All's Quiet

« The 'staff only' door to the now vacant office. One detail might give away which staff. :) »

Last night, the city was so quiet that even the local police commented in the paper today that it was half as rowdy as a normal Friday night. It's even rather quiet this morning which makes me nervous that people are gearing up for a 24-hour orgiastic drink-athon. It's like being back home when the sky goes dark and green, the wind dies and you're waiting for the torrential rain and the hail to begin. Happy Vappu/May Day/Walpurgis to all. :)

This week there was an Open Source conference in Moscow where, rather surprisingly, Larry gave a talk about community building with Open Source [.ppt ~3mb]. Old timers will notice it being a classic Larry talk by using a lot of pictures, being very vague and mentioning god at least once. There's really only one person who has put up with all the PITA Perl people over the past decade, including myself, who has actively tried to keep the community going but who has started to drift away from this role and it has begun to show; it's not Larry. Larry is the somewhat mythical god figure who very occasionally says something from the mount, these days usually about the similarly fabled perl6. When so many of the bright older guys who aren't given to personality worship have gone, the void is inadequately filled by starfucker/fanboys who haven't figured out that titles of "The" are only used for the infamous dead or artists whose careers are in a slump. It might have been interesting to talk about how Perl6 caused a schism and how the population surrounding the language has fundamentally changed since then, but that would require something a lot more concrete and insightful than, to summarize Larry's talk, people are people.