Woo! What a week!

Last week, Perl guru and Perl 6 co-designer Dr. Damian Conway was in town to play both host and guest to several Perl-related events, both evangelical and educational, with the support of Consultix, Inc.. On Tuesday, Damian presented his Time::Space::Continuum talk to The Seattle Perl User's Group, which he gave at this year's Yet Another Perl Conference 2002. I was excited to attend, as I greatly enjoyed his SelfGOL talk which he gave to SPUG last year. Similar to his famous Quantum::Superpositions talk, the lecture consisted of two hours of physics followed by a new Perl module related (if somewhat whimsically) to the rest of the talk. Quantum::Superpositions, for example, ended with a genuinely useful Perl module that implements set theory operators, such as: $x < all(@items) evaluates to true iff the value of $x is less than every item in the @items array.

Time::Space::Continuum also came with a Perl module that allows you to perform any calculations in zero time (as opposed to linear, logarithmic, or polynomial time) simply by using provided control structures that replaced the traditional ones. We didn't believe it either until Damian demonstrated it before our very eyes! Alas, Damian isn't going to reveal how T::S::C actually works, or release the module, until next year's YAPC. Perhaps based on the usefulness of the Quantum::Superpositions module, a few attendees actually appear to believe the demonstration of zero-time computing with this Perl module was genuine-- not that the module was performing some kind of miracle of time travel inside Damian's iBook (which was implied by the talk), but that the module utilized a trade-off between space (disk space, memory) and time (computing time), which Damian analogized to the relationship of space to time, or of energy to matter. I have no doubt that the revelation of the secret behind Time::Space::Continuum will be genuinely interesting and related to this idea, but I remain skeptical that the demonstration was anything more than slight of hand that won't result in a useful module. Kind of ruins the joke to say that, but the reactions of others to Damian's talk are notable. It was a very entertaining talk, and I'm grateful to Damian for coming to Seattle to present his light-hearted material at no charge, especially since I don't get to go to the Perl conferences.

Dr. Conway also taught several all-day classes throughout the week, and Tim Maher (of Consultix) raffled off seats to a class to raise money for The Perl Foundation, an independent non-profit that exists for the sole purpose of developing the Perl language and its culture. Fellow Blank White Carder, Wumpus Hunter and Seattle weblogger Jim Flanagan won a seat, but ended up not being able to go-- so he gave his prize to me! After begging my employer for permission, early Thursday morning I headed out to Kirkland for a day-long presentation of Perl 6, a very new version of the language that is still being designed. While a great deal of great work has been done on the design and implementation of Perl 6, it won't be ready to use for another two years, which is infuriating to realize after having spent eight hours hearing about all of the new features. Ever since the presentation, I've been thinking excitedly about going back to school for a Computer Science degree (for reals this time!) and studying computer language design like I had intended. And of course, like most Perl geeks, I've been rushing my brain to think of a meaningful way to contribute to the Perl community, which is especially difficult because I only have incidental day-to-day experience with the language, I don't get to write apps and use fancier language features. Nevertheless, I've made up my mind to preemptively understand everything I can about this language that doesn't yet exist, taking advantage of my co-workers' passing interest to ramble on and on about it.

While we wait: Perl 5.8.0 was released on Friday, with i-threads, even more Unicode support, and more. Of course I still only get to use 5.005 in every production environment I touch, but I can play with it at home.

Meanwhile, my father was in town on vacation for a few days, though unfortunately I had to work (and attend the Conway lecture), but we had a few entertaining dinners. On Thursday evening, I invited my sister, mother and grandmother into town (who are all merely a few hours away), and Lisa and I introduced our immediate families together for the first time over dinner. We were glad to get the meeting out of the way, in lieu of a real wedding, so there wouldn't be any awkward introductions at the inevitable future events where both families might be present.

Also, throughout the last couple of weeks we've been trying to obtain proper wedding bands, and after a few snags with ordering pieces not in stock and figuring out the correct sizes, we finally have them. It's been fun to wear them around for a while and test them (which I recommend, by the way, so you know you've got one that fits right before it's too late to return it), though we ultimately decided to take them off until we're actually married. I look forward to being able to wear it permanently.

Seahawks Stadium was open to the public this weekend, and it's pretty amazing to see. I'd like to write about how incredibly massive the thing is, with amazing views of the city from the southern seats and a view I've never seen of Elliot Bay off the western railings, but I just learned that a man commit suicide off the northwest ramp of the stadium the day we were there, so I'm no longer in the mood to wax poetic. I am pleased that, with all the thousands of college educations' worth of tax-payer money we poured into the stadium, we did the tasteful thing of not selling off the naming rights, though walking around the various private boxes, airport-like hallways and non-game-view seating areas (with dozens of expensive widescreen monitors-- there are even special monitors that animate the concession stands' price for a hot dog: $3.25) still makes it feel like a party to which I'm not invited. Maybe with use it'll feel more like ours and less like "theirs" (whoever they may be). Also, quick tip: the only drinking fountains in the entire place are hidden behind certain indoor food vendors, along with a hidden set of restrooms. Like most stadiums these days, you can't bring in your own beverages, so it's good to know where the water is, especially when it's so manipulatively hidden.

And finally, on Saturday, Bryan, Jeremy, Lisa and I saw They Might Be Giants. It was my first TMBG concert (and my second go-see-one-group-perform-in-a-large-venue-style concert ever), and it was quite enjoyable. Did you know the Paramount could remove their main floor seats for standing-only concerts? We had tickets for last year's concert scheduled for September 13, which was cancelled at the last minute for obvious reasons. I'm glad they made it back to Seattle. Many songs from No!, the usual popular favorites from Flood (plus my favorite non-Flood, "Ana Ng"), and hey, some stuff I've never heard before. The group has been recording for twenty years, and will be doing a free anniversary concert in Central Park real soon now.