We are having a few people stay with us during YAPC::Asia. It would be lovely if their flights had similar arrival times but that’s just wishful thinking. Today I nearly ended up going to Narita airport to meet a guest who is arriving tomorrow. Tomorrow I think I will be going twice. And then because Casey’s flight was delayed and he missed a connection I will be going to Narita again on Wednesday. I’m glad that Casey is speaking on Friday as he is going to be exhausted when he gets here.

I prefer to meet guests at the airport even though it takes me nearly 2 and half hours to get there. Most people tell me that after the really long flights to get here that the thought of navigating the airport and getting a couple of trains is just too much to think about. I imagine it’s easier if you’ve done it before but this year we have had a lot of guests who have never been in Japan before or any other Asian country. On top of that there is no way anyone is going to find our apartment without us meeting them at a train station somewhere.

I’m hoping that all the travel upsets are over now and the rest of the flights come in on time.

I was wondering how many people are travelling to YAPC::Asia from outside Japan. There are 24 confirmed registrants from outside Japan and 497 from Japan. The biggest YAPC in the world to date seems more a Japanese conference than an Asian one as there are only a handful of people attending from any other Asian country.

The thing I wasn’t expecting to see in the statistics was how few people list themselves as members of Perl Monger groups. Only 53 confirmed attendees out of a total of 521.

This conference was sold out in just over a week. How do all these people find out about the conference? Where is all this Perl interest coming from in Japan? One thing I can’t easily tell – because lots of people didn’t fill this in – is where in Japan the attendees are coming from. Are they nearly all from Tokyo?

Hopefully next week I will get some feeling as to why there is so much interest. I may not though. This will be my third YAPC::Asia and I didn’t find out very much during the last two conferences. I have a big language barrier to overcome. At the first conference I spoke no Japanese. Last year I had some Japanese but not enough to be that useful. This year I have more but I can’t talk about technical things or anything much beyond food, shopping, weather, and other basic life things. I am looking forward to the day when I can speak enough Japanese to properly interact with people in Japan.

I also feel less comfortable than I do at either YAPC::NA or YAPC::Europe. I have heard other women say that they feel like some sort of alien when they attend a big male dominated technical conference. Well in Japan I am a card carrying alien and I do feel out of place sometimes at tech events here. Actually, I haven’t gone to some because I didn’t want to be the only Western woman in the room. This was after my experience at a Free Software event where no-one would even sit in the same row as me. YAPC::Asia was nothing like that but I can still feel out of place at times. That being said I am really looking forward to this conference.

Flying between Vienna and Moscow today I had the misfortune to be sitting behind two annoying travellers. I first noticed them on the way to the gate. We had tried to go to the gate as soon as the sign to do this appeared on the board as we knew that we had to go through security just before the gate. When we arrived there was a really long security queue for around 40 gates. We stood in line and watched as our flight status changed from “go to gate” to “boarding” and wondered if we would actually make the flight. Most people around us were looking at watches and shuffling impatiently. But then I noticed two men making their way through the crowd. They paid no attention to anyone else and just pushed their way to the front of the queue. I remembered glancing over and thinking “why do they think they are more important than anyone else?” When we boarded the plane the same two men were sitting in the row in front of us.

I really dislike sitting behind someone who puts their chair back before the food is served. Given the cramped space on most planes it makes it very hard to eat. But these passengers put their seats back before the plane had left the stand! And the staff didn’t complain or do anything about it. Instead they brought them over a bottle of whiskey and tucked it into their seat pocket. And this wasn’t one of those miniature bottles you sometimes get on airplanes. I thought that most airlines had restrictions on the amount of alcohol that they would allow their customers to consume during a flight. But on top of the whiskey they served wine and other beverages. I wasn’t really paying that much attention but I did notice when the empty bottle of whiskey was taken away.

I managed to ignore them for most of the flight and thankfully I hadn’t planned to sleep but as soon as the announcement was made about the plane descending they became noticeable again – mainly because they were moving about the cabin and making quite a bit of noise. By this stage it was obvious that they were drunk. The announcement was made about putting chairs in an upright position and storing tray tables etc but again this was all ignored. In fact they continued to drink until the plane jerked and the glasses they weren’t holding in their hands smashed onto the floor. Not learning from this they managed to smash more glasses when the plane wheels hit the ground on landing.

The only time the staff told them off was when they started to move about the cabin as the plane was taxiing to the stand. I wasn’t surprised to see them push people out of the way to get off the plane and was really glad to see them disappear off towards immigration whilst we went towards transit. Travelling with Aeroflot has been a strange experience and their lacsidaisical attitude towards the behaviour of the passengers seems to be another quirk I have to look forward to on my flight from Moscow to Tokyo.

I’ve been staring blankly at my computer screen for a while now. Jet-lag is finally catching up with me and I’m finding it hard to concentrate. I am sitting at a “laptop bar” in Schiphol airport trying to catch up with my email. But responding requires concentration, which I lack. I can’t even be bothered to walk over to the board to check on the status of my flight when I can look this up on the airport’s website…

The schedule for YAPC::NA has been announced. I already knew that my talk had been accepted but I really wasn’t expecting to be the first speaker of the conference. I’m already feeling nervous but at least speaking at the start allows me to relax for the rest of it.

Over the past year we have dragged lots of our guests out to Big Echo to take part in the Japanese pastime of karaoke singing. The ability to have a private room makes it much easier to encourage people to sing and also means that we don’t have to listen to strangers crooning strange Japanese songs. This, however, doesn’t protect us from hearing our friends sing strange foreign songs.

When Geoff visited last year he had taken the time to learn a song in Japanese. I was very impressed. I have been here over a year and only recently managed to get the whole way through an Angela Aki song without stumbling badly over the words. So far I haven’t tried to do this in front of any of my Japanese friends. Though I do sing in Japanese for my language teacher – but then the Japanese version of “Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer” is a bit easier than an Ayumi song. Marty can’t sing Japanese songs. Once he makes a mistake he stops dead and gets completely lost. But still it’s amusing to listen to him try.

At the weekend Tony impressed us by singing the Romanian song “Dragostea Din Tei”. He also managed to find the Holly Dolly song “Dolly Song” but the “lyrics” were only written in katakana and none of us have a hope of reading it that quickly.

It is always good fun but sometimes we spend more time laughing than singing. Andrew’s version of “Take on Me” was probably much more amusing than it was supposed to be. I don’t think he realised that Morton Harket had such a wide range and watching Andrew raise his eyebrows in a vain attempt to hit the high notes certainly made me laugh. I think though that the funniest performance so far has been Norwin’s version of “Wuthering Heights”. I really does have to be seen to be believed.

今日は日本語のレッスンがありました。大畑先生は日本語のブログを書き始めたほうがいいと言いました。おもしろいでしょうね！

Now that it’s getting warmer the insects are coming back. Last night I saw our first jumping spider and tonight, whilst washing the dishes, I heard a cricket outside. (Now that Andrew has gone back home I have to wash my own dishes again).

Unfortunately the ants never really went away. The ants like house guests. House guests leave cups and plates on the table and more people eating means more crumbs dropped on the floor for the ants to find. House guests also managed to find food that the ants really liked – little sealed cups of jelly that brought the ants out in droves. So that even after cleaning the table with bleach my Japanese teacher was able to teach me the counter for creatures by counting the ants walking over my Japanese text books…

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.

It’s my little sister’s birthday today. She really hates the fact that she was born on April Fool’s Day.