blakehall

Well BarCamp is underway. It's the second session block (started with Media, Technology and Politics now I'm in a Rails session).

We've got a flickr group (and I see lots of cameras so hopefully this photo pool will grow pretty fast).

It was a pretty impressive turnout during the (long) introduction session at 11. I'm excited to see how this evolves over the course of the afternoon/evening/night/morning...

Figuring out how to present Drupal at BarCampMadison I came across this post on the flickr blog.

Turns out the Madison, Wisconsin flickr group has one member per 468 citizens of our fine city.

I finally got around to posting a description for the drupal session(s) (thanks for the reminder Pete). Unlike BarCampMilwaukee I'm going to go in without a "presentation" prepared. I'll have a couple of drupal installs at various stages, and I'm hoping to just do some live site-building.

My main goals for BCM:

• Find someone who wants to collaborate on an entry to the Sunlight Mashup competition
• Attend at least on session on Rails (assuming one happens :)
• Connect with the Minnebar folks who make the trip
• Destroy all challengers during the Wii fight...
• Some sort of hijinks involving the pool and projectiles
• ENJOY THE WEEKEND

And now..... We're getting an Apple Store.

Catching up on my RSS feeds this morning I caught a video from lessig's blog. After watching it, I couldn't help but post it here as well. (plus it gave me a chance to check out the coolfilter drupal module).

I love that you will be able to download the media files from the original creators, and remix it (or add footage). Creative Commons is a beautiful thing. . .

I've finally sorted through the close to 4K photos we (as a group of 27) took in Jamaica.

You can find them at flickr, or integrated on this site via the flickr module here.

So I got sick of the default Drupal 5 theme garland, and finally had some time to do something about it.

I was browsing over at Open source web designs for some inspiration when I found this theme called Lazy Days. I combined that with zen, a basic css based theme framework developed by the wonderful folks at lullabot (home of the great drupal podcast). A short while later I've got what you see here. There are definitely still a few css quirks (like the fact that your browser has a horizontal scroll bar, even though all the content fits on your screen, fluid style), but all in all for the amount of effort (or lack-thereof) I had to put into this I'm fairly pleased. On the top of my to-do list is to replace the header images with a shot of the madison skyline. I just need to up my photoshop-fu a bit (or find someone else to do it for me ;)

Here's a post from my new Wii. I found one by waking up at 6am on a Sunday morning. Still getting used to the controller but I'm impressed so far.

Let's try and start the new year off right, by posting regularly (and upgrading to the 5.0 release candidate).

Xmas has come and gone. My dad suprised by replacing my workhorse G4 12in powebook with a MacBook Pro. It's the 2.16 Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB RAM (soon to be two), 120GB HD, 128 ATI Video Card. I also spent the dough for parallels (which I'm really impressed with so far). It's sweet to be able to do browser checks so quickly; not to mention how much more sane (for me anyway) LAMP is compared to AAMP (apple should really improve their apache, php, and mysql install).

New Years was nice. Dinner at Roman Candle, followed by some guitar hero with Natalie and Chuck.

It was nice to see Favre come out with a win. I have a hunch he'll be back next year. The team is too young, and too promising for him not to give it one last shot.

The countdown to the wedding is drawing to a close. We leave for Negril on the 10th.

I've been contacted by Steve Hanson to help with some of the drupal sessions at BarCamp Madison.

All in all it's shaping up to be an exciting and busy year. Goals for the year:

• continue increasing my drupal-fu
• develop at least one useful app with RoR (even if just for personal use
• eliminate half of my debt
• find a wii
• convince Jeni that we should visit Banff
• attend ≥ three BarCamps and ≥ two other tech conferences

And most of all, continue growing. . .

The date has been set for BarCampMadison. The event will take place on March 3rd and 4th at the Inn on the Park Hotel.

I'm sure there will be lots of interesting people and sessions there. If you know any (interesting geeks that is) invite them!

Let the anticipation begin...

As I write this election results are continuing to stream in from across the country. It amazes me as a technology advocate that our voting system is as plauged by problems as it is. Yes I watched Hacking Democracy this weekend. I've never seen a more clear case for open source software in my life. I'm not yet a member of the eff, fsf, or any of Stallman's other groups. That said if a person who understands how open source software works doesn't support an open source voting standard I'd say they're being unreasonable. At the end of Meet the Press a week ago, during the late night talk show clips one of the hosts suggested voting via text message. I wonder if that would ever happen? It would certainly solve the problem of young voter turnout (see American Idol for evidence)...

Well the wiki for BarCampMadison is up!

If you'd like to help out you can sign up as a participant here.

In the mean time we need to try and find a space as great as Bucketworks (host of BarCampMilwaukee).