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EVENT

Perl Whirl 2000

Type: event
Date: 2000-05-29
Location: Alaska
Participants: Randal Schwartz, Neil Bauman, Larry Wall, Joseph Hall, Lincoln Stein, Bill Harp
Alias: Perl Whirl 2000
  • Perl Whirl 2000 (May 29 – June 5, 2000) was the inaugural voyage of Geek Cruises, sailing through the Alaska Inside Passage aboard the Holland America Line's M.S. Volendam.

  • Key Details & Speakers

    • This maiden voyage proved that developers would happily pay to combine luxury travel with intense technical seminars. The cruise featured 17.5 hours of classroom instruction alongside community networking.
    • The Geek Cruise contingent comprised about 200 of the ship's total passengers on a full cruise. The only thing the other passengers likely noticed was that we had consumed all the onboard meeting spaces while at sea.
    • Featured Speakers:
      • Randal Schwartz (instructing on CGI and web development).
      • Larry Wall (Perl creator, speaking on the history and culture of Perl) along with his wife Gloria Wall.
      • Joseph Hall and Lincoln Stein.
      • Guest speakers including Tim Bray, Jon Orwant (presenting "Rebuilding Post-Apocalyptic Civilization with Perl"), and techno-nomad Steven Roberts.

  • Onboard Coding: The parallel link checker

    • While sailing the Inside Passage, I spent my downtime writing and refining a forking parallel link checker in Perl.
    • This utility was later published in my September 2000 Linux Magazine column.
    • This coding project is captured in the naming of my Flickr Photos, which feature joke filenames like eve20-ActiveStatepartylink.jpg, eve24-link.jpg, eve26-morelinks.jpg, and eve31-brokenregex.jpg.

  • Excursions & Onboard Culture

    • ActiveState (a company well known as "friends of the Perl community" for putting their profits back into open source) hosted the onboard send-off party on Day 0 where we all mingled.
    • The Juneau Pub Crawl: In Juneau, Bill Harp led the very first of what would become the legendary The Legendary Juneau Pub Crawls. When the group's lunch spot turned out to be short-handed, Bill stepped into the kitchen to help them cook. Since the ship had no Wi-Fi, I spent that time sitting in the Juneau public library using their internet.
    • My only official off-boat excursion was the Misty Fjord plane and boat trip, which I highly recommend. Indeed, it was amazing enough that I ended up doing it a few more times on subsequent Alaska voyages.

  • Shore Excursions I Took

    • Juneau: Pub crawl and town exploration. (No separate Flickr album)
    • Misty Fjord: Plane and boat trip. Flickr Album

  • Wired Profiling & Onboard Culture

    • The cruise was famously profiled by journalist Steve Silberman in the October 2000 issue of Wired magazine in an article titled "Scripting on the Lido Deck", capturing the unique cultural intersection of hard-core geeks sharing a luxury ship with traditional cruise vacationers.

What links here

🔗ActiveState 🔗Geek Cruises 🔗 Geek Cruises and Insight Cruises I Attended 🔗Gloria Wall 🔗Joseph Hall 🔗Lincoln Stein 🔗 Origin of Geek Cruises and Karaoke with Neil
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.