drupal

I made it to San Francisco yesterday around 1pm on short puddle jumper plane from Denver. Shortly after touching down Jay took to me to a local Voice, Vision and Video conference(VON). Supposedly the conference was covering Video on the Internet and how to handle it from a business perspective.

Unfortunately the conference sucked. It was dubbed as a conference about the "Vision" of voice or video on the net but it was really nothing more than a trade show. IP Telephony ruled the show but not in a forward looking manner but in this is what we have right now. Honestly the current IP-telephony stuff (although I'm a big advocate) kinda sucks and needs a lot of work, the future is crazy bright though.

He met a few of his vlogging friends and we talked about the future of vlogging, economics of the Internet and just technology in general. Although the conference sucked it was good to see what Vlogging is becoming and what it will become in the future.

Today I'm sitting down in a "Drupal menu" session at DrupalCon @ Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, Ca. This is really just a big geek fest but what I really like about Drupal is that the geeks have changed. These geeks are becoming (compared to the geeks at programming conference of a few years ago) "cool". They shower, dress well, are articulate and don't let the computer consume their lives (a problem that I still struggle with).

Its cool. I'm really excited about what you can do with Drupal and it freakin' amazing to see how many other people are using it and the kick-ass work they are doing. This morning I hijacked a session on "Internet Video" w/ Drupal. I showed off NYMapExchange.net, IndieTrekker.com. Kent showed over EchoChambermovie.com (freakin' awesome!) and Winborn, of Advomatic fame, showed off a new site he is working on that use a new Video field for the CCK module (schweet!).

Anyow.. I'm having a good time, learning a lot and getting ready for a week long vacation from my computer!

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On Saturday night my body was twitching from a caffeine overdose and I couldn't concentrate long enough to move one foot in front of the other. My body, deprived of nourishing food and kept alive on caffeine, shut down about 10pm. My brain died quickly thereafter. 3 comments -- Add a new comment

I arrived in Denver almost a week ago and have been working 14-18 hours a day on MNN's database open source project. A massive project involving the creation of custom Drupal modules, integration with CiviCRM and tons of coordination.

Since arriving in Denver I have learned two things.
1) Deb (g/f of Tony) showed my hypem.com  -schweet!
2) CiviCRM is a horrible system to program against

Oh well the struggle continues. In one week's time I will be on vacation in Portland, Oregon! I can not wait to get back to Portland.
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Drupal Camp ended yesterday and I have never felt geekier. I helped organize the event (ok I took credit for doing very, very little to organize; Noel and Hans did everything) the event and I was also roped into doing multiple sessions. On Saturday I did a session on how to create websites with google maps but on Sunday I got hit really hard. In the morning, as the group was defining what we all wanted to talk about, both Sam T and I noticed a really bad trend. All of the sessions fell into our realm of expertise. The end result was Sam doing multiple sessions and I starting out a 4-hour power session in a single room.

Oh ya, that was fun. 20 people and 4 hours of joyous Drupal Talk. Whoo Hoo! Actually to be honest it wasn't that bad.

I was completely exhausted at the end of the day but I have to thank OpenPlanner for stepping up at the end of the day, taking us all out to the bar and paying our tab! Oh ya, nothing feels better than to end a super geeked out day with a nice vodka on the rocks (or two).

After the bar I headed home and set out on a mission to purchase tickets to Sweden.

Ok first a little background.

Earlier in the week I received a travelzoo email that advertised an amazing deal to Stockholm from NYC. $380/rt AFTER taxes ($199 before)!!! I'm sure I waited about 5 seconds before telling myself that I'm going to Sweden. That evening I went online to malaysiaairlines.com and attempted to order the tickets. I say attempted because I have tried multiple times each day on every day, since Wednesday, to order these tickets and every attempt has failed.

The first error was with Time-Warner (my cable-internet provider). The domain name for their payment processing (a .my domain) was BLOCKED by time warner. Look I'm a geek, I digged, pinged, tracerouted, everything and the name was definitely blocked.

I got around the error by finding the correct IP address and adding it into my local HOSTS file.

The second error was harder to get around. My credit card information seemed to be going to them but it wasn't processing. I tried over and over again but I kept receiving errors. I did, however, have a booking confirmation. In fact right now I have 5 booking confirmations for trips to Sweden.

After about 10 or so attempts at purchasing the tickets with multiple browsers, computers and even a windows machine I decided to break down and call the company directly in Malaysia.

Verizon cell charges to Malaysia: $1.25/minute!
Verizon cell charges to Malaysia if you an "international calling fee" of $4/mth: 20 cents/minute
Skype calls to Malaysia: 2.5 Cents a minutes.. yes that just over 2 cents a minute.

So I put $10 on my skype account and called them up. I heart skype!

Figured out that they are having trouble with Mastercard and that my Visa is being blocked by the bank. I cleared those issues up and I'm still having troubles. :(

At this point I don't have ticket to Sweden but I AM going.... I've called Malaysia twice, I'm calling Kuala Lumpur tonight and I will purchase these tickets. (fingers crossed)

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Drupal Camp, a "camp" for drupal geeks, is here again; version 2.0 of the camp. This time we're doing it up right. Bagels and Coffee in the morning from a local bakery, afternoon pizza from Grimaldi's and lots of geeks walking, riding, subway riding, flying, driving, trucking and skipping in from around the city, northeast and country to get a piece of the DrupalCamp action.

If you're not at Drupal Camp this weekend you should ask yourself why..... (probably because you have a life.. doh!)  

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