P* deluge

I'm going a little nutty at the moment with a stack overflow of P* programming languages.

1. Perl: I have been attending Yet Another Perl Conference::North America (YAPC::NA) in my lovely hometown of Toronto. YAPCs are a little out of the ordinary, as far as conferences that I've attended--for one thing, the cost for a three-day conference is about $100 CDN. Do you get what you pay for? Well, $100 goes a long, long way in a true community built on a volunteerism spirit. Oddly enough, Larry Wall gave a very thoughtful opening keynote/meditation on community building... anyways, I've been immersed in Perl today.
2. PHP: But then I picked up this email when I got home, with the subject Zend Certified Engineer Exam - Results!. I had taken advantage of the free certification exam when I was at php|tropics, on a lark, when Jason Sweat walked past me at 8:00 in the morning and I asked him where he was headed so early. I followed in his wake and wrote the test without studying diligently beforehand. When I tried to open the email, to find out just what my Results! were, the combination of an ongoing virus scan + Lotus Notes' turgidness made for a (no kidding) 10-second delay of pure anticipation before the email opened. I had enough time to think "I really hope Zend doesn't use exclamation marks on the notices that inform people that they have failed their exam -- that would be funny, but cruel". It turns out that I passed, so I'm now a "Zend Certified Engineer".
3. Python: For the aforementioned Deep Dive with Apache Derby tutorial for OSCON, I have been wrapping up my summary of Python and using the pyDB2 module to connect to Apache Derby from Python applications. I've got wayyy too much material on Python, geez, maybe I should write a book or something. Oh wait, done that

Despite the perils of varying sigils and whitespace, I think I've managed to keep the languages straight today. Tomorrow should be a little simpler, as it will be a day of pure Perl at YAPC::NA capped off by a Perl cruise around Toronto Harbour. Those Perl folk know how to live it up!