No more docbook
For historical reasons, our build environment for our course materials has been docbook, and it's never really agreed with me. Sure, it's open, free, and powerful, but I've never considered it to be at all human friendly. All those tags just get in the way.

Having said that, we still want to use docbook as our build platform; it produces good looking books and we have literally hundreds of thousands of words already written in docbook. I just don't want to have to write any more.

Luckily, Pod::Docbook appears to do a pretty good job of converting POD into docbook. That's a good thing, because POD is what I use for writing articles, program documentation, Perl Tips, and just about everything else except for web content.

The most lovely thing is that I don't lose any power by writing in POD. If I need to jam in some docbook-specific tags, I can do so with =for docbook for a little bit, or =begin docbook for a big chunk. Now I can have my cake and eat it too.

SAGE-AU 2005
I'm finally back from the SAGE-AU 2005 conference. I presented two talks, one entitled Conference Presentation Mind Control, and a double-length one on Starting a small (open-source) business.

I discovered that SAGE-AU audiences don't laugh as much as local user groups. At first I thought it was me, but this appears to be a comfort factor. Local groups usually see the same crowd each month, and are a lot less formal than a national conference which meets once a year.

The best reactions to my talks have always been at Sydney Perl Mongers, and I attribute this primarily to the meeting being held in a rather nice pub. I'll be expanding my presentation talk to recommend that if you can arrange for your audience to imbide alcoholic beverages during your presentation, they'll give you a better review than if presented with water. Just don't expect them to remember the details of your talk afterwards.

Damian Conway
If you're in Melbourne, or can get to Melbourne, Damian Conway will be speaking this Wednesday, 14th September, at Melbourne Perl Mongers. Damian is one of Perl's most highly celebrated speakers, and author of Object Oriented Perl and Perl Best Practices. Like all Melb.PM meetings, admission is free.

Conference talks
Presented my Conference Presentation Mind Control talk last week at the Open Source Developers Club. It was very well received, with the audience laughing at all of my jokes, even the accidental ones.

In other matters, the Linux.conf.au CFP closes today. Much to my confusion they only seem to accept 50 minute presentations. That's a long time for a talk, and most of what I consider my best material is aimed at the 25-30 minute timeslot. I've asked to see if there's any accomodation for smaller presentations.

Training
It's been a busy couple of weeks in the training arena. Eight days of training, and two Perl Mongers presentations in three weeks.

Things have calmed down a little now. I've only got a presentation this week at OSDClub, and two conference presentations next week at SAGE-AU.

Rather foolishly, I'm giving a talk on how to present at conferences, or more specifically how to use mind-control on your audience to convince them you're a good speaker. I say foolish because it's easy to be critical of a presentation on presentations; if I make any mistakes then I'm sure the audience will notice.

Wetsuits
Ocean temperatures lag behind surface temperatures, as the ocean has such a large thermal inertia that it takes considerable time to move it. The warmest water is not during summer, it's at the end of autumn, and in the same vein the coldest water can be found at the start of spring.

At the tail end of winter the water in Melbourne is almost as cold as it can be, 12 degrees celcius, but the temperature on land is quite plesant. This makes for perfect conditions to trial our new wetsuits for cold-water conditions.

Jacinta and I headed down to Williamstown, donned wetsuits, masks, snorkles, and fins, and hopped into the water. I was pleasantly surprised at the effectiveness of my new wetsuit. I felt quite warm and dry entering the water up to my chest, and it was only when my bare hands entered the water did I appreciate that the water really was painfully frigid.

The whole experience was quite bizzare. Complete comfort and warmth all over, except for my uncovered head and hands which were acutely painful from the cold. Luckily we were just snorkling — our hands became used to the cold, and only our faces needed to be in the water. I think that obtaining a hood and gloves will be in order at some point, which provides the exciting possibility of being able to completely ignore Melbourne's water temperatures at regular depths.

Chicken warfare
I never thought owning chickens would involve an arms race, but clearly it does. There's a local fox, that likes to eat the chickens, and a local crow, that likes to eat the eggs.

Jacinta and I have been deploying new technologies to try and keep the fox away. This started as a raised coop, then a fence, then a bigger fence, and now we have a run that is completely enclosed on all sides and top with wire, and has wire dug into the ground around the sides.

The new enclosed run has the advantage of not only keeping out foxes and crows, but also many of the wild (introduced) birds which try to eat the chicken's food. The fox could still potentially get in by doing a lot of digging (under rocks and wire), but I think it will need an astounding amount of determination to do so.

Our youngest chickens have also finally to the stage where they're laying eggs, so we're once again heading towards having too many rather than too few.

Dinner with Skud
On Friday night I was able to catch up with Skud in person for the first time in many years. I've known Skud for about as long as I've known Perl (about a decade now), but we stopped bumping into each other once she moved to Canada.

Dinner was at a small Indian resturant, and included a decent crowd of Melbournites. The dinner was a perfect example of the small-world syndrome that is rife in Australia's IT communities. I almost fell off my seat laughing when the lovely person next to me commented that her son wished to attend The University of Melbourne, as they had a fantastic Anime Club. I had founded the very same club about ten years ago while still a student. I felt both proud and a little old at the same time.