OSCMS Summit and Drupalcon -- Day 1

I started OSCMS by making hasty child care arrangements from my cell phone in the airport Wednesday night, due to my mom’s flight being canceled in the eleventh hour. Everything worked out, though I also spent a large part of Thursday on the phone, ducking in and out of sessions to coordinate the situation at home. My poor mother finally made it to my place late Thursday night. I’m still glad I went, though I feel pretty bad that my mom went through all of those delays and cancellations.

Rasmus Lerdorf’s talk alone made the trip worth it. He’s an even better public speaker than I’d heard, and I learned some new things about PHP, including the existence of some tools I can’t believe I didn’t know about. The OpenID talk was well done, but really didn’t tell me anything new. I changed my mind about “Theming Drupal” and instead went to chx’s talk on the new menu system. I am glad that I did. Not only did I learn quite a bit, but I ran in to webchick, the first of my fellow Drupalers besides chx to whom I could match nick, real name, and face. She is even more awesome in person than online. Her astute questions and comments added a lot to every presentation or discussion I saw her in. I certainly picked up a lot more than I would have had she not been there. Yahoo’s hospitality was top notch. They provided parking, meeting space, food, swag – all the essental materials. I even managed to get some extra swag for mom as a thank-you for all she went through to babysit for me. Earl (merlinofchaos) gave an outstanding talk about node_access. It was my favorite among today’s talks. After node_access, I attended the Drupal Search talk, but gave up on the internationalization talk part way through because I have a horrible time following people with strong accents when I don’t have enough visual cues to make up the bits I missed. I plan to catch up on the internationalization info online once the conference is over. I nabbed a great pick-up discussion in the common area after leaving, so the time block definitely wasn’t a loss.

The summit wrapped up for the day around 5:15, but I stuck around for a quick Drupal Dojo meetup. Following that, I joined sepeck, webchick, add1son, jjeff, eaton, Dries, dopry, chx, KarenS, merlinofchaos, and many others for dinner, drinks, and witty banter. Much fun was had by all, and if my head wasn’t already completely awash with new ideas after my day at the summit, it was when dinner ended. My only regret is not having a functional laptop to take notes, scratch out ideas, etc. on. (Not to mention the coding withdrawal I’ve had lately for the same reason.) I can’t wait for tomorrow.