So I’ve just arrived home from the roundtable discussion with Matz, where everyone lined up to ask them the nerdiest questions they could think of so that they didn’t embarrass themselves in a room full of other dungeon masters.

I showed up at around 7:20, and after a brief 10 minutes the night began. Everything was kicked off with a short quizzing of the audience with books being awarded as prizes. Quickly going off on a short tangent before I continue – earlier in the day, when the books were raffled off, they couldn’t give away AWDWR2, because everyone in attendence already owned it. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it was pretty funny. Anyway, many decent questions were asked that fell into the category of “Oh man, I should know this, but if I raise my hand I’ll probably get it wrong!” Because of this, I didn’t win a book. :(

There was also a point where a female .NET programmer was singled out as the answer to “the person in the room who has the least knowledge of Ruby”, to which somebody boldly replied “IT’S THE .NET GIRL!”

While this was hilarious on many levels, she won a book and I didn’t.

Moving on, when the quizzing finally turned onto Matz himself, there was a constant line of people that always seemed to include Charles Nutter. Most of the questions were suprisingly good, but the responses to them weren’t always able to match the quality of the question. Some of the questions seemed to be phrased or received incorrectly, because every now and then the answers seemed fractured and/or off topic.

All and all I think Matz must’ve answered well over 20 questions (though at least 1 of them seemed to be nothing more than a chance to kiss some ass), and for the most part they were all fairly serious, technical questions.

I’m really looking forward to some of the talks tomorrow. Specifically Tim Bray’s talk on Unicode and Michael Granger’s talk on natural language processing. There are also some interesting sounding talks that I’m looking forward to, but my head hurts too much to consult my itinerary at the moment.

I think I’m going to grab something to eat and watch Tivo’d episodes of Project Runway until I pass out.