to know how to read a lace chart.

There is a cliche that says that says, “it’s easy when you know how”, but I’m not convinced.  Even a task that is easy can become difficult if you have to repeat many times.  As for the stew maybe it is an easy option for Marty.  All he needs to do is eat it once it’s finished and given how good it smells at the minute that shouldn’t be too difficult.

As always I got some lovely gifts for Christmas.  But this year I also received a gift that really made me laugh.  As part of her Christmas present my sister bought me some novelty wool and a knitting pattern to go with it.   Can you imagine how funny I would look wearing one of these?

Of course, it may be a hint to knit one for someone else…

I’m not really into New Year’s resolutions but I do like to have goals.  Last year I started a list of 101 things to do in 1001 days.  I really like the concept but there were quite a few months during the year when I didn’t even look at the list.  And since some of my tasks were weekly this has left the list in a bit of a mess.

So, today I’m going to create a new list.  When I mentioned this to Marty he said, “So you are going to cheat.”  But no, I don’t consider what I’m doing cheating.  The list is there to help me focus on some things I’d like to do.  The new list will contain most of the tasks I didn’t complete on the old one and it will contain an additional 8 tasks to replace the ones I did complete.  8 tasks out of 101 doesn’t sound like a lot but then my list doesn’t contain that many one-off tasks.  It’s mainly made up of things I want to do weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

There are also some things I will not put on the new list because I don’t need them there any more.  I wanted to increase the amount of fruit and fish I eat in a week and I now do that without needing a list to remind me.  This change to my diet alone is encouraging me to create a new list.

Grocery shopping on New Year’s Eve in Tokyo is every bit as bad as grocery shopping on Christmas Eve in Belfast.  Normally I would avoid doing this but we only got back yesterday.  In Belfast, when I wanted to go food shopping before a major holiday, I would go to somewhere like Tesco in the middle of the night.  But here in Tokyo we don’t have 24 hour mega grocery stores. Normally I don’t miss them but being able to go to one shop would have made things easier today.

The first shop I went to was so crowded it was hard to get inside.  I persevered as it’s the only local shop where I can buy cheddar cheese.  The second shop I went to wasn’t much better. I wanted to see the display of crab and fish but I couldn’t face fighting my way through the crowds to do this.  I quickly decided that we weren’t going to have any traditional Japanese New Year food and instead bought the ingredients for making chicken soup, Irish stew, and chili.  The only Japanese thing I bought was a black Ebisu stout in the hope that I can use this instead of Guinness in my stew.

I’m also not going to eat soba to welcome the New Year.  Instead I’m thinking about chocolate and champagne, though neither of those things is likely to help me have a long life.

Happy New Year!

Thankfully the trip back to Japan was uneventful.  I haven’t rang anyone to let them know that I’ve got back but then my voice hasn’t come back yet.  I lost it a few days before Christmas and by now I am thoroughly fed up with croaking and whispering.  The thought of travelling whilst ill fills me with dread but I didn’t have a problem on the long return flight.  The only problem I seemed to have was staying awake as apparently I was asleep before the plane had taken off.