Visiting the Paris Perl Mongers

Advance Planning

The first thing you should know is that the Paris Perl Mongers hold a monthly meeting, normally scheduled for the second Wednesday of the month (regardless of whether the day is a public holiday). In any event, the date of the next meeting is always posted on the home page.

If you have any say in the matter, and can arrange your own travel dates, the best thing to do, then, is to come during the second week of the month. On the other hand, this isn't always possible if it's your company that is organising the trip, or if you are attending a conference.

But that's ok too, if you can give us sufficient notice (a month), we will change the date to fit in with your schedule. We do, however, draw the line at weekends: we tried that once and it wasn't a success.

Getting to the meeting

We have elected domicile in a tavern on the Place de la République. The tavern goes by the name of, funnily enough, "La Taverne de la République." The colour scheme is chocalate brown with sand brown lettering. Alas, the tasteful mauve and pink neon was wiped out during an episode of renovation.

Be careful not to get mixed up with "La Taverne du Maître Kanter," because we don't hang out there.

Finding us

Once you get inside, you have a couple of rows of tables, which you can safely ignore. Head towards the bar. Once you get there you'll see a passage on the left hand side that leads past the bar. At this point you'll probably run into the manager who will try and help you get a table. If your French is no good, just try saying things like "perl", "internet", "computers", "bunch of crazy weirdos" and he'll probably cotton on. You can save time and earn extra credibility points by ordering a beer at this point.

Head down the side passage past the bar and kitchen. There are a few small tables on the left, a couple of steps up, and then on the right hand side you come to a stairwell that leads down to the cellar. At the top of the steps is a huge dragon sitting on a pile of gold coins. The tavern is very tastefully decorated. Head down the stairs, this is where we lurk. Head down the steps, go past the public telephone and toilets and into the main room. There is an open doorway on the left that leads to a second room, and that's where you'll find us.

Sometimes, though, if someone has booked the downstairs for a karaoke session, we may be found sitting at the row of tables at the back of the tavern on the ground floor, beyond the stairs. In fact, these days, that's much more likely to happen. Besides, the wifi reception is better upstairs.

There may be a couple of obvious indices, like Perl books or OpenBSD t-shirts and the like. Otherwise your best bet is to check out what we look like. Meetings kick off at 20:00 (8pm), but people trickle in at least up to one hour later. Things wind up around midnight, so that people can catch the last metro.

The food is good, although a vegetarian will have a hard time with the menu, but then again that is true for France in general, whose unwritten gastronomical motto may well be "eat meat, you feelthy foreigners." There is a vast range of beer, and other assorted non-alcoholic drinks. You don't have to eat -- some people come along only for dessert or not even that, but a meal and a few beers can be had for less than 30 euros.

Discussions

Topics vary far and wide, and don't always have much to do with Perl per se. Regular favourites include Perl, CPAN modules, Linux, the *BSD family, apache, postfix, firewalls and network security and system administration in general.

Other programming languages that make regular appearances include PostScript, Forth, Lisp and Befunge. More distant subjects include linguistics, mathematics, books read, fiction and non-fiction, recently or not. Web pages seen and useful mailing lists (having a copy of your bookmarks can come in handy).

The tavern has free wifi, and we debug the router when it plays up. We can usually lay our hands on a power socket, so you can run off the mains if your machine is running low on juice (make sure your adaptor's plug looks like it would fit).