Tricia: "We will miss you, Odo. But you will miss us even more."
Don't worry. I'm sure your respective principles will keep you warm at night.
me: That and a fully charged phaser.
Tricia: Phaser's heat the rocks that boil the water that makes the steam that powers this mill. And that, kiddo, is how flour is made.
me: snickers "Is having a gun under your pillow keeping you up at night? Try new gunpillow! The first gun that's also a pillow!"
Tricia: XD
*giggles*

If it weren't for the code sprints the following day, my third day at DrupalCon would have been much more wistful. I hugged Pazi before I left for the day, as when I returned in the evening, she would be half-way to California.

My second day at DrupalCon Portland 2013 was also the longest day of sessions. There was a keynote session right away in the morning. I didn't feel the need to go, but I got up early anyways. Unlike the previous day, I managed to get a seat in the same room as the speaker, rather than the overflow room. Perhaps it was the fatigue, or the fact that it was in the morning that resulted in my inability to remember much of anything about the session.

The morning started at 6:30am. I gave myself extra time to prepare myself before heading out as I wanted have a more professional appearance on my first day. I knew that my sponsor, Palantir.net, wanted me to attend one of their sessions in which they would introduce all of those that received a DrupalCon ticket. I didn't know to what extent this involved, so I over prepared. I poached eggs for breakfast, used the oven to toast bread, and then walked to the nearest Max station.

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.