Good evening

[da]

I'm a happy camper. We just had our first guest presenter at my Perl User Group meeting; he was an excellent speaker, on a great topic [1], followed up by some good local-ish [2] beer, and biking home in shorts and tee-shirt for a total of ~10km today. And melted_snowball is coming in 2.5 days, huzzah huzzah.

Logistically, in the list of: preparing the talk, presenting the talk, reserving the room, ordering and getting the pizza, paying for the pizza, and cleaning up after the pizza, I only had to do one item. There have been many months when I didn't have to do most of them (some when I did) but I think this time it was distributed more evenly; two people each did two items, the other two were chiefly done by one person each. That is to say, I think we're more organized. I think if I were to be hit by a bus, the group would continue. Which is a good stage to be at.

[1] Cees Hek spoke to us on AJAX - Dynamic web sites with DHTML and Perl: How to use the popular Prototype library to fill your web application with flashy widgets such as draggable lists, autocompleting text boxes and transition effects. With a focus on HTML::Prototype and CGI::Application.

That is to say, some of the magick behind gmail, flickr, and such; sending data without reloading pages. With a minimum of fuss/writing XML (ugh).

[2] I've been corrected. It was by Molson. (*sigh* Shows what I know about beer.) But it was still OK beer; Rickard's Red.

Comments

[sachmet.livejournal.com]

Excellent. I'm looking forward to this talk when he brings it down to Chicago.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Aha, he's giving it at YAPC I take it? Excellent.

It was a great presentation, though unfortunately for a more structured environment he'll have to shorten it. We basically gave him as much as he wanted, which turned out to be... 2 hours, including a bit on JS fundamentals at the beginning. Time well spent!

some dude

[(Anonymous)]

It's worth mentioning that we spent a -lot- of time on tangents, that talks at YAPC rarely go on such lengthy tangents. Our group is a good size, in some ways... people feel comfortable interrupting and asking questions, but there aren't so many that it totally bogs down.

Re: some dude

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Agreed!

[sachmet.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm starting speaker notifications today, and that's going to be given Monday afternoon. He'll actually be preceded by a intro to JSAN and AJAX, so it may not hurt the presentation as much as it might.

[zanate.livejournal.com]

Rickard's is a tolerable fallback, yes. But, if you like good beer, local-ish or otherwise, we'll have to, um, introduce you to a few. :)

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Heh.

I'm always willing to try new things, especially if they happen to be good beers.

Not this weekend, though; but I'm up for Introductions some future weekend. :)

[zanate.livejournal.com]

Noted. quingawaga and I certainly have had our beer horizons broadened over the last year.