Thought I'd pack my entire year's conference schedule into one week...

First was a Neuroinformatics infrastructure interoperability workshop at McGill, my second trip to Montreal this year. Well outside my wheelhouse, but there's a fair amount of interest in that community in git-annex/datalad. This was a roll with the acronyms, and try to draw parallels to things I know affair. Also excellent sushi and a bonus Secure Scuttlebutt meetup.

Then LibrePlanet. A unique and super special conference, that utterly flew by this year. This is my sixth LibrePlanet and I enjoy it more each time. Hghlights for me were Bassam's photogrammetry workshop, Karen receiving the Free Software award, and Seth's thought-provoking talk on "incompossibilities" especially as applied to social networks. And some epic dinner conversations in central square.

Finally today, a one-day local(!) functional programming(!!) conference in Knoxville TN. Lambda Squared was the best constructed single-track conference I've seen. Starting with an ex-pro-figure skater getting the whole audience to pirouette to capture that uncomfortable out of your element feeling you get learning FP, and ramping gradually past "functional javascript" to orthagonality, contravariant functors, the lambda cube, and constructivist logic.

I notice that I've spent a lot more time in Boston than I ever have in Knoxville -- Cambridge MA is starting to feel like my old haunts, though I've never really lived there. There are not a lot of functional programming conferences in the southeastern USA, and I think this explains how Lambda Squared attracted such a good lineup of speakers. Also Knoxville has a surprisingly large and lively FP community shaping up. There will be another Lambda Squared next year, and this might be a good opportunity to visit with me and go to a FP conference too.

And now time to retreat into my retreaty place for a good long while.