Richard Jones' Log: PyCon final day

Sat, 26 Mar 2005

The last day of the conference was spent winding down. I went to Greg Stein's keynote, which other people blogged about (Google should use Roundup :). I was to follow that up with Fred Drake's XML presentation, but there were technical difficulties so I went to the registration desk early. I then spent then next 2 hours or so manning the desk, mostly talking to people about random things (Greg about Google, Grigory about mod_python, various people about GPG keysigning and some other less-well-remember conversations).

I made it to the last half of the lightning talks for the day, which included some fun stuff. Of note:

  1. The "http://www.python.org/pypi/[package name]/[version]" URLs we generate in PyPI are being indexed already, and they're ranking really high. Kudos to Martin v L�wis for implementing that.
  2. I need to talk to Daniel Chudnov about OpenURL and related topics. I think this could be a very close conversation for Common Ground to have with him.

I then kinda drifted around, caught Steve Holden's closing presentation which included some amazing limerics. I didn't copy down the best one, as I was enjoying it too much :) I'm sure others will have copies of it online. It's a shame that no-one at the conference appeared to know that the call-for-limerics was on.

We had an attempt at a pydotorg BOF (Sean Reifschneider, Ping, AMK, Barry, Grigory and myself, IIRC). I've decided to look into a PyLucene (good noises about it came from a number of presentations) hook into Roundup, which should help some things. Barry and I have some work to do, it seems :) At the end, I mentioned I would've liked to have a boardgame session or two during the conference, and just about everyone spoke up and said that'd be a great idea. Sigh. Next time I'll be more organised, I'm sure. Sean did mention a game I'd not heard of, Metro, which is apparently good for two players.

Finally, the conference wound down. I met a number of people I'd not met during the conference, including Moshe Zadka. We talked very briefly about favourite shows, and I need to check out Veronica Mars. Available *cough* online *cough*.

Then was the final dinner with AMK, his better half Barb, Andrew Dalke, Mike Fletcher (those were the people sitting around me) and about 20 other people :) The discussion centered mostly around sci-fi novels to read (old sf books are tradeable on sf-books.com, if I could bear to part with them) and graphic novels.

I then said goodbye to people I really, really want to see again next year. I guess I'd better start saving...

On the other hand, I get to go home tomorrow (Saturday - I actually arrive home on Monday) and see Rachel and Abbey again. Yay!