Blogs

The sheer size of Drupal, and of DrupalconSF, was brought rudely to your attention as you walked into exhibit hall A, which looked to be about the size of room you would need to store a few decently sized airplanes, and saw the rows and rows of chairs set out for people to sit back and hear Dries talk about the State of Drupal.

In short, he thinks it's doing pretty good.

Well, I've arrived in San Francisco and dropped bags off at the house we're staying at. If someone wants to reach me, I've got my phone on me - 303 - 668-9778

Today is exactly one week before I leave for San Francisco for Drupalcon, and so I decided I needed to go by MicroCenter and pick up a few supplies.

For one, when I'd been typing up some notes in Open Atrium the other day, my house's power blinked, and my computer shut down, and restarted. I almost had a heart attack, and the waited on the edge of my seat to see if the browser (Google Chrome) would somehow magically remember what I'd been typing. Happily it had, and I quickly saved the entry before finishing it up. But that really taught me that I need to have a UPS if I"m working from home.

For two, my KVM switch had been dying slowly recently and this morning it had taken three successive restarts of my computer for the switch to work. That was pretty much the end of the line for me - I suspect that's why it wasn't working with my Mac recently either.

When I first started working in Drupal, I was astonished to hear that the logging function that Drupal provides is called - of all things - watchdog(). I complained that it was a bad name, but continued using it, along with the dblog module, happily throwing things into the watchdog table and looking them up there.

So, last night here in Denver was the original ie6Funeral party, and I showed up. There was a lot of booze, a lot of really tasty snacks - Forest Room 5 did a fine job there - and finally, there were remembrances. And here's the one I came up with:

Now, there's a bunch of others that my friend Matthew Saunders posted on his blog, so if you want to see more about the funeral, and see a picture of the deceased, I suggest heading there. It was a lot of fun.

Here's the list of the 50 best core rules, as scored on RPG.net, bold the ones you own. (Picked up from chadu's livejournal.)

1 Nobilis (8.31)
2 Spirit of the Century (8.25)
3 King Arthur Pendragon (8.14)
4 Unknown Armies (8.13)
5 Call of Cthulhu (7.95)
6 Feng Shui: Action Movie Roleplaying (7.93)
7 Mutants & Masterminds (7.75)
8 Over the Edge (7.7)
9 Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (7.68)
10 Paranoia (7.68)

A mixture of short items I thought I should mention.

• My friends and I have started up a coop of developers and web designers, called Vintage Digital, and now we've got a website and you can see a picture of me from when I was visiting Boston for Drupalcon there. I also posted a huge blog post going over how to update Ubercart so it can handle multi-currency. If you're interested, have a look.

This year it was Tammy's turn to choose, so we are down in New Bern North Carolina to visit her family. We left on Christmas Eve, which meant that we actually unwrapped gifts from each other (and from my family) on the 23rd, which was a little odd. She really loved the Falling Water Lego set I got her, and the foot tall Nene Thomas Fairy doll that I found. I got some neat books, some video games, and a 32 gig flash drive that I sorely needed.

The actual travel was a bit miserable. I wasn't feeling very well that day, and was half-asleep through the entire flight, except for when I made the mistake of trying to move my legs during the flights. I'm not very fond of the legroom they give you these days. We finally flew into Raleigh airport (which looked very nice) and had our two hour drive down to New Bern. (Usually we try to fly into New Bern's airport, but unfortunately all the flights were full when we went for tickets.)

Sadly, no Avatar for me today. I totally underestimated the demand to see the film on 11:50 on a Sunday, and so when we finally arrived, shows were sold out until 11pm! So, Tammy and I will have to wait until we get back from North Carolina to sit and watch it. (Tammy's family lives in a nice place, but I'm willing to bet money there isn't IMAX any closer than Raleigh.)

The Continental Deli/Sausage in Cherry Creek North is a great little place to eat lunch at, or to go shopping for old world food and snacks. Andy turned me onto the place, and we went there today for lunch. I got a bratwurst (with apple and beer in it) along with sauerkraut and potato salad, and he got Gulash on some sort of noodles. Both were really good - although I couldn't finish my sauerkraut.

While there we saw some large chocolate ladybugs. Not chocolate-covered ladybugs, but chocolate like you see chocolate Santas - molded out of chocolate with foil wrapped around. According to the deli lady, in Germany they're considered good luck, so they make treats out of them. She also mentioned that Germans like pigs for good luck, and as it turns out when we got to the register there was a bucket of marzipan pig heads for sale.