Didn't realize just how beautiful San Francisco was until visiting. DrupalCon SF 2010 was absolutely amazing, photos on Flickr. I really loved the sessions, meeting everyone, and visiting the city. Running around the Fisherman's Wharf, eating stellar sushi and seafood (thanks Mike!), visiting the classy bars, San Francisco is great.

I had a blast and would like to thank the whole Drupal community for putting on yet another fantastic DrupalCon. Thanks especially to the San Fran folk who worked tirelessly to make it such a great success. Hope to see you all in both Copenhagen and Chicago!

On my way to the airport to hit up DrupalCon San Francisco! After hearing so much about San Francisco, I'm really looking forward to seeing the areas. If you're there, be sure to check out the presentation that Randy Fay (rfay), Katherine Bailey (katbailey) and I will be putting on entitled: AJAX and JavaScript in Drupal 7.

The thing I like most about Drupalcons are the things that happen outside the sessions though. Seeing all the people again, meeting folks I've had the chance to talk with online so far, making new connections, the birds-of-a-feather discussions, and the various shinanigans that happen afterwards. I'm also really looking forward to meeting up with the rest of the Acquia crew who I haven't met yet! Drupalcon Paris was ridiculously amazing, and am really looking forward to this one!

San Francisco, here we come!

David Akermanis pinged me yesterday on Twitter ("Twatted me" just sounds so wrong) stating that it has been a full year since my last blog post. And it's true it's that old, March 3rd, 2009 was the last time this website got some new content. It has been a crazy busy year, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to make a one year no-blog-post anniversary blog post to bring it back up to speed. The majority of this will be old news, but it's here just to make sure we're all on track...

• DrupalCon DC was so much fun, I posted the pictures on Flickr
• The proposal to turn Drupal into a Distributed Micro-Blog went through with the Knight Foundation and we're currently going through documentation and reports to make sure it goes through nicely
• Helped put together a new site for my good friend, David Akermanis. The aim was to be a social networking hub for his latest events, pictures, music, and his thoughts on life. Been about a year since then, so it desperately needs a new design!
• The Open Video Conference in June was crazy fun. Guest star appearance of Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde! Video interview here.
• Created yet another Drupal module: Konami Code
• Got a new Nikon D90 and absolutely been loving the pictures its taking
• Paula Valstein plays a wicked show, as did Ingrid Michaelson (here's The Chain) and Joshua Radin (here's Everything'll Be Alright). Oh, and Nick Warren, Ronski Speed, Ferry Corsten, should I go on?
• DrupalCon Paris was absolutely amazing. Paris is an incredible city, and I guiltily regret not exploring more of it instead of going to the DrupalCon sessions. Definitely going to have to visit France again.
• The New York Anime Festival was a blast. I have to get on top of uploading pictures from events. Watched Cowboy Bebop and liked this scene from episode 18 the most.
• Some of the modules I maintain are now Drupal 7 ready: String Overrides, Disqus, Mobile Theme, OpenID URL, etc.
• I'm now a Drupal Engineer at Acquia! My projects so far include keeping some of their internal workings on track, being a bridge between the marketing team and the engineering team, and helping out as much as I can in other areas. It has been absolutely fantastic so far, and I'm so happy to be part of such an incredible team.

Moving forward, I plan to post more rapidly on here. Although I'll be writing less content on each post, I will be posting more frequently. There's normal blogging (essay-ish) and then there's micro-blogging (140 characters), I think I'll turn this into something in between... A Miniblog?

In closing, I'd like to thank you everyone! It has been an amazing no-blog-post year. A very busy, productive and fun year. I hope to see you all soon!

I'm on my way to Washington, DC to attend the annual DrupalCon. I'm really excited to see everyone again, talk some geek, have some beers and, of course, learn a lot.

DrupalCon is done! I had an amazing time and will upload pictures soon.

Next week marks the beginning of Do It With Drupal, the three day conference made of pure awesome held in New Orleans.

I'm really getting excited to seeing all the Drupal folk again, as well as meeting some pretty awesome people like John Resig of jQuery and Chris Pirillo from, uhhh, everywhere. It will also be great to see Ed Sussman again, and watch Nicole talk about project management in a Drupal world.

All the sessions will be amazing as well. Building Twitter/Flickr/YouTube/Amazon clones with Drupal, project managing a website being development, creating community, every session looks to be very fun and education (edutaining Drupal!). Looking forward to seeing you all there.

If you can't make it to New Orleans next week, be sure to book your ticket to DrupalCon DC 2009 next March!

Jim McGinley from TOJam contacted me a while ago, asking if I'd like to present TOBam at the Microsoft Energize IT conference in Toronto. Well, it went really really well. There were about four teams who presented their XNA-related TOJam entries and we got to talk closely with some people in the games industry, some people from the XNA team, and some people from Microsoft. It was a great opportunity and I would like to thank Jim McGinley and Mark Zielinski for all the work they put into both TOJam and Microsoft Energize IT's GameCamp. Make sure to check out the pictures!

I got a short and sweet e-mail from Jim McGinley informing me that TOBam was posted on the TOJam website. He did a great job putting the page together, making sure the video was there, the groovy screenshots. He even wrote a nice note about the game:

"Did you see all those planes? That's NUTS! While it starts seemingly like Capcom's 1943, the sheer number of planes makes this a different beast altogether. I love playing this game on hard. When level 3 hits - you're DEAD. Perhaps the most thrilling game created at the jam. The movement of your plane is subtle and classy, and Toronto makes the perfect scrolling background."

The main menu has been implemented and it looks pretty good. I used some very nice articles posted on the XNA Creators Club website. Now that I have the base game state system of the game down, I can move onto gameplay.

The Toronto Indie Game Jam has just begun. We're given two and a half days to create a video game. I'll be attempting a top-down forward scrolling shooting game using XNA. I will also be posting a status update every stepping stone.

Microsoft has come out with XNA 1.0 Refresh. This release now officially supports Microsoft Vista and comes with a number of new things. Although I'm having the connection problem they talked about when attempting to deploy to the Xbox 360, I'm happy that they now official support Microsoft Vista. Download it!