A week ago I attended a talk by the famous Andrei Alexandrescu at Amazon. Of course Andrei is the author of Modern C++ Design, or "The cRack bOOk" as it was known at my previous company NITI. (As in, you must be "on crack" if you're doing such unnatural things with templates) The subject was "A Policy-Based basic_string Implementation"

Honestly, I was disappointed with the talk because I don't think he explained things as well in person as he does in the book. A bunch of my coworkers bailed on the talk and went back to their offices still in the dark about policy-based design. I know it was because the presentation wasn't all that enthralling -- If you had read the book, you could follow along, but there were huge gaps that left most people confused.

After the talk I was lucky enough to get my copy of the book signed by the author. I'm still jealous of all the NITites who met Joel Spolsky but maybe this makes up for it.