I let the shower curtain win this morning, as it was too much
effort to fight with it. I could tell when I woke up that I was coming
down with a cold, and so my first act after showering and dressing was to buy
some Tylenol and cough drops at the gift shop in the lobby. The morning
session of the conference was a bit of a trial.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression, though. Despite ill-timed
colds and overly friendly shower curtains I’m having a ball. It’s neat
to get a chance to meet people I’ve hitherto known only by name.

This is my second Tcl conference; the previous one was five years ago, in
1997, when I was just getting started with Tcl and no one present had any
reason to know who I was. This time it’s been very different. I’m a
relatively small fish in the Tcl pond, but I’m definitely a resident.
Since 1997 I’ve written some Tcl tutorials that have proved popular,
and a couple of open source software packages that use Tcl; on top of
that I wrote a paper for this conference (“Automated Testing of the Deep
Space Network’s Uplink Subsystem”, don’t ask unless you really want to
know). I really haven’t had to worry much about introducing myself to
anybody this time around.

I presented my paper this morning, and apparently I was
lucid despite being mostly on autopilot. When I know a topic
backwards and forwards you can just wind me up and I can expound at
length (Jane can testify to this), and it probably saved me. I
just hope I’m not too dopey the rest of the day.