Lightning talks from outside the echo chamber

I'm already tired of the hoohah about "Perl 5 is dead" and the hand-wringing and the useless flapping about what we should do. I'm more interested in what is going on in Perl that none of us have heard of yet.

If I didn't have family and book obligations, I'd gladly take two days off and an 18-hour round trip to Omaha, Nebraska to check out the lightning talks presented by the University of Nebraska at Omaha on Tuesday. Robert Fulkerson posted to the Omaha.pm list:

The Fall 2008 UNO CSCI 2850 (Programming on the Internet) class invites you to an evening of lightning talks on Perl programming, the Firefox web browser and other (mostly) web-related topics.

Lightning Talks are no longer than 5 minutes and can be about anything: a new idea, an evaluation, an observation, a story, a complaint, an explanation, a suggestion, a report of success or failure, a call to action, a description of a technique, technology, or a lament.

Usually we split the talks over two nights, but this semester it's going to be one, big solid night of talks.

Where: Peter Kiewit Institute, Room 252 ( http://tinyurl.com/5g83cb ) When: Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 Time: 6:00 PM until 8:30 PM

Topics

• Writing a Greasemonkey script for FireFox to make BlackBoard tolerable
• Obfuscating Perl
• Connecting Perl to databases
• Net::SSH::Expect
• Using BioPerl for sequence analysis
• Perl Google APIs
• Acid Test 3
• Gossamer Forum
• Perl vs. Python
• Index a website starting with a single page
• Dictionary attack using Perl
• iTunes playlist extractor: C++ vs. Perl
• Regex Creator
• Regex Coach
• History of Perl
• Software Pirating Debate (Spore, SecuROM)
• Perl 6 vs. Perl 5
• Rapid Exploit Development using Perl
• SSH on iPod Touch
• Regex usage in Perl vs. C
• Ubuntu with Conky
• Perl-XML: XML Made Easy with Perl!
• Perl Module - GD::SecurityImage
• Gmail:Checker module
• Improving Perl program efficiency/performance
• Subversion Tortoise client search
• Perl PayPal APIs
• JQuery UI
• Talking to LCD projectors using Perl

"Talking to LCD projectors using Perl"? "Rapid Exploit Development using Perl"? "Perl 6 vs. Perl 5" by someone who (I assume) is not part of the core group? Someone get this on tape and YouTube 'em, willya?

I would love to be there. (Plus, then I could go get some Valentino's pizza).