DrupalCampSeattle07 a Big Success!

DrupalCampSeattle2007 was a huge success, and a lot of fun! I just got home and figured I would post a quick note before heading back out. We had over 40 people spread across our two tacks (user/superuser admin focused and developer focused). We made significant progress on our barn raising for “Celia The Dark And Weird” a community site for teen poets, which proved to be a great teaching tool! We covered: CCK, View, Taxonomy, module installation, organic groups, and even some Panels! We had a wide ranging discussion about choosing modules and collecting requirements in order to do so. Roland Tanglao of Bryght came down from Vancouver and shot a ton of video which will be edited in the coming weeks, and I’ll be sure to post a link to it. I lead a mid afternoon YogaForGeeks session. I will post the “routine” and hopefully someone snapped a picture while 10 of us were doing some Tadasana, Utkatasana and Uttanasana, Anjali Mudra and some standing twists and wrist exercises. Someone asked “are you also a yoga instructor?” “No, but I play one at DrupalCamp!” (thanks to my teach, Douglas at 8 Limbs Yoga (on Capital Hill in Seattle) and of course to Sarah Pullman of YogaForGeeks.com for paving the way for yoga sessions at geek events! CivicActions and Pyramid Communications sponsored the event which was produced by the Seattle Drupal User Group with special organizing help and leadership from Robin Barre (who is working with CivicActions on Witness Video Hub) and Shawn MacDougall. Thanks to everyone else who helped out with setting up the rooms, and traveling to...

Quantifying the value of time spent blogging or commenting

Not on our site, but on political blogging sites. There is truly some useful content out there, and interesting points of views, I just wonder about the value of the time spent commenting on blogs. I caught the story about the Edwards Coulter exchange on Hardball yesterday and then saw a post about it on The Caucuses. There are 108 comments. Basically taking 1 of three views (well I only sampled about 9% of them ;-). I wonder if it probably would have been more valuable to either “side” (pro Edwards or anti-Edwards people) to have made a phone call, or talked to a friend about the...

What exactly does “green business” mean?

On Tuesday, Dan, Aaron and I had an interesting and spirited conversation about “green business” and what exactly it means. We are really interested in working on projects that have a real measurable impact, and with so much happening these days in the realm of “green business” or “clean tech”, there seem to be alot of “good” projects out there, but how do we really know which ones are authentic? Dan asked a question that is on alot of people’s minds these days, “What makes something green, and how do I know?” The New York Times ran an article about Home Depot’s efforts and “greening” which points out many of the conundrums. I have blogged before about the issues surrounding carbon offsetting. Aaron pointed out that the focus of truly authentic greenies is once again shifting to conservation above all else. Conserving energy and resources is far better than offsetting, for...

A suggestion for Google Feed Reader

I’ve been watching some feeds recently for particular terms, for example, DRM on technorati, google news search, google blog search, digg and delicious. What I have noticed is that the same story gets blogged about on a 100 blogs, mostly pretty little, and many with very little extra information. There is nothing wrong with blogging stories like that. I do it all the time. But it sure can get tedious wading through to find the good one, maybe the one with some new info, or the one worth linking too. So here is the suggestion: Roll up all those articles under heading, perhaps the original article they link to, or provide some kind of weighting, a visual queue that indicated which of the 50 articles about the latest bit of DRM news is published on a blog with lots of traffic. There has got to be a...

How much is your daily latte?

Probably something like $3. Assuming you have 4 a week, that’s $48 a month or over $500 a year! This is not a blog post about Fair Trade, nope, this is about political campaigns in the United States. It’s not a new development that campaign fundraising is “dirty” business, but it certainly has escalated in recent years. Last night I heard Bill Bradly from Americans for Campaign Reform (and former US Senator from NJ, Democratic Presidential Candidate and NY Nick) on the radio. He was talking about public financing for federal campaigns. His angle: it is far cheaper to pay for candidates congressional campaign than to let them raise the money and owe all kinds of favors to all kinds of people. These favors have a way of turning into very expensive earmarks in the federal budget. How much cheaper? Well publicly financing campaigns would cost just $6 a year for every American. But it really represents a per capita savings. How is that? Well earmarks cost over $200 a person in 2005! (NOTE: the Just6Dollars.org website says “citizen” but uses the number 300 million. Last time I checked there were 300 million or so people living in the U.S. but not all were “citizens”). Anyway, back to that Latte, I would give up two lattes a year to get money out of politics and restore some integrity to the process. I’d give a week or more of...