What's new in Perl 5.10
The slides from my talk are now available at the Perl Training Australia talks page, and can be modified and distributed under the terms of Perl itself (see the license at the end of the presentation).

OSDC, day 3 + aftermath
For a good description of talks and events, see cog's journal.

Day 3 of OSDC involved me giving my talk on Human Interfaces for Geeks which was extremely well received, especially if the number of drinks purchased for me at the pub are anything to go by. Thank-you, everyone.

An especially big thank-you goes to Jarkko Hietaniemi, who patched Acme::Ook with less than 24 hours notice to assist me in writing a lightning talk. The result was Acme::OSDc, a module to compile and run a language presented by Jon Oxer (of Linux Australia fame) in the lightning talks the day before.

In true OSDC fashion, the entire module was written "live" on-stage in less than 5 minutes.

After the conference we went to a pub, and then another pub, and then a bar... You probably get the idea. Currently Randal and cog are visiting Healesville with Scott and Amanda, and I'm sure are having a great time. However with 37'C temperatures (98.6'F) I imagine they'll be spending a lot of time in the shade.

OSDC Day 2
I missed the first half the day, as I had stayed up very late the night before and slept in. It seems I wasn't the only one who wanted an extra snooze.

I spent most of the day in the Hallway Track, speaking with people and catching up on events. A notable exception was the lightning talks, which are always worth seeing at OSDC. José encouraged everyone to start use.perl journals as a way to attract more international speakers, and singled me out as an example. Whether I'm a good example or a bad one, I don't quite know.

I'm presently working on my talks for tomorrow, including both a lightning talk and my main presentation. I've also discovered I need to think more about my talk titles for multi-track conferences. A title like Human Interfaces for Geeks works great for a single-stream, but I feel isn't catchy enough to attract the crowd I'd like when competing with multiple streams. Next year I'll have to use a title like Robotic Ninja Pirates.

OSDC-2006 Day 1
Today has been the first day of OSDC. My Perl 5.10 talk appeared to be received acceptably well, and I was humbled and honoured that Randal provided positive feedback. I consider today's talk my "poor" talk, and hope that I'll see a good crowd for my Friday talk, which I consider superior.

Jose Castro (cog) was scheduled with all three of his talks in the first day, and I admire his ability to present after a 26 hour commute from Portugal and 11 hours of timezone difference.

The highlight for the day was the dinner. Damian Conway's Da Vinci Codebase was awesomely fantastic. I mean, Damian's talks are normally awesome, but this really went above and beyond. If you get a chance to see it at another conference, see it. Wow.

The dinner continued with many jugs of diet beer (just like regular beer, but with "diet" written on the jug), and a discovery that Adam Kennedy covets the Acme::Playmate module. Actually, that's not quite fair. Adam wants to write a module that looks up stats on Playmates and allows you to print patterns so you can crochet clothing for your favourite model. I suspect there'll be a lightning talk very very soon.

Other features of the day included catching up with Skud and watching her music videos, and catching up with an incredible number of people who I haven't seen since last OSDC.

Life after thirty
About a month ago I turned thirty. Thirty is considered a significant number due to our obsession with the decimal counting system. However I had also expressed a number of times that I'd like to be retired by thirty... So, you may be wondering how I've gone.

Most of my plans involving retirement didn't actually involve the complete cessation of all work. I've known for some time that being able to stop work for ever would still take a few more years. Instead my goal for thirty was seeking to work as little as possible, preferably less than ten hours a week.

The good news is that income from our investments and hobbies does actually cover our yearly expenses, which is much more than I had hoped or expected. That in itself is pretty incredible.

The bad news is that they cover it only barely, and with no real safeguards against inflation. So while we could stop all work tomorrow, we'd be struggling to remain asset-neutral, especially as these income streams can be quite variable in nature. While it's nice to know that I could stop working for a decade or two, that's not my goal. Discovering that I need to return to work at fifty is certainly not appealing.

Regardless of this, I've certainly reached my goal of working as little as possible. I'm doing no more consulting (which was a huge time sink), and instead we're just running courses every few months. I got to more-or-less take October off, I'll be doing the same with December and January, and many more months next year. I'm not calling conference presenting work, since it doesn't really pay, and I do enjoy it.

Overall, I'm calling this a win.

Booking Hotels
If you're booking a hotel in Australia, and you're asked if the booking is for personal or business, say business. I don't know why, but it's always cheaper, sometimes much cheaper.