Perl books (for ladies)

[John Costello]

On Thu, 3 May 2007, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 08:38:24AM -0700, Ovid wrote:
> > --- amayer at ebi.ac.uk wrote:
> > 
> > > Didn't Portland.pm go the way of short-ish talks with ample martini's
> > > and later adjoining to a pub for games? Less boring perhaps.
> > 
> > More or less.  It was made easier by the fact that Portland is slightly
> > smaller than London (*cough*) and that makes it easy to travel from the
> > geek to alcoholic venues.
> 
> Does London have the same density of alcoholic venues as Portland?
> Otherwise I'm not certain what the advantage is. I'm assuming that Portland's
> public transport is roughly comparable with London's, on coverage.

There probably is an answer to this later but:

Portland has, or until recently had, the largest concentration of brewpubs
per capita on the planet (Bavaria may have edged them out recently).

A bit of googling reveals that Portland is 1/15th the size of London, but 
has 5 times as many breweries (25 vs 5) within the city; this ratio 
changes in London's favor (25 vs 11) if you include brewpubs in London's 
count.

The public transport system is excellent for a city of their size.  There 
is no Tube, but they have light rail, trolley, and a very good bus system.  
The downtown core is walkable.  There's a new tram, but I haven't been on 
that yet.

Portland's area is 130 square miles.  Quite a bit of info is at
<http://www.travelportland.com/visitors/portland_profile.html#books>

The brewery count doesn't include pubs, bars, or restaurants which, as I
see Ovid notes later, often hand out beer lists that are as extensive as 
the wine lists.  Higgins is one such place, and I recommend them highly.  
Beer selections are local and global, and some places will pour a proper 
pint by British standards (not chilled).

The lack of a Tube means that transit to certain parts of town is a little 
pokey, either on foot or by mass transit, but there is a large ride-free 
area that covers downtown and the convention center.

Right, I'm stopping myself before I start thinking about why I don't move 
back[1].

> Nicholas Clark

John
[1] Seattle has a better array of bookstores, for one.