I’m still thinking about Schwern’s post and the following line:

“Touch is powerful, but complicated and we usually don’t employ it”

The first part I agree with, touch is indeed powerful. I agree less with the second part, as touch is not always complicated. It’s the third part that surprises me. We use touch all the time when we communicate face-to-face. How often we touch and what is considered appropriate touching is cultural.

A few examples. People may touch when they meet. In the West we shake hands, hug or kiss. People touch at the end of conversations – again they may shake hands or maybe pat each other on the back. People touch during conversations by lightly touching someone’s arm or leg.

As I said the degree of permissible touching depends on where you came from. It was really funny for me to watch Marty’s Dad touch an elderly Japanese man on the train. Marty’s Dad was thanking the man for moving over and giving him a seat. He touched the man without even thinking about it. The Japanese man looked as if someone had just groped him. So there is no doubt that what touching means is open to debate but it still happens all the time.

My Japanese friends have been shocked when I have told them that I have been kissed on the cheek in the office by a business associate. For them that seems overly sexual. To me it’s just a greeting from a colleague and completely sexless.

I was wondering if Schwern was writing about touching in a specific context – that of geeks communicating with geeks. But that still doesn’t make sense to me. I am considered by many to be a geek and Schwern touches me when we chat face-to-face. So maybe it’s just another one of the things we do during face-to-face communication that we aren’t quite aware of. But we shouldn’t discount it, as touch is something that helps us connect with the people we are talking to in a way that can’t easily be replicated when communicating remotely.

I meant to write up the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop when I was there in October but didn’t get round to it. Mint has been writing about it lately, which reminded me that I hadn’t.

(This is only the second Perl Workshop I have been to and I haven’t been able to work out why they are called workshops. To me this implies something more practical with an exchange of information and not a series of presented talks.)

Pittsburgh isn’t exactly close to Tokyo but it was a good opportunity to catch up with some friends.

Sometimes things can be a bit chaotic at a grass roots event but this workshop was very well organised and there seemed to be very little that the organisers hadn’t thought of in advance. It wasn’t the first workshop they had put on and it showed. Like most Perl Workshops the event was inexpensive and great value for money. Given the low cost I was really surprised by how much food was provided. Breakfast and lunch were served at the venue. They also provided snacks on the Friday night before the workshop, dinner on the Saturday night and a beer at the end of the conference on Sunday night.

The event was held on the Carnegie Mellon University campus and the rooms were all an excellent size. This is always a hard thing to get right at conferences as you don’t know when you are booking how many people are likely to turn up. It was also within walking distance of shops and restaurants – which I think is very important for a conference. I don’t find it as enjoyable attending conferences when I am stuck on a university campus outside the city.

I didn’t attend many of the talks, as I ended up helping out at the registration desk, but I did chat to lots of the attendees. It was noticeable that some of them were not at all interested in the “Perl Community” and were much more interested in learning how to do things with Perl. This meant that some of the attendees I spoke to found the opening keynotes dull as neither the Perl Survey nor Perl Mongers were of interest to them. This made me realise that the workshops are different than the YAPC conferences. At first a workshop looks just like a mini YAPC but at a YAPC there is much more talk about “community” and people do want to know what it happening within the community and with organisations like TPF.

After the 2006 Pittsburgh Perl Workshop the organisers ran a survey, as they wanted to know what they could improve for 2007. One of these things was more teaching for beginners to the language and in 2007 they ran a one-day tutorial to do just that. YAPCs do run talks for beginners but they also have to cater for the very experienced Perl programmers who attend year after year. Marty and I gave a talk for beginners about CPAN at YAPC::Europe 2006 and in the audience we had some of the most prolific CPAN authors. I remember looking round the room to see if there was anyone there who hadn’t already released modules on CPAN. I imagine if I had given the same talk at Pittsburgh that the audience would actually have been full of the sort of people the original talk was aimed at.

Mint pointed out another difference in the workshop: the fact that there was a higher percentage of students in attendance than there was at YAPC::NA. As he mentioned, both conferences took place at universities, although YAPC::NA was held in the summer, but the workshop appeared to encourage student attendance more by reducing the cost for students.

I’m sure I had more to say about the workshop but his post already feels too long to me. Maybe, if I get to attend again this year, I’ll try to write things up a lot sooner.

I should really start to work on my travel plans for 2008. There are a number of conferences that I hope to attend as well as some family events I want to go to. At the minute I am planning on attending the following:

• OSDC Taiwan
• YAPC:: Asia
• Portuguese Perl Workshop
• YAPC::NA
• YAPC::Europe

Marty has just pointed out to me that the venue for YAPC::Asia is within walking distance of our apartment. This surprised me as the Tokyo Institute of Technology is supposedly really big and I have never seen it. Seems I need to go exploring.

This will be good news for our house guest.

I have been watching the animated picture that Marty mentioned. And it’s been driving me mad. It kept changing direction on me and I couldn’t work out why until I realised I was being distracted by the television – both by the sound and the subtitles.

I could hear the cars drive through wet streets this morning. I could hear water dripping from the steps and pipes of the building next door. But I couldn’t hear the rain. Marty got me up to look out the balcony window as the quiet rain was the first snow fall in Tokyo since we moved to Japan.

We went to one of my favourite places today.

I was thinking today that I am glad that it doesn’t get really cold in Tokyo as I don’t want to spend the whole day shivering under a blanket. But then I realised that if it did get really cold in Tokyo then maybe apartments would be fitted with central heating and it wouldn’t be so cold in here. It may actually be colder in the bathroom than it is outside. I tried to take the temperature in there but my house thermometer doesn’t record temperatures under 10 degrees C so I still don’t know what the temperature is – just that it’s cold.

As my Dutch step-sister is arriving on Thursday my Japanese lesson drifted towards the subject of “Holland”. My teacher wanted to know a little about Holland and Amsterdam and was completely horrified when I mentioned drugs, the red light district and prostitution. Her thoughts on Holland centre around cheese, tulips and windmills. She has never heard of the concept of a “dutch coffee shop” and thought I was joking when I said that cannabis products could be bought in one of these.

I think I have totally destroyed her romantic thoughts about the country.

At the end of 2007 the shops were full of cute little rodents to celebrate the fact that 2008 is the year of the rat (although since everything here was so cute it looked more like the year of the mouse.) This year for us it’s going to be the year of the guest – as so far 11 people are due to stay and we are expecting more to arrange flights later on in the year.

Don’t read too much into the fact that I am writing about guests and rats in the same paragraph as the main reason I remember rats is that I am one.