The night before OSDC
Well, this is it. After many months of planning, OSDC (aka YAPC::AU) is finally happening, tomorrow. The committee will be starting setup at 7am, and that includes Jacinta and myself. Tomorrow will be ending after the dinner, I'll be drinking a lot of coffee tomorrow.

Today was spent doing day-before setup at the facility, putting up signs, installing computers, and testing that Frozen Bubble works on the huge overhead projectors with thumping sound systems. Perhaps I could challange Damian or Gnat to a game of Frozen Bubble as a lightning talk? Perhaps all the stress of conference organising is finally sending me fruity.

For my part, I have everything ready, except for the traditional things, like my presentation and keynote introductions. At least this is one conference where I won't need to pack a huge box of business cards -- as Perl Training Australia are sponsors, everyone will be getting a business card in their conference pack.

I've got a bunch of photos of setup and organisers (while they're still smiling!). They'll be going up when I get a a free moment with connectivity and no pressing tasks.

Scuba Gear
Big box of scuba gear arrived the other day. Getting it through customers was interesting, they wanted to know what a 'tank bhan-ger' was used for. Eventually (when I found my order sheet) I realised it was a 'tank bang-er'. After a few more difficulties (why would you want to bang your tank?) I communicated it was an underwater signalling device,

After the conference I'm looking forward to popping down to Portsea for a day or two in order to test out all the new gear. We've got some wonderfully over-engineered lights (primary filament, backup filament, backup light, and locator light), so I'm really looking forward to a night dive if we can squeeze one in.

Revision Control
Goodness, sponsoring a conference is an awful lot of work. There's brochures to print, presentation folders to make, advertisements to prepare to particular dimensons, speaking opportunities, and an awful lot of text to write for everything. On top of that add the regular conference things like your own presentations, and stir in a number of clients trying to spend their budgets before the end of the year, and you end up with a particularly busy week. There's a good chance that something can be overlooked.

As developers and writers we all know the golden rule of working together, or even just singularly. Revision control, revision control, revision control; and in my case a little coffee on the side. However during this hectic week of presentations, a mistake was made. I broke the golden rule. When submitting one of our advertisements, I submitted the wrong one.

Sure, there was a 30-minute deadline to get the advertisement to the relevant people, and sure there was a conversion process in there to get it into the preferred format, and yes this was at the end of the day with other deadlines looming. It's the perfect situation for a mistake to be made, and that's why the golden rule of revision control is all the more important.

In this particular case, I didn't know that the document had been filed into CVS. I knew that it should have been. Jacinta knew that too, and indeed had placed it into CVS into the most obvious location, and updated it to the revised version that we actually wanted to use. Everything was there, I just didn't bother to type cvs update to find out.

Wedding Anniversary, 1a
I've been married for slightly more than 13 months now. Jacinta and I celebrated our real one year anniversary on the correct day, but aside from a nice dinner and helping save the life of a drug overdose victim we didn't really do that much due to work restrictions. So we instead planned to have a second anniversary -- one month and one day after our real one.

The plan was that we would take Friday off work, spend a little time shopping for scuba equipment, and then head to the beach if the weather was good, or plan something else enjoyable if it were not. Afterwards we'd drop into a Firefox celebration happening that evening, have a nice dinner, and take advantage of a complimentary stay with breakfast that was offered to us by the hotel where we had our wedding reception a year ago. It was going to be a wonderful break from what's otherwise been an exceedingly busy and stressful time.

Unfortunately, things didn't go quite as planned. The BoM was tipping rain, so we skipped on the day at the beach. Instead we spent the entire day working on formatting papers for the OSDC proceedings. Not technically paid employment, but certainly not my idea of a romatic day together. Still, we had the evening to enjoy.

Childhood dream fulfilled
Like many other eight year olds, I was caught up in the Ghostbusters craze some twenty years ago. I watched the movie so often I knew most of the script. As a fledgling roleplayer I had the Ghostbusters RPG. As an imaginative child I would procure many household items (vacuum cleaners, turntables, radios, hairdryers) for conversion into ghostbusting equipment, which (much to my parents chagrin) usually involved them being disassembled and the electronics coated in cooking oil to shield against ghosts.

I also had the Ghostbusters computer game, for the Commodore 64. It was a good game for its era, although its primary selling points were the song lyrics on the title screen, and two voice-synthesized phrases: Ghostbusters! and It slimed me!.

Despite hours of play of the Ghostbusters computer game, I never managed to complete it. The last scene involved sneaking two ghostbusters past the marshmallow man, and I could only ever get a single one past. I had heard tales of friends of friends who had done it, but nobody I had actually met in the flesh.

Yesterday, on a whim, I grabbed a copy of Ghostbusters for my emulator and tried my luck again. As fate would have it, I got past the marshmallow man on the very first game, with the very first two ghostbusters. My childhood dream was fulfilled.

Unfortunately, like many games of its era, the end-scene for the Ghostbusters C-64 game was rather uninspiring. A brief and unexciting animation, followed by some written text which amounts to a little more than Congratulations, you have won. Regardless of the poor ending, I still feel superior over my peers for having seen it.

Breakfast dreams shattered
Awoke rather early today in preparation for a long trip across town to visit an irregular client. With some excitement I realised that I woke early enough to allow me to comfortably make my favourite breakfast: soft-boiled eggs with soldiers and espresso coffee.

Unfortunately, we were out of bread, so this dream never came to fruition. In hindsight I probably could have walked to the corner store and picked up some bread rather than writing a journal entry about things I thought were cool when I was eight, and what I was planning to have for breakfast.

Photos of The Damian
As part of our Perl Training Australia's advertising campaign we're looking at adding pictures of our trainers to both the website and a number of our advertising materials. Since we have a number of courses to be conducted by Dr Damian Conway early next year (bookings are open), Jacinta politely asked Damian for an appropriate photo. To quote from the e-mail that ensued: