The San Diego Perl Mongers held a special meeting last night. Damian Conway is in town this week and dropped by to present one of his seminars. Dr. Conway regaled us with tales of Sufficiently Advanced Technologies; some fictional, some he himself has contributed to the CPAN, some we wish would have remained fictional. Unfortunately, my wife was sick and couldn’t make it. She really wanted to find out why I spent the entire week of OSCON 2006 (and the following month) raving about this Damian mad man.

Anyone who has attended one of Damian Conway’s seminars, tutorials, or keynotes will most likely have noticed that aikido will make an appearance once in a while. And for anyone who hasn’t, I highly recommend tracking Damian down. But not in that creepy stalker way. That’s just… creepy. Anyway, Damian knows a bit of aikido (or at least one move). He plucked a good friend of mine, Dan Risse, from the audience to demonstrate a “come-along” move. There was, as with most of Damian’s demonstrations, a good reason for this. I was wildly amused. In fact, I kind of have the itch to practice aikido again.

Sufficiently Advanced Technology is a pared down version of the API design tutorial I attended at OSCON. Memories of the Girl from Ipanema came flooding back to me.

I mentioned that Damian is in town. For the second year in a row, he will be presenting two of his courses over three days at Qualcomm. Fortunately for me, I now work for Qualcomm (I didn’t when he was here last year). I will, of course, be in attendance all three days. By the end of the week I should know much more about Perl Best Practice and Advanced Module Development Techniques.

Needless to say, I’m excited. Hopefully I won’t require psychological counselling.