Catherine and I had a great Valentines' Day -- in addition to the usual romantic gestures I introduced her to Raising Arizona, which she'd never seen before. Pure magic: it's always gratifying to know that you married someone who finds classic Cohen brother insanity amusing, too.

And now, I'm on the road again. @quicksketch an I are heading out to Stanford to help train their internal team, and this week will be a parade of Drupaling. Sadly, I think @walkah will always win the frequent flyer mile contest.

The next couple of months promise to be packed, too; Drupalcon DC is coming up in just a couple of weeks, and I'll be presenting on API design and webservice-based site architecture. Drupalcon's growth over the past few years has been crazy: this year, tickets sold out more than a month in advance. This fall, the European Drupalcon will be held in Paris -- hopefully the venue will accommodate will match the demand.

Looking a bit farther down the calendar, there's the SXSW CMS showdown: a team of Drupal devs and designers will be competing against Wordpress and Joomla! folks to build a reusable site for local nonprofits, and a team of judges will select a winner. After last year's warm SXSW welcome for Drupal, I'm hoping we can make the site shine. And later this spring, there's the Chicago CMS Expo: a combined Drupal/Alfresco/Joomla! event that I'll be speaking at. It's a great opportunity to connect with other projects in the OSS community, and I'm really looking forward to it. In addition to the usual presentations about Drupal development, I'll be speaking about successful GPL-based business models. There's a lot of interest in this in the Joomla! world especially, since they're going through a community discussion about how the GPL impacts for-profit extension development and template design.

Never a dull moment...

I've been on the road for the last 10 days or so with the rest of the 'Bots, first for a training workshop in Providence and then for some on-site training with a client in NYC. It's the longest Catherine and I have been apart since we married, and it's been be back together after so long. It's startling how much those kinds of rhythms can become part of how you measure your days, and how off-kilter it can feel when they're disrupted.

The work itself was great, though -- the workshop was the largest we've ever done, with almost fifty people and a new venue to fit them all. Feedback has been great so far; there were a lot of great people there working on interesting projects. It's encouraging to see all of us (the Lullabot team, that is) polishing the flow and professionalism of the material. With each workshop, things are more refined, better focused, and so on. James did an awesome job organizing the week.

Spent the weekend in New York with James and Liza doing a bit of recuperating before diving into another two days of training with in-house developers for Mansueto. Their IncBizNet project soft-launched in beta a little over a month ago, and they're in the final stretch with the new Fast Company site. It's the culmination of over a year and a half of business development, planning, and then Drupal development.

And today? Back in the saddle with code reviews for Mansueto, outlining on the O'Reilly book, and other assorted projects. And this morning, my name popped up on the list of confirmed speakers for the 2008 SXSW Interactive conference. I'll be participating in a panel discussion about open source web software organized by the head of Palantir, a cool Chicagoland design/development company that's been doing great stuff with Drupal lately.

Whew.

Never a dull moment!

So after a crazy week or two, the Lullabots and I are heading to the Barcelona Drupalcon. We're looking forward to hanging out, geeking, and meeting up with the rest of the Drupal community. It's my first trip outside the country -- Catherine's bopped around Europe before but I'll be seeing things for the first time. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to play with the camera and I'll flickr my brains out. Woo!

With Drupal 6 entering beta now, momentum in the community is picking up even more. It'll be very interesting to see what new ideas and directions come out of the conference.

To those who've already arrived, see you in 15 hours!

So the workshops are over and it's time to dive back into real life. I'll be relaxing with Catherine for the rest of the weekend, which will be great. I miss her and I miss home. Who wouldn't?

It's always great, though, to hang out with the rest of the Lullabots. I can honestly say that I really enjoy my job and I love the people I work with. Teaching and training with them, geeking out with them, and building cool things... it's a great way to make a living.

Observations about New York:

• Pedestrians are aggressive, and cars stop for them. Street traffic and foot traffic seem to exist in a homogenized mix here, with traffic lights only indicating where the heaviest flow is currently going. It's fascinating.
• Chicago may have the best deep dish in the world, but I think we should be willing to conceded the Thin Crust Crown. Holy cow is the pizza here good.
• A nontrivial percentage of the population actually does dress like they're auditioning for Sex And The City. I tripped over more twiggy, heavy-lidded makeup models with gigantic furry hats on one subway ride than I thought actually existed in the wild. Is LA like this? I hear about this fierce LA/New York rivalry, but I'm a simple Midwestern boy. We're too busy herding our cows and chewing straw to pay too much attention.
• Soho is cool, and I like the shops there. If the traffic weren't o heavy and the weather weren't so bitterly cold, it'd be fun to just spend a day or two poking around and browsing and eating at vegetarian pasta cafes, etc.
• I managed to swing by Purl, an awesome little textiles/crafts/knitting suply shop, and pick up some fun stuff for Catherine. (Shhhhh. Don't tell her, it's a surprise.) The store is awesome, but also dazzlingly packed with yawns and fabric and needles and so on. Like, thousands of patterns. Jillions even. I felt dizzy.
• The Apple Store is three blocks from my hotel room. It is a shrine to geekiness. Naturally, I used a digital camera to record a movie of it.

So. All in all, New York is cool. If I ever come back I think I'll have to bring the Canon; I don't think I could live with myself if I didn't get some high quality shots of the assorted bits of city life. But I'm ready to scamper back home now, and watch movies and play cribbage and be with Catherine. My everyday life is good, and I'm eager to get back to it.

So, Ted and I are here in New York for work, doing a week of meetings with a client to nail down specs for a project that's been moving along for a while but is approaching the final stretch. It's funny that now is when we have a meeting like this, but the project has been on track up to this point. The biggest problem is that the folks we're working with are facing 'catastrophic success' -- all the other business units in their company now want them to roll out sites that duplicate what we've done on a limited scale. And, of course, it has to be done yesterday...

So, between rounds of meetings we're enjoying good New York eatin' -- deli sandwiches the size of my head, amazing thin-crust pizza to die for, things like that. The Apple Store is an amazing temple of geekiness, too. Tomorrow I'm going to try to wander over and get some photos of it, maybe a Quicktime clip. Am I a geek? Yes. I am a geek.

When I get home, Catherine and I are totally going to go see Children of men. Awwww yeah.