Sun, 01 Jul 2007
Houston Texas
I got back from my computer conference (YAPC, which stands for Yet Another Perl Conference) but I was too tired to post anything. The conference was at the University of Houston, which seems to be a typical State University commuter college, like UMBC or Towson State. They put us in the student dorms, which provided spartan, but cheap accommodations. The mattress on my bed had a tag saying it was manufactured by inmates of Texas Correctional Institutions, which no doubt provides a useful warning to UH students. The favorite leisure time activity at the conference was staying up all hours drinking and talking. Just an extension of college life, but since I don't drink and go to bed early, get up early, that left me out. I'm just an old stick in the mud, with the emphasis on the world old. Most of the participants were a generation younger than me and I only saw a few gray heads like myself.
Larry Wall (creator of Perl, if you didn't know) gave the keynote talk, as usual, and it was really two talks, the first a talk on scripting languages and the second the story of his life. The first talk had one gem. Larry said, "the difference between programming languages is not in what they can do, but in what they make you do." The story of Larry's life is well known: he's the son of a minister and went to Bible translation school. What I didn't know is that he was forced to drop out by his food allergies, which gives us something in common (the food allergies, not the Bible translation.) After the conference I took the course with Randal Schwartz on Perl Best Practices. Damien Conway was going to teach it, but was forced to drop out because of family problems. Randal and Damien, if not Perl gods like Larry, are at least demigods.
The weather in Houston is hot and humid. This is not too surprising, since it sits on the Gulf of Mexico. What I didn't expect, though, is that the native compensate for this by turning the air conditioning way down. There were rivers of condensation running down the inside windows of all the stores. I had packed for the hot weather, but froze instead of sweltered, as I tried to cope the the Houston definition of what is comfortable. I was a parasitic plant growing in the trees and wondered what it was until I figured out it was Spanish moss, something you don't see in the trees in Baltimore.
I brought along the book "The Master and Margarita" to read on the trip. It's a fantasy about a trip by Satan and his entourage to the Soviet Union and all the mischief they cause. The author, Bulgakov, was heavily censored by Soviet authorities and this novel, unpublished during his life, was his way of getting a back at them. It's a wonderful novel on many levels and was first recommended to me by Yuri, a Russian emigre I once worked with at the Space Telescope.
