ApacheCon 2003, Day 3

The third and final day of ApacheCon is the one I had been looking forward to the whole time, because it was the day with all the Perl sessions. However, having learned from Ben that some sessions are for novices, I rechecked the schedule and decided to skip a few. I went to:

• “Writing Tests with Apache-Test” presented by Geoff Young was great. Not only was the content good, but Geoff is a great presenter and uses PowerPoint-style slides in the most effective way I’ve ever seen.
• Next up was Geoff again, for “why mod_perl 2 sucks/rocks”. It wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for, but was still good.
• The next Perl session looked elementary, so I went to a presentation on mod_pubsub. I guess it was a good experience, because I learned that mod_pubsub isn’t as cool as I’d thought last time I heard of it. Oh well.
• “Localizing BBC News for a Global Audience” was interesting, not so much for technical content, but just for the glimpse it provided into the Beeb.
• “Advanced Apache Administration with Perl” wasn’t great technically, but it did provide lots of food for thought and gave me some good ideas for how to centralize administration of Green River Apache servers.

Finally, the conference was over and it was time for the closing session. The closing session consisted primarily of a raffle for prizes, which sounds exciting, right? Unfortunately it was kind of sad, because they just kept drawing names of people who had left early. And once the painfully long raffle was finally over, the coordinators dragged things on by begging for feedback, which nobody wanted to provide in front of the whole room. So they eventually let us go…

…and it was time to hit the casinos. Dr Texter and I brushed up on our craps theory (with an inspiring performance by Dr Gibson), then we searched high and low for $2 craps tables. Eventually we found a place and played for a couple hours.

I was fully expecting to lose money, and had budgeted just a small amount for gambling, thinking of it as an “entertainment” expense. However when we left the table, I was actually ahead! Having started with $40, I left with $47, plus I’d had a bunch of fun at the table and the casino had been giving us free beer. It made me think “say, there just might be something to this whole ‘gambling’ thing”…