Tags haven’t always been associated with delicious. I’m moving back to New Zealand for good in two weeks time and while packing, I found the collected mass of badges and nametags from ten years of conference going:
In it you can find my badge from the second Perl Conference, which I think was the first that I chaired. I say “think” because this was around the time we were writing the Perl Cookbook, and everything’s a blur.
I was still working for Front Range Internet back then. You can see me move among jobs and hobbies by looking at the badges. By 2000 I was a trainer but put my company down as “Perl Toys”, the small company I founded with my wife to sell Perl fridge poetry magnets (we found the last of them while packing in June and gave them to Allison Randal at OSCON):
Not that my badges were ever reliable indicators of my identity. I used to enjoy playing with the fields when registering for conferences:
We did a University of Perl tour in 2000, where we took Perl gurus on the road. I still have fond memories of that: it was the first time I met Mark Dominus’s wife; the first time I’d been outside the airport in Los Angeles (I got to see the conference hotel AND a Cheesecake Factory, the full LA experience); my first time doing Whose Line Is It Anyway-style improv with Damian, Randal, and Dan Klein; and my first (and, regrettably, only) Daily Show screening in NYC with Jon Orwant (the ticket to the Daily Show is still attached to the UoP badge). Ah, good times:
I have name tags from our Java conference (RIP), our Mac OS X conference (RIP), our Bioinformatics conference (RIP), the first five YAPCs, and many more. I’m not obsessive about them; this is the first time they’ve been out of the supermarket bag I threw them in. Instead, I use them like other people use digital photos: to remind me what I’ve done, who I met, what I was. I wonder what tags I’ll accumulate in the next ten years.