I compared it to winning the Oscar for Best Picture. Yesterday, pingVision won the top Drupalcon Boston award for Drupal Web Development for its work on the Popular Science migration from Vignette 7 to Drupal. Both Megan Miller and John Mahoney are to be congratulated. They worked hard with the pingVision staff to ensure the project went smoothly.

The morning of Day 2 was spent working on the Popular Science presentation with Kevin Bridges (cyberswat) to get it into good shape for the afternoon session. The presentation had been complete, for the most part, but needed some reformatting into S5 and some light editing.

Jacob Redding, John Zhu, and Scales ran this session. I've known Scales for about a year and a half and was pretty amazed (but not surprised) when he announced that he was moving to China. The three of them talked about China, the Drupal project, and why the Open Source community makes so much sense in the Chinese environment.

Jay Batson and Dries presented an introduction to Acquia. This is a report on what was said and is based on my notes at the time.

Dries had the idea to start a company and at Drupalcon in Sunnyvale, Jay "dropped out of the sky". Drupal was finding its way to a tipping point. Its usability has improved, but still could be further improved upon and to be really successful the overall ecosystem must be increased.

Acquia will seek to be a provider of services like Ubuntu, Zend, RedHat, and MySQL all of which have commercial ventures/companies behind them.

Cooperation and Collaboration--can it happen between shops?

One of the challenges faced by different Drupal houses is overlap of efforts. For any given client, there may be several solutions for the same problem that has faced other developers. Similar solutions come up again and and again--meaning there is a waste of time and a waste of code. Often code that goes into a client project, it dies in a client project. If code is contributable back to the community, share it. It belongs in Drupal CVS.

After a very snowy morning in Metro Denver, and a late departure from the airport, I am on my way to Boston.  I am flying through New York Lagurdia where I change carriers before heading along to a flat that I've rented with other pingVision staffers.  We are scattered across three different places to stay--two hotels and the apartment.  On this trip, 11 of us are headed to Drupalcon.  The last meeting was in Barcelona, which was much more exotic than Boston will be. 

When I travel, I don't like to spend a lot of money. I also don't like skimping on comfort or location. With my family, I usually look for a flat or an apartment that is available for short-term rental. Usually a quick Google search will unearth several options for such rentals.

A couple of summers ago, my wife found a flat in Sydney Australia for $500 USD a week with a kitchen, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a combo living room/dining room. This past summer we stayed Edinburgh for roughly $750 USD per week.

The Great Euro Hunt.

• I got up this morning and prepared for the day--shower, shave (just the cheeks and neck), dressed
• Grabbed Quinn, who had surgery on his two back paws a few days ago
• Got in the car and drove from Westminster to Boulder to Quinn's Vet who checked his paws
• Drove home
• Drove to the credit union to deposit money and get cash out for Barcelona
• Went to Wells Fargo because they wouldn't answer the phone and found out that there are only two Wells Fargos in Metro Denver that sell euros--one in Denver and on in Boulder. The one in Denver was closed and the one in Boulder was not answering its phone.
• Back to Boulder to go to the bank and found out that they don't sell euros on Saturday. The only place I'll be able to score them is at Denver International Airport.
• I drove home and had some lunch
• I drove to DIA and scored some Euros
• I drove back home

Sum total today--over 120 miles.