Amsterdam. The weather's much nicer than Ottawa -- not too hot, not too humid -- though it has been raining a bit.

YAPC::Europe has been really good so far. I've attended heaps of talks, some of which were great and some of which I more or less slept through. Mornings aren't treating me well... jetlag, I guess... so I haven't really been awake in many of the morning sessions.

I've been spending a lot of time with, uh, Special Agent Fishpants, which has been extremely pleasant, but I suppose might also go towards explaining the sleep deprivation. Most amusing side effect: being asked "Do you program Perl, or are you just here with your boyfriend?" at the speaker's dinner the other night.

Got good responses to both my talks (e-smith yesterday and Reefknot today) but I have to admit I'm sick of both of them. I'll have to shelve the Reefknot one until we've got a heap more to show, and I think I want to do a big rewrite on the e-smith one.

Amsterdam itself is a nicish city, but I'm not sure whether I'd actually like to live here. It's a bit dirty, for one thing. But it was fun walking around all of central Amsterdam looking for bars and restaurants and stuff. The overall impression is of canals and mad bicyclists. Traffic here is crazy. Must be the drugs.

One of the things I notice as I travel is that every place has its own local quasi-monopoly on toilet door locks. There's usually a certain type of lock which is used almost exclusively in institutions. In Australia it's got a wingnut-type handle that you turn about 180 degrees, which flips a little sign outside from "vacant" to "occupied". In Canada it's similar but a) has no little sign outside, and b) only turns about 30 degrees. The smaller turn freaked me out at first because it didn't seem *closed* to me. Here in Amsterdam the common type of handle/lock is a really serious lever-style handle and a quarter-turn lock.

And on that note, I should probably continue my old "airport ratings" thing:

• Heathrow: 4/10 (good shopping and facilities, but horribly overcrowded and too many widely dispersed terminals)
• Schipol: 9/10 (clean, good facilities, fast customs, good public transportation)

Today's annoyance is that I appear not to have a PIN for my Visa card, so I can't get any more cash out. It wouldn't be a problem except that I'm reliably informed that I *really* want to buy a t-shirt at the auction this afternoon. The t-shirts are from the "Bondage and Discipline: stricter than strict.pm" talk, so chances are that I will want one :)