Impressions from the trip to Paris
Things I will remember from the trip to Paris:
Sleeplessly hacking away at presentation software at night at Liz and Wendy's place. (This was after a fantastic pancake dinner and a set of competitive games of Martian Fluxx, most of which were won by Liz.) At about 2 o'clock I managed to get the "viewport" in the presentation to pan over from one slide to another, and then discovered that it all looked smoother when a sine function was applied to the "reaction coordinate". ((sin(πx - π/2)+1)/2 maps [0,1] to [0,1].) I the found that it looked even nicer when the sine function was applied twice.
Giving my "Hardcore bug reporting" talk and enjoying doing so. I believe I will give this talk again in some form or other.
Paris (or at least the part we were in) being unexpectedly derelict. No complaints about the venue, the hotel, the people, or the food, which were all excellent. Just the city itself being ugly beyond my wildest dreams.
jnthn and mberends sleeping very soundly after an active first day while I sat cross-legged on my hotel bed, debugging presentation software and franticly writing slides for my other talk. (Incidentally, I hear there's a way to actually finish making the slides before the day you're supposed to give the talk. It's called "using slides from a previous conference", and I don't do that nearly enough.)
Giving my other talk, "Perl 6: there's some madness to the method after all". I feared I might have too few slides, but instead I ran out of time and had to rush things a bit towards the end. This second talk didn't feel like a big splash, but might still have a few ideas in it that could be polished into something good. I kinda like the 'badges' idea.
French jumping back into my head, annoying me with the readiness by which my brain could parse it compared to its almost non-existent ability to produce it. As a small consolation, by the time we handed Liz back to Wendy, we seemed to have managed to corrupt the former into speaking English with a heavy lolspeak accent, almost to the same extent as jnthn, mberends and I.