I've been absent from the Perl Monks scene since the middle of May or so (for various outside personal and professional reasons) when my spring semester class has ended. While I'm not always the most prolific contributor, Perl Monks has always been helpful to me, and I feel guilty when I don't have time to offer something back. Especially when I'm in need of help or information. Friday was one such time.

For those of you who weren't around, I logged in around 7:45 CST looking for material for my 8am seminar. I had run out of material for the week, and had 4 hours of class time to kill starting at 8am. Within minutes, a number of monks had provided me with links to various nodes - good meditations, obfuscations, poetry, and the like. I didn't have the time to say thanks before I had to start teaching class, and so for those who assisted me, please accept my belated thanks. You really saved my ass Friday :)

What was I teaching? I had been recruited by the Illinois Community College Board to teach a week long workshop on server-side web programming in Perl and MySQL. While teaching students is one thing, I have to admit that teaching educators scared the living crap outta me ;) I'm sure merlyn has the (dis)pleasure of even tougher audiences (and, given my ordeal this week, I now hold you in even higher esteem!).

I think that the most gratifying part of the week was when the 20+ year COBOL instructors saw all the things you can accomplish with a single line of code in Perl. I think of the 10 people I taught this week there will be 8 or 9 new Perl programmers.

Again, thank you to those who helped me. It is greatly appreciated.

MrCromeDome