I love technical conferences. In 2008 I had the opportunity to attend IBM IMPACT. I assisted in building the booth for my company, but I love attending the sessions the most of all. It was a amazing experience. Since then, the only professional conference I attended was a web-only cloud conference in 2010. It was a disappointing experience and left me feeling like I had wasted the company's time. If I were in person, however, it might have been more interesting. Then, I learned about the Minneapolis DrupalCamp.

Since the news that I will be attending Drupalcon stuck over a week ago, I've lost the thread of what's going on with OSNews 5. Every night since then has been spent either in abject exhaustion, or in a frenzy of worry and anticipation. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that this happened. It is, however, frustrating and the interruption a terrible detriment to my productivity.

So where *are* we with OSN5?

Lately I've been craving buying a new laptop. Work provides me with one, but I've been craving something smaller, lighter, and something of my own. At the moment, there's little chance I will actually act on this craving. There are a lot of bills and other concerns since I bought a house back in October. Instead, it's more of an enjoyable exercise in speculative consumerism.

For the last year, I've been working on writing import code for OSNews.com. It's been a lengthy process due to the fact that I'm doing this when I can spare the time. Some weeks there's furious development, others none at all. Some months ago I had the first complete version of the import code working. It was a completely custom module, relying only on core APIs to get the job done. I knew that the Migrate module existed, and provided a lauded framework for importing content into Drupal.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has released a huge number of images to the public domain, for use by the public.I don't have any use for them myself right now, but others might, and maybe in the future I will. It will be good to have available in that event.

A lot of the time I suspect I am not actually faceblind, that it is actually just some label I latched on to when in fact I recognise people just fine. And then there are times when this post gets predictable.

I've been watching Midsomer Murders recently, as it airs on television. From looking at the show's Wikipedia page I knew that later on the lead actor had resigned from the show. Not until tonight and looking at the season listings in detail did I realise the two seasons I've been watching in parallel actually spanned that changeover period.

Oops.

This has been a very, very long road.

About a week ago I was listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe episode wherein they interview Pamela Gay and Fraser Cain about their podcast, Astronomy Cast.

I only relatively recently got access to enough bandwidth to make listening to podcasts practical, have been catching up as far back as the various feeds I've subscribed to will let me, so this particular episode was from the first half of 2007.