fear and loathing at yapc or a savage journey into the heart of a swiss army chainsaw. this is a diary of my yapc experience. it is as true as the facts and my lawyers will allow and as false as you wish it. any resemblence between this and the reality of the trip is pure dumb luck. most of the names have been lost due to the bug the nsa put in my skull. how did i first hear of yapc? maybe it was over the back yard fence? or was it mentioned in the matt drudge report? or could it have been an email from matt wright? i don't know but what i do remember is what i felt when i heard about it. some cmu kid was going to try and get some perl hackers to hang out with him for a couple of days. i didn't know kevin lenzo from a script kiddie (just kidding :-). so i pretty much ignored the idea of going until i heard some of the names attending. larry (not rosler) was going to bestow his aura upon the festivities and randal was going to be drinking iron city and all sorts of other low lifes and perl mongers were going. i felt the tug of a critical mass of perl geeks drawing me to the convergence of two mighty rivers. i consulted my boss. she said, "uri, you want to go, so go and let me have some peace in the house for 4 days". i felt the love. so here i am in my hotel on wednesday afternoon wondering what i would do for the evening when i decided to call this kevin lenzo and see what was up. lo and behold he actually answers his phone and he tells me of a dinner gathering that night and that i could crash it. it was at a middle eastern place and about 25 hackers were there. i met kevin and he had a long pony tail. i just knew we would get along. the evening zig-zagged along in a "who are you?" and "what is your quest?" dance amongst the sets of new faces. kevin turned out to be a decent guy and not the posturing twit my evil imagination had predicted he might be. after randal showed up later we crawled across the street for a code review of the Monger::Suds module. the next morning i got there just in time to register and i caught the start of larry's speech. it seems he scrapped his scheduled talk and gave one about living in the x10 house from hell (larry, sorry for the bad word). it seems he has enslaved his family to worship his computer by pressing the correct sequence of buttons and switches so that the system will emit the chants and encantations that keep the life forces flowing through his household. or that is what i got out of it. i told my wife about the button to hit and you can hear if you have email and she wants one! she won't get it because larry praises laziness and i am just lazier than he is. i got a look at the building and conference rooms and i was impressed. cmu just built this center and we had a very large ball room which could be split in thirds. nothing like that at cambridge tech. the first session i attended was the sweetly named "ineffective perl programming or idiotic perl". i knew i could contribute some doozies i have seen. but the ones shown on the big screen were stupid enough for a barrelfull of newbies. matt wright's name was taken in vain a lot. the crowd seemed to was brought to a homicidal frenzy of cruel and inhuman abuse of the moronic code. i was in the right place. we then were given box lunch and i thought that my value so far was equal to what i got from the o'reilly conference which cost an order of magnitude more. my next session was an unscheduled one given by gnat on perl lies. with the kind of logical reasoning he was expounding, he should have testified at randal's trial! seems we perl advocates have something to learn from (abe) lincoln. during the lulls between interesting sessions, i was able to hang out with various others also playing hookie. we truants would have interactive conversations in real time with 3d effects. K001. i had a private tutorial in the ways of perl/gtk. i think i will switch from perl/tk which never clicked (sic) with me. another time i met with someone i was introduced to over thl senses" and was given by a cute perl girl. it appears that perl can see and hear (via read and listen), but it can't smell (though its detractors say it smells), taste or touch (it can touch on unix or on POB with the pptools). she did a marvelous job and PBS is picking up her option for a series of 10 hourly episodes. skipping most of a reception (except for some of kevin's mom's homemade treats), i tossed a frisbee around (with a pig and a coin) on some campus lawn. this was after first doing it in the hallway outside the ballroom with a mildy interested audience. then we had a buffet dinner. o'reilly never gave us dinner. somehow kevin scammed the computer science dept. into paying for it all. the man is a regular milo minderbinder! i bet he sold into indetured servitude to some catering company some of those cmu CS undergraduates. sounds like a win for yapc. after chowing down, the collective fractal brain came up with a plan for the evening. first let's find the least comfortable room in town in which to drink beer and then we will perform live on stage, our own version of MST3K. we ended up in a funky cinema which sold beer and had a theater with many beat up lounge chairs and tables mixed with their regular seats. we took over the place with about 50 of us (1/5 of the whole conference) and made it one of the memorable nights of my geek life. the few poor souls who actually wanted to see the matrix in all its insipid glory had lousy luck in picking their show time. a pair of them sat in front of randal and kept shhhing him. we should hire them to hand around with him more often. the best audience line was when the bad guys were viciously interrogating our intrepid (and stiff acting) hero, and a monger bellowed "you didn't use strict!!!". friday began with another free breakfast and hookie time. other than ziggy's perl mongoloids session (or was it some other portuguese word?) i stayed out of the ballrooms. lunch was hanging at the pm table and scarfing pizza. and they had root beer and not just coke and its poisonous isotopes. again better than o'reilly. this was turning out to be a great deal. after lunch was more perl/gtk and hookie until jon orwant addressed the post-apocolyptic survivors (and i don't mean yapc attendees :-). the best line of the show: a 13 year old perl hacker said, "i loaded linux onto our pc and my mom got pissed!" he may be a kiddie, but the script prefix doesn't apply to him. then there was the town meeting where we got to give back to kevin what he deserved. first i had to win another prize for the glory of boston pm. i was able to scarf an EPP for knowing how to print "hello world!" or was it something much harder? i was also given a whole bag of perl stuff from the masters of pm and i have since sold them for an outrageous profit to python lusers. towards the end of the meeting we all decided to act out a scene from a favorite movie. it seems that kevin can't add numbers too well and was over budget (use Big::Int!!). with kevin as george bailey, abigail as mary, myself as uncle billy, a perl bag was passed around and jacksons kept flying through the air until over $1K was amassed. kevin practically pissed in his pants or maybe he actually did (we should call hime "old yellowstain"). with value this show provided any unexpected fees just were converted a well earned tip from all the working hackers. that evening was a study in chinese fire drill organization and a bunch managed to be in the same restaurant in the same temporal plane. it was goodbye for many of us. the word was passed to meet at noon the next day. many were staying over saturday to save on airfares. on saturday a fair number (25 or so) crossed paths in the courtyard outside the conference center. we caravanned to the darkest cave we could find and proceeded to swill gallons of fine beer and scarfed moby sized burritos and bushels of chips and salsa. afterwards we had a major civil war about deciding the next destination. my faction decided to keep the geekness of our experience alive while the rest weenied out and went to some artsy fartsy place. our gang of four hightailed it to pittsburgh's geek palace after a long and unintentional self-guided tour of iron city's highways and byways. don't attempt this at home. when we finally got to the andrew's temple of geekdom, we were able to finagle our way in by using my boy scout perl hacking merit badge. i claimed the other 3 hackers as my long lost children and i was told to lose them again. we also glommed discount tix to various visual experiences. showing off our juggling skills and playing with the large metal brain-teaser toys kept us out of trouble for a long while. i got to crunch a marshmallow after it had a liquid nitrogen bath. crunchy and chewy at the same time! finally we entered the maxi-flick theater and were subjected to visual motion sensory overload and TMI on how multimedia thrill rides are created. the second feature was more real with omar sharif playing a doubled grand slam inside the great pyramid of egypt. my children were pooped so i reaped them and tucked them into their vehicle whereupon i proceeded solo to my third visual overload in a row. do not do this at home. it was the spherical wall of floyd and well worth the neck sprain and retinal burns from the lasers. no one told me not to look at them directly. i dragged myself to the lobby and was able to get a cab to convey me back to my boudoir. i actually caught my 7:30 flight the next morning and was welcomed back to my fortress of marriage. my one yapc regret is not trying an "Original" hot dog. it seems we passed a place (near the beehive theater) which is a famous hotdog place. one ex-cmu type mentioned it. but it was showcased in the recent pbs show on great hotdogs around the country. and i could have eaten there! next year we must schedule a visit there and we will consume mass quantities. their fries look awesome and their servings are bigger than your car. so all in all, i had a helluva time as did most of the cobol coders who attended. best geek value i have ever seen. lenzo is one cool bot. cmu sucks compared to cambridge tech but it has a nicer conference center. perl rulez! uri guttman, uri@sysarch.com