Memoirs of an OSCON Rockstar, Day 3 (An Illustrated History of Failure)
It's Wednesday, and I'm giving what I consider my good talk. I've presented it a number of times in Australia, it's gone through four revisions, and it's nicely polished. That, combined with my new OpenOffice 3.0beta presenters' screen, and my alluring aussie accent, I'm practically guaranteed me good reviews. Out of all my talks, this is the one I'm most looking forward to presenting. Plus it's the last talk of the day, so I have a chance to get a decent night's sleep the night before.

Needless to say, everything worked beautifully. I did some self-promotion at my security tutorial, and since there were a number of familiar faces in the crowd, I think it paid off. In fact, it seemed that before there was standing room only. Wow!

My talk finishes, the crowd cheers, I feel like a rock star. R0ml, who gave the amazing keynote the night before, sticks around despite the crowd of people milling around me after the talk, and hangs out at the trade show with me. The trade show had beer, and wine, and food. The food at OSCON was consistently excellent.

After drinks there were Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions. I arrive at the rethinking CPAN BoF, hosted by Andy Lester, which has a modest but significant attendance. My big gripe about the CPAN is that users are too easily paralysed by the issue of having too much choice, and I think a simple favourites system for users can help here. Andy has much grander plans.

After the rethinking CPAN BoF is the managing user groups BoF, hosted by Gabrielle and Selena! I almost consider this to have been the therapy BoF for those who have the difficult tasks of managing user groups. There were a lot of common themes, and at least for me it was good to know that I was not alone.

After the BoFs, you guessed it... back to my hotel room to work on another talk for the next day!