Best keynote ever

Damian Conway's keynote this morning was beyond brilliant - this must count as the Best Keynote Ever. It was an half-hour satire of business speak - an imaginary start-up that would make Microsoft acceptable to Open Source developers by charging them several hundred dollars evey time they used a patent in their own software. Nobody would mind due to the use of subliminal advertising using kittens - to give everybody a warm fuzzy feeling, of course.

A great touch was a spoof of an open source pr0n search engine modeled after Google (www.go.ogle.com), including an "I feel horny" button. I cannot believe this doesn't exist yet - I'll have to check the domain name every once in a while to see if it shows up soon.

This was Damian's second spoof talk this week - his "Da Vinci Codebase" thriller spoof on Tuesday was astounding as well and must have taken him weeks to research and execute.

And I hope Damian's talks on perl 5 and perl 6 were not spoofs - or else the total count would be up to ten or so, and we'll all be the poorer in terms of coding options.

Damian - putting the con in OSCON...

Ah, the joy of red-eye flights

So OSCON is over - and it ended beautifully, with me having lunch with various really smart people: Jesse Vincent (of RT fame), Mark Jason Dominus (Higher Order Perl), Audrey Tang (Pugs) and her friend Ballas. Not sure why I was invited, but hey :-). It turns out that Audrey is using my MQSeries perl module and could really use the DB2 module I was about to release, so I feel at least marginally useful.

After lunch, I ran into Arthur Bergman at Powell's Technical Bookstore, and he made several off-the-cuff remarks about free software he's worked on that will probably save me several months of work. He's so smart it's often frightening, but him being such a nice guy makes up for it.

But now the bad news. I was supposed to catch the 11:59 PM flight from PDX to JFK (scheduled to arrive at 8:20 AM). I've been at the airport for a while, and now hear my flight has been delayed by at least 1 hour 20 minutes. So I'm not just going to be home late, I will also be really, really tired. Glad I'm not flying to Australia or New Zealand, especially not economy.