I am almost sorry to see winter break drawing near. For the past two weeks, I've had the privilege of introducing an amazing group of kids to open source software. Inspired by GHOP, Google's pilot Highly Open Participation contest, I've put together an extracurricular computer club for interested students at nearby Sandridge Elementary. We meet twice per week after school for an hour and a half.  I came into this with the slim hope that the school's new administration would let me shepard a couple of students through GHOP. Mr. Hollingsworth's (Sandridge's principal) and Dr.

Wow. Just, wow. If only I had the money to blow right now. I am am drooling over the new Linux-powered phone/PDA from Motorola. What more is there to say?

I started the morning with a round of Drupal lightning talks -- eleven topics in sixty minutes. dww even convinced me that if I ever actually have free time, I should pitch in a bit on project module.

Dries' "State of Drupal" talk was excellent, though the audience as a whole didn't seem to react well to the bit about eliminating the webmaster, developer, designer, etc. The whispers and whines in the crowd implied that some people found those statements threatening. I'm mentioning this because I didn't feel that way, and I'd like my fellow geeks to know why: web technology is an ever-evolving industry. I've been doing system administration since the early 1990's, working with open source software since 1995, and playing with web technologies on and off since the 1990's as well. NOTHING is like it used to be, and *I'm still here*. So are a lot of other people.

I started OSCMS by making hasty child care arrangements from my cell phone in the airport Wednesday night, due to my mom's flight being canceled in the eleventh hour. Everything worked out, though I also spent a large part of Thursday on the phone, ducking in and out of sessions to coordinate the situation at home. My poor mother finally made it to my place late Thursday night. I'm still glad I went, though I feel pretty bad that my mom went through all of those delays and cancellations.

Rasmus Lerdorf's talk alone made the trip worth it. He's an even better public speaker than I'd heard, and I learned some new things about PHP, including the existence of some tools I can't believe I didn't know about. The OpenID talk was well done, but really didn't tell me anything new. I changed my mind about "Theming Drupal" and instead went to chx's talk on the new menu system. I am glad that I did. Not only did I learn quite a bit, but I ran in to webchick, the first of my fellow Drupalers besides chx to whom I could match nick, real name, and face. She is even more awesome in person than online. Her astute questions and comments added a lot to every presentation or discussion I saw her in. I certainly picked up a lot more than I would have had she not been there.

Apparently, this is old news to everyone but me: LiveJournal has launched LJtalk, their new Jabber instant messaging service.

I've been a bit nervous that Google's Gtalk might someday leverage their huge userbase to help them drive the XMPP standard, wresting control from the community at large. This move by LiveJournal indicates that the 'net may finally be moving toward real distributed instant messaging, and that I probably shouldn't worry so much.

I'll be teaching a short "Beginning Drupal" workshop next Thursday, October 19th, as an activity of FOSS Olympia, my local Free and Open Source Software user group. This free workshop will be held at Mud Bay Coffee from 7pm to 9pm on October 19th.

Today, Rob Levin, aka lilo, CEO of PDPC and head of the Freenode IRC network, died of wounds sustained in a car-vs-bicycle accident a few days ago. He leaves behind his wife, Deborah, his son, Benjamin, and a legacy of cooperation, leadership, and tolerance. Rob will be missed by friends, family, and the FOSS community as a whole. You are not, and will not be, forgotten.

It seems that having some sort of special program to "reach out" to women is the trendy thing in FOSS right now. Debian Women has been around for ages, but now we have Ubuntu Women, the Gnome summer camp for women, and Gentoo is talking about starting Gentoo Women. I suppose I should be impressed that in each case they say "women" and not "girls". I'm tempted to check out some of the above groups just to see what's going on. I've pointedly avoided them thus far because I totally and utterly fail to see how they can be a good thing for FOSS, or a good thing for the kinds of people whose involvement most benefits FOSS.

I finally broke down and bought a digital camera. I've been putting off spending the money, but now that I have, I'm glad I did.

The camera I purchased is a Nikon Coolpix L1. I was apprehensive at first, as I'd intended to save up for a different, more expensive camera from the same maker. Having tried the L1 out for a day or so, I am impressed.

At today's Edubuntu Community Council meeting, pygi (Mario Danic) and I were officially made Edubuntu members, each by a unanimous vote.

At the meeting, JaneW and others encouraged me to become more involved in the development side of the Edubuntu project. I am eager to do so, as that has been my aim from the beginning. I joined the Edubuntu Cookbook team as a way to test the waters before jumping into development. My past experiences with debian-edu had left me skeptical, and I didn't want to again risk becoming invested in a project that was foundering under the weight of surrounding social politics.