Drupal

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 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.

Update: I found a roommie, yay! I can't wait to see you all at the summit.

I'm trying to figure out how I can attend DrupalCon 2007 at the Open Source CMS Summit sponsored by Yahoo! The summit and related events are free, so it's mostly a matter of child care (got it covered) and affording transportation and the hotel stay.

If any non-smokers in Washington would like to carpool to Sunnyvale, or any nonsmoking webmonkeys would like to split a hotel room with an easygoing lady geek, please let me know. I'm a night owl, I don't hog the bathroom, and I'm happy sharing accommodations with geeks of any gender. Please note that I am deathly allergic to cigarette smoke, so not smoking in the car/room isn't good enough -- you really have to be a nonsmoker.

No, I haven't fallen off the face of the earth, believe it or not. My offline life has kept me very busy, so I'm just now finding time to upgrade BinaryRedneck.net to the latest stable version of Drupal. The look will remain generic until I somehow extract from my schedule enough free time to write the design I want.

Time permitting, I intend to start blogging more often (how many times have I said that?!), so keep your eyes open.

Susan (a.k.a. HedgeMage)

I've finally given up on keeping my calendar, etc. on the laptop. It just doesn't work for me. I've gone back to the system that got me through my youth juggling homework, work, extracurricular activities, volunteer commitments, family events, and some minor political activism -- an 8" by 5.5" paper planner.

I caught a sale at Office Max, and picked up a leather planner binder with some undated starter pages and a year's worth of dated refill pages, for about $15 more than I'd have expected to pay for just just the year of dated pages. Not bad, since the binder could have retailed for more than I paid for the entire shopping trip.

That, of course, is one of my biggest reasons for trying to leave my paper day planner habits behind: they get expensive. I was lucky to have found a good bargain. I'm very particular about my planner, and as luck would have it, the pages I like the best are among the most expensive on the planet: Day-Timer. The possibility of making my own pages has lingered for some time on a shelf somewhere in the back of my mind. However, the time required to come up with a layout I am happy with would likely be considerable, so the idea has remained shelved, until now...

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.

Edit: My apologies to those who were confused... if you want me to be able to read your protected entries, keep "HedgeMage" in your friends list, as that is the account name I use for reading.