Damian Conway

So, for the first time in several years, I'm travelling though North America on a speaking tour. It's great to be back here, and I'm very much looking forward to the various Perl Monger events we have planned. I dearly wish I could get to more places around the continent, but these days I'm more-or-less restricted to the cities where I have clients or some other kind of funding.

I kicked things off last week here in Portland, where I was speaking at OSCON. That's always a great start to a tour: catching up with so many friends and colleagues, and enjoying the lovely city itself. The OSCON crowd seemed particularly positive this year; everyone I spoke to throughout the week was having a great time and the conference itself ran even more smoothly than it usually does. Even the schwag in the Expo Hall seemed better than previous years. Inmotion Hosting in particular won my personal prize for "Best Schwag" by giving me a single retractable USB cable that handles all three different connectors of my iPod, my phone, and my backup hard-drive...and which also came with a tiny USB charger. I don't really need their hosting services myself, but anyone who lets me cut three cables and a bulky recharger down to one-and-a-micro certainly gets the attention of this frequent traveller (and even a little product placement in his infrequent blog ;-)

The public talks begin this week...in Utah. On this coming Thursday evening at 7.15pm, I'll be giving my infamous "Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Spacetimes...Made Easy!" talk, at Utah Valley University. Sure, it's a trivial subject that you probably covered in elementary school, but if you're in the greater Salt Lake City area, I'd still love to see you there. You can register for the event through the Salt Lake Perl Mongers website and there are still plenty of seats available.

Next week, I'll be back in Toronto, and speaking there on two separate evenings. On Tuesday August 6, I'll be at the Mozilla offices, discussing the fun to be had with "dead" programming languages. Then on Thursday August 8, I'll be at the Bahen Centre giving two talks on Perl 5 and Perl 6. The Toronto crowd are always fantastic, so I'm very much looking forward to these two events.

Finally, in two weeks' time, on Wednesday August 14, I'll be speaking at the offices on 10gen in midtown Manhattan. Though technically a Perl Mongers talk (Mike Friedman is speaking at the same meeting about the horrorswonders of the Perl API), I won't actually be talking about Perl myself. Instead, I'll be talking about...talking. I'm going to give a 60-minute mini-seminar on how to deliver "Instantly Better Presentations". It's a kind of sampler of my longer professional presentation skills classes, but will (I hope!) still useful and valuable in its own right. 10gen have only limited places available--all of which are currently taken--but there's a waiting list if you're interested.

So, if you're in near SLC or TO or NYC over the next three weeks and feel like having your brain twisted and maybe even warped a little, please come along to one of these events. We'd love to see you there and the tin foil hats are entirely optional!

Damian