When I would talk or write about the semantic web, microformats, RDF and all that, people would often ask, "Why? Who cares?" or shudder with a "That's creepy!" Images of Big Brother tracking every move, to be indexed, measured and evaluated for Ungood behavior, or something like that. At best, people could see a kind of abstract benefit from making information more digestable by machines, you know, in the interest of having a sense of general order in the Interwebs or something.

But what about when the semantic web yields dividends back to the human experience?

It's just a little thing out of what's possible – a mere smidge of cobbled together APIs – but Mozilla Labs Ubiquity (a Firefox plug-in) is really something to see, for it gives you a peek into the kinds of things that will be possible (and now already area) with an Internet that has semantic meaning.

Check out this video, that's very much to the point:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Oh my!

Without even finishing the video, I used it to Twitter about it.

It's like having the entire web available one click away.

pingVision is delighted to support DrupalCon Szeged 2008 with sponsorship.

Although we are not sending anyone to Szeged, we support DrupalCon as a semi-annual event that helps cultivate and strengthen the Drupal community. There's nothing like putting hundreds of Drupal aficionados in the same room to generate some real excitement and learning. Not only that, any profit from the conference goes to benefit the Drupal Association (of whose General Assembly I am a member). (We're hoping there's a profit. As of last week, meeting the expenses was looking to be a near thing. We certainly want to do our bit to help avoid a deficit!)

We really wish we could be there. I think last month's DrupalCamp only whetted our appetites for more Drupal camaraderie. But it just wasn't in the cards.

Free pass available

As DrupalCon Szeged starts in just a few hours from now in Hungary, this comes as an extremely late announcement, but if there is somebody – a student, perhaps, or a Google Summer of Code participant – who would like to attend but simply cannot afford to buy admission, we do have a sponsored pass available. (Sorry, but for transportation/lodging/etc. you're on your own.)

If you are interested, please contact us right away and tell us about your interest and participation in Drupal.

DrupalCon * 2009

We are definitely looking forward to the announcement of the next DrupalCon to take place next year in North America. There are several very strong proposals that have been submitted, and the Drupal Association Board will be announcing the winning city during this week's DrupalCon. Where ever it is, we'll see you there!

If new music is created and nobody can find it, does it make a sound?

Time was you could listen to alternative radio and discover new tunes. Time was you could spend hours browsing the record store, digging up arcane and obscure artists. Time was the music could be found. But now it seems like all the radio stations are playing the same 20 songs (and a zillion commercials). Now CD departments are shrinking and disappearing from the stores. And now internet radio may be about to disappear. If that happens, how will you discover new music?

I had tried Pandora back when it launched. It was ... okay, but not great, and I let it go. But last month, when the iPhone apps came alive, and I found the Pandora app sitting there, I ended up revisiting the "music genome" service ... and found that they are doing much better at finding music I like than they ever did a year or so ago.

In fact, Pandora now is fabulous! After years of living in a music wasteland, with crap on the radio, worn-out "classics" on satellite, and pretty much nothing to be found on iTunes or in the local store, I rediscovered new music (and even ended up buying some). Pandora has been an incredible resource for introducing to me new music I never would have encountered otherwise.

Of course, that means it's too good to stick around, right?

Via the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Last year when the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board substantially hiked the royalty fees for songs that are Webcast, online broadcasters sounded an alarm. At the very least, they said, the raised fees would force some online radio stations to cap their audiences. At worst, the broadcasters warned, the royalty board could end up writing Internet radio’s swan song.

Now it looks like those grim predictions may come to pass. The founder of one of Internet radio’s leading lights, Pandora, tells The Washington Post that Web royalties may soon force his station out of business. The fees now soak up 70 percent of Pandora’s $25-million annual revenue, according to Tim Westergren. “We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” he says.

What’s striking is that Pandora is no fly-by-night operation: The Web-radio service, which lets users build radio stations to match their own tastes, reaches about a million listeners every day, and its recently created iPhone application has become one of the most popular downloads for the device. But the rules of the marketplace, as currently drawn up, are none too favorable to online broadcasters. Terrestrial radio stations don’t have to pay per-song royalties, and satellite radio providers pay only small fees. But by 2010, Webcasters can expect to pay between two and three cents per hour per listener.

Michelle Wolverton offers some context:

Pandora faces closing the lid on it’s popular streaming radio service after the CRB, earlier this year, tripled the fees due to SoundExchange. Each time a streaming service plays a song they have to pay a small fee to Soundexchange. Soundexchange is deeply associated with the RIAA, who continuously acts like the bully on the playground. Making all the rules and taking your lunch money to boot....

...I support 100% that artists make money from being played ANYWHERE. I know musicians who are struggling to keep up in the daily grind. I also know that there are a few who have passed along their music to Pandora so that new fans can be reached. I’ve also discovered new music over at Pandora and would hate to see them close their doors. I don’t think that anyone in internet radio objects to paying fees for playing songs, but suddenly requiring internet radio to pay 3x the fees that the did for streaming is unbelievable. Yet, it’s done.

Oh, and your regular AM and FM stations? They aren’t getting hit with the same outrageous fees. SoundExchange and RIAA are acting unfairly because they are scared of what internet radio is doing for independent artists at the same time being damn greedy with what shouldn’t primarily go to them, but to the artists that they “represent”. A lot of the time that money doesn’t reach the artist because Soundexchange “can’t find them“.

Techdirt has a dark analysis of all this:

The RIAA knew exactly what it was doing in pushing these higher rates: it was killing off alternative routes to promoting non-RIAA music. The RIAA labels have always thrived off a very limited distribution and promotion channel. After all, distribution and promotion are where record labels really make their money. Competing methods of distribution and promotion are threats to be killed off -- and the RIAA may have succeeded here (with Congress' and the courts' help, of course).

Jenn at BlueCherryDoughnut is upset:

Pandora recently also released an iPhone app, allowing iPhone users to tap into their stations via their phones (which, if I could afford an iPhone, would definitely be an app I would be utilizing). What’s more, a federal panel delivered the order to increase the fees. Ah, our government hard at work in bed with big business. Ain’t it grand!?

I listen to Pandora at least once a week (and usually more often), and have found tons of new music/musicians that I enjoy through listening to it, music I might not have discovered otherwise. I will endure pop-up ads, onsite ads, ad breaks between every couple songs, whatever….just to continue to have access to this online service.

But if Pandora falls, how long till all the other internet radio stations fold as well?

On The Open Piehole, Sister Joyous Whip of Enlightenment has one word to offer on all this:

Crap!

Via Read/WriteWeb, we learn that, despite efforts by Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.) to arrange a few last-minute deals between web radio stations and SoundExchange, the organization that represents artists and record companies that would reduce the the recent fees, Pandora CEO Westergren does not sound optimistic.

"The moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved, we have to pull the plug because all we're doing is wasting money." We don't blame you Tim.

In a comment on a Gizmodo thread, Bobbee offers a simple problem:

I think the RIAA just wants to count the money made for them directly through Pandora (things like click-throughs from Pandora to Amazon or iTunes, etc). Since there is no easy way to tell that I bought a CD down at my local shop because I'd been turned on to that music from Pandora, it doesn't count. Typical corporate thinking: if you can't produce direct numbers to prove it's making money then, at best, it's not worth the effort/resources. At it's worst, it's losing money...forget the "intangible" benefits.

Jill Sommer suggests that Pandora change its business model:

That’s sad, because I have been turned on to several new groups and artists through Pandora and even recently attended a concert by “Over The Rhine” because I enjoyed some of their songs through Pandora. I wrote about Pandora back in June in a post about music in the workplace. I for one would pay to make sure they don’t close their site, so hopefully the people at Pandora will reengineer their business model to fee-based accounts....

...Most of you overseas readers probably don’t understand why this is such a big deal to U.S.-based companies, since foreign radio stations have always paid fees for public performance of music. Let’s just say that no one likes change, and this presents a big change to the status quo in the United States. Unlike European countries and other countries around the world, the United States did not collect payment for public performance of artists’ work prior to 1995. Users of music, the digital music service providers, freely performed these works at will, without paying the owners of those recordings or the featured artists who performed the songs. The Digital Performance in Sound Recordings Act of 1995 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 changed all that by granting a performance right in sound recordings. As a result, copyright law now requires that users of music pay the copyright owner of the sound recording for the public performance of that music via certain digital transmissions. Conventional radio stations don’t pay these fees yet, but that should change soon.

What do you think? How do you find new music?

BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott blogs at rare pattern and the pingVision blog.

Today, finally, after saving many nickels and dimes, I bought a Rans Stratus XP. I don't actually have it in hand as it is being configured with a rack, fenders, a small mirror and some different tires. I'll pick it up next Saturday, assuming I can get a roof rack for my car and an appropriately long bike rack for the roof by then.

I was going to get it back in the Spring, but, well, that didn't quite work out. I test rode a lot of recumbents up in Ft. Collins at Spring Creek Recumbents (which is pretty much the only recumbent bicycle shop in the entire [much] greater Denver area) back then and, honestly, did not much care for the short-wheelbase 'bents that are so popular in the Boulder area. I didn't like the high-bracket position of the pedals, and the steering felt twitchy to me. Maybe I could have gotten used to that, but the whole cycling position did not feel comfortable for me – nothing like the Rans, anyway.

Now I can hardly wait to pick it up. This recumbent will be a weekend enjoyment for me, and once I'm back into shape, a commuting bike as well. And maybe I'll finally lose some weight.

Following up on my previous post on trying to remove StickyWindows, it apparently did not work. Upon rebooting, the f***ing application was there again in the preferences panel.

I am really hating StickyWindows. What kind of application embeds itself permanently into your computer? Malware, spyware, rootkits... WTF!

Donelleschi, you have worn out your welcome.

Do not install StickyWindows unless you know for sure that you will never ever want to uninstall it, because you won't be able to.

When I have time, I'm going to do some deeper digging to remove this stinger from my computer. But I have work to do.

One of the signs of maturity of an open source software is when some really high-end books about the software start hitting the shelves.

Pro Drupal Development set a new high mark when it was initially released. Now this Second Edition covers even more (and has the higher page-count to show for it), with everything updated for the Drupal 6 API.

We just received our first seven copies, to get us started. We'll be picking up some more as needed.

You can pick up your copy at Amazon. Go there through http://drupalbook.com and a piece of the sale benefits the Drupal Association.

I saw this thing flying outside of my office window. I swear it was at least 3 inches long. Look at the size of that stinger! I would not want that thing coming after me, I can tell you!

Arrrghhhh!

StickyWindows is an app I thought I would like, but after nabbing and grabbing windows and generally distracting me from my work, I decided to uninstall it....

...except that I couldn't. Searching through the Applications folder yielded nothing. Searching through Applications Support in the Library yielded nothing.

The app was there in the Preferences Pane, so what I did was find the file in the Preferences folder and delete that. I'm not sure if there are other pieces lurking around my hard drive still, but I found that experience supremely annoying.

Bad on you, Donelleschi!

Lo and behold, this past Wednesday, after waiting all day for the Drupal 6.4 update that was rumored to be coming out, it finally was released at around 6:30pm MDT. We saw it at the DBUG Meetup during setup, and I knew that once again it was time to do some updating. At pingVision, we have an entire dev/test/production process for all of our clients' and our own sites. But when it comes to my own sites, I prefer to do it myself as much as possible so that I can keep my fingers in code and configuration, even while my more official presidential responsibilities tend to pull me in other directions.

And yet my own sites are still under Subversion, so it's not just a matter of uploading the new code and being done with it. No, I have to do it through SVN.

Now if you are like me (and unlike our developers), and have a general preference for a good GUI over using the command line, and are working on OS X and using version control like Subversion, then you likely have run into the problem that the architects of Finder have not deigned to solve: You cannot "merge" folders in OS X using Finder. No, Finder will overwrite folders completely.

Why is this a problem? Anyone who uses Subversion (or other version controller) will know what I'm talking about: If you try to just overwrite wholesale a folder that's under version control, you end up deleting the hidden .svn folder, which has the versioning information. And that leads to Dante's SVN Inferno, where all sorts of error demons torment you while you wail with pangs of regret: Oh, why didn't I merge that folder instead of replacing it?

Using Unix command line, you can of course use mv -v to merge folders, but that forces you to use command line. Since OS X is built upon Unix, I and many others wonder why Finder does not offer this option, not even with contorting combinations of control, option, command and shift.

It's ridiculous. –Especially when you consider that your basic (s)ftp applications can merge folders without a problem. This isn't rocket science.

A trick to merge folders on Mac I figured out a couple of years ago (when I was first introduced to SVN workflows) is this: ftp from your computer to your computer, using your favorite ftp application.

That's right, rather than copy or drag files from folder to folder using Finder, you drag files from folder to folder using ftp. (I use Transmit, but this will work with any ftp app that can merge folders. A free one I can recommend is Cyberduck.)

To enable this approach, all you need to do is turn on ftp access in OS X.

You do this in Preferences -> Sharing.

Click the checkbox to enable "file sharing".

Then, with the file sharing option highlighted, as pictured, click on the Options button down in the lower right-hand area of the window.

This reveals the kinds of file sharing you want to enable, and one of them is ftp. Enable that.

Underneath you will now see a message that provides the IP address where your computer can be reached. You just enter that IP address into your ftp app as the remote server. You may need to enter your username and password for your Mac.

That's it. Now just drag folders over from your desktop into the appropriate area on your ftp app and the merge will happen.

Note: Depending upon the ftp app, you may need to set appropriate preferences to merge folders. Here are the settings I use in Transmit:

This way you can maintain your website in a dev environment on your Mac desktop or laptop, and manage updating tasks easily without having to do SVN gymnastics or work in Terminal.

I welcome your comments.

The Knight News Challenge Garage is a site where people intending to apply for a grant from the Knight News Challenge could workshop their applications, get feedback from mentors and peers, and – hopefully – improve their chances of winning some of the $5 million being granted this year by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

We designed and developed the site in 2 weeks, from wireframes to beta deployment.

Last month we were commissioned to develop rather quickly a community website where potential applicants to the Knight News Challenge could workshop their applications, get feedback from mentors and peers, and – hopefully – improve their chances of winning some of the $5 million being granted this year by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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We designed and developed the site in 2 weeks, from wireframes to beta deployment. The Garage is running Drupal 5, with some customized implementation of the Organic Groups modules. We love working on rapid timetables; it's something we do quite a bit of.

Anyway, here is the video announcement by Kristen Taylor, Online Community Manager for the Knight Foundation – video courtesy of DotSub:

If you are multilingual, you can help get the word out. On the Knight blog, Kristen writes:

We've used a video-sharing service called DotSub above so that the video can be subtitled in many different languages–the News Challenge is an international contest and open to everyone.

You can help us get the word out by going to this video on the DotSub site here and subtitling it in another language (thanks in advance for your help).

There's money to be had here. Seriously, if you have an idea for a project that might fit the mission of the Challenge, go to the News Challenge Garage and start workshopping your application!

pingVision is currently hiring for the position of intermediate-to-advanced level Information Architect for web applications. We are looking for a seasoned Information Architect with experience with User Interface and web design to work with our creative team on frequent projects for world-class clients such as BMW, the Knight Foundation, Stanford University and Popular Science.

We're looking for a detail-oriented person interested in joining our <?php print l("our growing design and development team","about/people"); ?> for work on a wide variety of web and media projects.

We are looking for someone in or willing to relocate to the greater Boulder/Denver area. Sorry, telecommuting is not an option. This is a full-time position.

I spent last weekend at DrupalCamp Colorado 2008, where 100+ Drupal enthusiasts gathered to meet each other, share knowledge, and spread the word about Drupal. And I always come away from these events with a charge of energy from being around so much enthusiasm and passion for open source. But I also come away with a bit of wonder at why there aren't more women involved, at least in a public way. The only barriers to entry are self-imposed. No gatekeepers. No glass ceilings. I haven't figured it out yet. But maybe others have.

Look Who's Talking

Emma Jane Hogbin recently did a presentation (notes) at OSCON 2008. Slides:

In comments, emmajane writes:

I think there are lots of reasons why women don't participate in FOSS projects (and each reason will be unique to that individual). I think we need to start looking forward to find new ways to encourage women into being comfortable using software instead of focusing on where the problems have been in the past. For example: there are lots of jobs available now to work on open source projects. It's no longer just a hobby!!

Her slides are much more ... unambiguous, e.g.:

My vagina is not relevant to the functionality of my computer or any other computer.

Slide 39 is especially surprising:

72% of proprietary developers are male
98.5% participants of FOSS projects are male
Source: FLOSSPOLS

[Aside: For a good laugh, check out slide 50. Emma Jane blogs at emmajane.net.]

I wasn't at OSCON and did not have a chance to peruse the presentations. This find was via Shelley Powers on Burningbird:

I want to spend more time with Drupal, because I've only scratched the surface of this application. I am extremely pleased, nay tickled to see Angela Byron from Lullabot win an award for Best Contributor at OSCON for her work with Drupal—affirming that my move to this software was the best move for me. In fact, in sounds like women made significant inroads in the open source community at OSCON this year, aided, in part, I think, because of software communities, such as Drupal, which are decidedly woman friendly environments.

In particular Emma Jane Hogbin's Form an Orderly Queue, Ladies presentation at OSCON provides details of a dastardly plot to infiltrate women into the ranks of the tech through open source. I love evil plotters, like Dr. Horrible, and evil plots, like women invading open source through innocent seeming applications like Drupal.

Feel the Sunshine

Maybe times, they are a changin', and yes, you have come a long way. In a slightly different context, Liz Henry maybe summed up the picture best:

So who are we and what are we? Women who are speaking, who are consumers who talk, sort of like journalists, sort of like authors; we are conscious, individually and, more and more, collectively, of our power to speak and be seen in the world of public discourse. We have jobs and we're in public, we're out of the domestic sphere, but our thoughts, the way we're framed in public conversations, in the media, isn't yet all the way out of the domestic sphere. My point is that we are no longer containable by old style media. We aren't an elite of "influencers" to be courted and co-opted. We're journalists who write about who we are, not what we're told to write, like a million mommy-blogging Hunter S. Thompsons writing The Curse of Lono instead of their assigned sports article.

And we're women who are designing and coding and architecting, and we don't need to ask permission to do it.

Cheers to the Inspirers!

Let's pause for a moment to restate what Shelley mentions above: Angie Byron was named Best Contributor of the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards. Check out the comments on the Drupal.org announcement last week.

Angie was at BlogHer, you may recall.

If you ever met Angie, you would know why she has garnered such accolades. Congratulations, Webchick!

Act

In case you missed it, Emms Jane's notes are posted on the Geek Feminism Wiki. There's stuff there. Check it out!

Brenda Wallace has built Geek Speak Women. Are you registered as a possible speaker?

Have you taken the A List Apart Survey yet?

BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor blogs at pingVision and rare pattern.

DrupalCamp Colorado 2008 has come and gone. I personally felt that the diversity of participants and the energy of the group was remarkable.

I felt that the networking opportunities the event offered were significant and I want to try to expand on the 30 or so people I managed to talk to. I have created a LinkedIn group called DrupalCamp Colorado. To join, log into LinkedIn and do a search in Groups for "DrupalCamp Colorado".

Here at pingVision we've largely switched over to making all of our clients' websites with Drupal 6 - there's a number of advantages in doing that, but sometimes there's one major disadvantage: The website they want would be great with module X, but module X doesn't have a Drupal 6 version yet.

In those cases, we convert 'em ourselves, and post a patch appropriately. I wrapped up updating the wonderful Invite module to Drupal 6, and that made me think back on the various updates we at pingVision have done so far:

• NodeCarousel
• NodeQueue
• Favorite Nodes
• Custom Error
• Profile Privacy
• Thickbox
• DrupalVB
• Invite
• And I'm working on upgrades for a few of the User Points Contributed Modules, especially userpoints_invite.

It's really kind of fun converting a module to Drupal 6 - for one, you really get a good feeling for how that module works. You also can learn some interesting features of Drupal's extensive API that you haven't run into before, and when you're done you've helped out the whole community.

Give it a try! Find a useful module that doesn't have a patch for Drupal 6 yet, get a copy of the most recent code, and open your browser to Converting 5.x Modules to 6.x and work your way along. Also, it can help to get a copy of Coder and use that to look for any changes you've overlooked.

Attached: A slide presentation that I did for a local Drupal meetup on upgrading modules to Drupal 6.

While pingVision as a company is one of the many sponsors of DrupalCamp Colorado 2008, several pingVision people are doing presentations and panels.

Here's a quick run-down:

Kevin Bridges

...is doing a BOF on Project Workflow Management and Client Expectations.

Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, UML, Process Diagrams, Wireframes, Design Comps ... how does it all fit together into a clearly defined purpose?

John Fiala

...has a presentation on Advanced AHAH and Modifying Forms, which gets into that lovely UI goodness of dynamic forms generation, drag-and-drop, etc. He's also doing a presentation on Using SimpleTest to Prove Your Code. Very useful to any coder.

Ezra Barnett Gildesgame

...has a presentation on Drupal Benchmarking and Performance, covering:

- Factors that affect performance
- Measuring performance
- Different types of hosting (Shared, VPS, "Grid", Mosso)
- Techniques used to make enterprise websites scalable (ie Facebook, LiveJournal)
- Basics of Performance-friendly Drupal Module development

Greg Hines

...is presenting on RESTful services and Drupal, and will be showcasing his brand spanking new REST provider module which provides something of a REST API.

Ben Jeavons

...is presenting on Contributing to Drupal, which is about how anyone can participate in the Drupal community. He is also presenting Drupal Lightning Demos:

Rapid-fire demonstrations of modules, themes, Drupal-powered sites, fancy Drupal code snippets and anything else Drupal related that can be demoed in 5-10 minutes. These are quick, 5-10 minutes including time for questions, demos of something you've built on or with Drupal. Unless we have very few demos there probably won't be time to go looking at code so just show how it works or what it looks like.

He's also doing a session on the Drupal Community:

I'd like to talk about the Drupal community, the ways in which we are open and sponsor participation and the ways we've push people away. Because we have pushed people away. What do we do that is right and what are we doing wrong?

Make it better?

There is also going to be a BOF about Making DrupalCamp Colorado better, led by Kevin Bridges and (hopefully) many other interested folks. Maybe we can pull together a DrupalCon proposal?

The geek weekend

I was going to be joining Greg Knaddison in a session where we, as permanent members of the Drupal Association General Assembly, were going to give a little update on what's been happening and attempt to answer questions that may arise, but that proposal was rated lower than the others, so it's not going to happen. No, this is a weekend to get your geek on! See you there!

Today is the last Friday of July, making it SysAdminDay, when we show appreciation for all the hardworking, oft-under-appreciated sysadmins who make our new economy hum along like a well-tuned machine.

Here at pingVision we have several people who serve in the sysadmin role. Our heavy lifter is Andy Lasda, who has scripted our deployments and been involved in most all of our hosting environment setups and performance tuning.

Andy Kirkham is another expert sysadmin in our ranks. Between the two Andys, there's no solvable problem they cannot solve. Yes, you can say "rubbish" and dismiss it as mere enthusiasm, but in this case I think I'm right.

;)

Kevin Bridges also does a fair bit of our sysadmin work and configurations. And of course Ezra Barnett Gildesgame, who is in fact doing a DrupalCamp Colorado presentation this weekend on performance tuning techniques for Drupal.

Thank you, Andy, Andy, Kevin and Ezra! And thank you to the Rackspace Fanatical Support sysadmins who've kept our servers running optimally.

In case you've somehow missed the news, DrupalCamp Colorado is happening this weekend.

greggles posted a nice rundown of things to do for DrupalCamp. Registration is easy. The price is an affordable $10 ... or $25 at the door (if there's room -- the cap is at 100 people).

Hey, and we can haz stickers! Maybe your laptop wants one, too?

Have you seen it yet? This is not something to miss! Personally I love the music, but the real charm is the humor. Neil Patrick Harris is the perfect comic hero/villain.

If you've not heard of this show, it's a little ditty by Firefly and Buffy creator Joss Whedon and cohorts, created as something to do while the writer's strike stalled all production in Hollywood.

Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system.

Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first.

(Of course, it will be available for paid download after today, but why not see it for free while you can?)

DrupalCamp Colorado 2008, happening in Denver, is less than two weeks away, but it's still not too late to submit your session proposal.

It's also not too late to register.

As one of many sponsors of DrupalCamp Colorado*, we hope to see a full house of both the new Drupalers out there as well as the experienced veterans. There are going to host a mix of sessions and BOF's geared towards all areas of interest ... or at least your interests, if you get your session proposal in! (No pressure.)

See you there!

* We developed and host the website. The website design is TBD. Maybe that's worth a session at the 'Camp? What do you think?