Well, YAPC::NA was awesome as always. The introduction of the "perl5 4lyfe" meme makes me very happy, as does Chip's Core Hackers project to help people get involved with extending and improving perl core. I even managed to agree with chromatic about a few things in spite of his continued faith in the perl vista project - though I definitely agree that "the community's rewrite of Perl and of the community" should exist. I'm just waiting for people to realise that a href="http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?MooseX::Declare>MooseX::Declare, signatures.pm and other modules are rewriting the syntax while no indirect;, no autovivication and others are rewriting the semantics, and nascent projects like Modern::Perl and Schwern's more alpha but also more ambitious perl5i module are working towards providing a coherent new vision for perl - a vision that is also backed up by the Enlightened Perl Extended Core project and the sterling efforts of many community members to get important modules packaged for as many distros as possible.
So no, chromatic, pumpkings aren't "Larry's lieutenants". They're the caretakers of the perl5 language and runtime on behalf of the community. Larry no longer has time to be on p5p because he's too busy working on perl6 - and in case, as the original language designer he can and should be equally skeptical of all implementations. And we, as active people, as CPAN authors and documenters and wiki janitors and helpers of newbies and advocates to the wider world, are the caretakers of perl5 the platform and the culture on behalf of both the wider world and ourselves.
As for the badge code, I almost got the damn thing working and will be finishing it off and getting it live this week; except a flurry of posts on that and other things as I try to buy myself some breathing room since I realised while testing I've been posting on my last day far too often.
In the meantime, while I get my act together, I'd like to welcome Aran Delatc, Philip Mabon, Pawel Murias, Bruno Czekay, Josh Ben Jore, and Chas Owens to Planet Perl Iron Man, and hope to see more iron mongers join us on the grand stage of the ARPAnet and World Wide Web over the coming days and weeks.
JFDI.
-- mst, out