Hi all, I've already registered and paid to YAPC-Europe-2011 in Riga, Latvia (subtitled "Modern Perl", though many people on perl5-porters now resent the term.), in August IIRC, and am planning to go there. I'll need to renew my (Israeli) passport, which only I can do, but I wonder if the Israeli gang can plan on taking a flight together, booking a hotel together, etc. (in part because I suck in it.). I'd like to finally meet many Perl people whom I interacted with only on Internet means face-to-face, and also Peteris ( http://www.catonmat.net/ , BCCed to this message), who is Riga born-and- raised-and-living-there ("native Rigan") said he's going to attend, and he's a very good Internet friend of mine.
Riga should be a very nice city, with beautiful buildings and a lot of history. I think most Latvians have working English (though they may have the standard Soviet and/or continental-in-general anti-English-speaking Elitism ) and some of them probably should be happy to communicate with us. They also should have good Russian, in case we would have any Russian speakers (and we likely will). The official language in Latvia is Latvian, which is a Baltic language (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balto-Slavic_languages ) which is incompatible with Lithuanian, the other remaining Baltic language, and with all other languages, and it probably won't be worth our time to learn it. Peteris once told #perl that there's only one Pizzeria in Riga (!), which was not too prompt as far as service is concerned. (I then suggested that he takes the initiative and start another Pizzeria with good service, instead of messing with programming. - ;-)) I don't know if they got a lot of other good Ethnic food (Chinese/etc.). and I'm not sure the local Latvian food is any good in Israeli and especially Tel Aviv standards. I suppose that vegetarian and especially vegan food will be a bit of an issue, and this doesn't look too good: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g274967-d1030607-Reviews- McDonald_s-Riga.html (broken URL - http://xrl.us/bjxyxf ) (Sorry for brainstorming out loud). Anyway, I made a small donation to YAPC::Europe (about 10-20 Euros IIRC) [Prices] and I suggest you do the same. I am: http://yapceurope.lv/ye2011/user/2220 Not sure you can friend / like me there, but you can read my plaintext-only bio. Anyway, previous FOSS conferences were fun for me, but tended to drain my energy, and lately I've had too little energy for none-computer-related activity (including physical exercise, and attending many local FOSS meetings - you may have noticed), so I hope I'll be OK. And naturally, if I'm going to become hypomanic during the trip, it will be a problem (I'm also hypomanic now). Regards, Shlomi Fish (sorry for the brainfart and being self-centred as usual). [Prices] - sorry for not announcing about the end of the Early Bird registration, but the conference is otherwise not too pricey. It irritates me that Israeli people sometimes rant that the fact that August Penguin costs 30 ILS or 50 ILs to enter is too high, while similar "grassroots" conferences in the world are priced much more competitively. (To say nothing of commercial conferences, whether in Israel or abroad, which can easily cost 400 USD if not much more.). I would love to organise another OSDC::Israel , but after trying to organise one of the August Penguin's a few years back, I realised it was the hardest thing I ever took on myself to do. I learned a lot from that experience, and not only did I become too nervous and ecstatic, but also close to have killed our chances at the conference, though luckily someone else stepped in to replace me after I announced that I had and did a better job at that than me. I imagine organising OSDC::Israel would be much harder, and I also have to take my (mental) health into consideration. If someone steps in to organise another conference, then I will do whatever I can to help them, given the various constraints I have (job, family, Internet life, etc.), and I can refer to other people who would be happy to help. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Understand what Open Source is - http://shlom.in/oss-fs Chuck Norris can read Perl code that was RSA encrypted. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . _______________________________________________ Perl mailing list [email protected] http://mail.perl.org.il/mailman/listinfo/perl
