Photos

Two and a half months later, but I've finally remembered to post my photos from my one week in New York. After DrupalCon Hungary I timed my trips back to have a one week layover in New York. Sam also joined me there for the week.

Title: Flat Iron Building
Author: Scott Hadfield
Taken: 5 Sep 2008 - 8:36pm
Using the d-lighting setting the new nikon point and shoots have. Used in my blog post: <a href="http://scotthadfield.ca/2008/11/22/new-y...

I think this is the only blog post I've written about that trip besides the one night stop over I had on the way there (due to a mistake in my ticket purchasing :) ). Anyway, the trip was really good, we stayed the week in a nice apartment in Brooklyn that had fairly central access to a few different subway lines.

Title: Mmmm... chocolate milk
Author: Scott Hadfield
Taken: 7 Sep 2008 - 9:06pm
Me getting excited at the hershey store at times square. Used in my blog post: <a href="http://scotthadfield.ca/2008/11/22/new-york-photo...

It definitely had a few areas that reminded me of parts of Vancouver... but everything was at least x50. I really liked the city and wouldn't mind spending a bit more time there.

Title: New York at night
Author: Scott Hadfield
Taken: 4 Sep 2008 - 10:18pm
Used in my blog post: New York photos uploaded.

On my way to Hungary and currently at my first stop over on the way there in New York. I arrived just after 9PM and leave at 5:40PM the tomorrow. This is my first time here and I'm pretty excited about it. So far my only comment is that this city is /big/. I'm actually a bit overwhelmed right now :-).

On the airplane I met a couple guys coming here to skateboard for the weekend, so we caught a cab downtown together and I walked around there for a bit while I tried to get a hold of the person I was staying with. After finding some pizza I caught a cab and headed to the apartment in harlem (the customs officer gave me a hard time about it :-) ).

The flight was really good. I flew Cathay Pacific and I'm definitely impressed. All the flight attendants were really nice, good amount of leg room, comfy seats, and a great in flight entertainment system. Just how great? Well check out this pic from when it was rebooting :-):

Tomorrow I mostly just plan on wandering around manhattan with my 60lbs of luggage, finding some donuts, bagels, pizza, hot dogs, maybe a burger... you know, just the healthy stuff. Maybe hit up some record stores and mostly just walk around and take photos.

ultra-high resolution photo of manhattan from the plane

They've got barely understandable accents, drive on the wrong side of the road, their toilettes flush in the opposite direction and safe sex means doing it with a can of mace and a taser under your pillow. Kinky... I know, but that's how they roll in South Africa. I returned May 7th and just finished uploading the rest of my photos to Flickr. I didn't really feel like blogging as I went, instead I just tried to upload Flickr photos... which proved difficult at points with crappy internet connections and power shedding.

Everyone seems to want to know what my favorite part of it was. Unfortunately I don't really have an answer to that question. I just went to visit friends and relax, I didn't go there to go on a safari, diving, or any other things someone might want to do while in South Africa. I guess the best part was the people who I spent my time with there (oh, and thanks for letting me crash at your places too :-) ). That said, I still did some pretty cool things... like tasting crocodile (among other animals), driving through joburg's lion park, feeding giraffes, eating penguins, and visiting the wine lands outside of cape town.

The crime there didn't seem nearly as prevalent as everyone led on, but then again... wait, I meant watching penguins, not eating them! Who could eat a penguin!? Anyway, there are definitely some cool areas in Joburg, but the suburbiness of it kind of turned me off. After a week in Joburg (and one stomach flu later) I went to Cape Town with Sam and her friend Sara... I took this week completely off work. Cape Town is a beautiful city. We stayed for the first few days with Guy at his place (I believe in or near the Camps Bay area) on the side of the mountain overlooking the ocean. We spent the rest of our time at Adrian's mostly just chilling and video gaming awesomeness :).

A few of the trips extra highlights... getting lost trying to pick up Adrian's brother Jo and turning a 30 minute drive into a 3h drive... driving through the wine lands and doing tastings (at one place we had like 5 or 6 good sized tasters for like $1.50 CAD!)... and of course arriving at the Cape Town airport, waiting in a 2h line-up and yelling at the ticket guy only to find out we'd shown up a day early. And oh yeah! The afternoon in downtown London, England was nice too :).

Flickr photos are here! But these are some of my favs below.

march is quickly wrapping up and i never did post a DrupalCon wrap up post. i figure i'll just through all of march into one quick and dirty post. i ended up not going to nearly as many sessions as i'd hoped, and instead spent most of my time chatting with and meeting people.

it looks like a number of people at the conference ended up getting the same flu that came through vancouver in full force last month. fortunately i was already several weeks deep into the sickness by then, so i was safe.

the final day had all the remaining people went to MIT for a Drupal code sprint. a few of the NowPublic dev team flew back into vancouver to work out of our main office and meet some of the vancouver peeps the following week.

it was great having some more developers in the office for a change... but don't worry, we still only communicated via IRC/skype instead of in person.

last weekend (easter weekend) steven, alexa, and myself all went to victoria. our plan was to ferry there and fly back on one of the float planes.

i was surprised how quiet victoria is. i think living in downtown vancouver for a year i've gotten desensitized to how busy it actually gets down here. friday and saturday nights on a long weekend in victoria, and the place was practically dead.

after we arrived we did some quick shopping and decided to look for spinnakers brew pub... ended up getting lost wondering around esquimalt and when we eventually found it ... they'd already done last call ... at 10:50 ... on a friday night. ahh well. ended up at the sticky wicket instead :). we went to a pretty sweet club saturday night... which i'd talk more about, but what happens in victoria stays in victoria?

flying back on the float plane never did happen due to a storm coming in right before our flight and the winds being too high. ended up taking 6h to get back home instead of 30 minutes. :-/

well.. there goes march.. and in case you were wondering... i'm still sick right now :) (at least i had a few days off before getting another cold).

So day 1 of the conference has wrapped up. Overall pretty good. Adrian and Konstantin both flew into town today too. Btw, if anyone wants to get a hold of me while I'm here I have a US cell number for the week.. 1.617.922.1385

I started off the day with the Drupal Usability (Report from formal Drupal usability testing at the University of Minnesota Libraries). This was basically an update from some usability testing that was done shortly after the D6 release. Pretty interesting, though I wasn't /overly/ surprised by there results. The cool thing about it was the eye tracking software (including eye tracking heat maps) to track where people were looking for things on the pages. This next photo shoes where a user was looking on the page to create a new content type.

This particular user looked everywhere on the page with the exception of the tabs that you actually need to use to create the content type. I think this kind of thing is great for Drupal. If this was done, maybe even more extensive testing, prior to the development starting for every release, it could really help things out.

Choice quote from a tester:

this software's going to be really interesting when it's finally released

This was followed by Dries' keynote. Very cool. He talked about drupal's current momentum in the industry, some D7 things, automated testing, and RDF and the semantic web. Djun was live-blogging it a bit via jaiku and I liked this one:

puregin#drupal: Dries: every Drupal site can be an RDF repository. The social graph connects people... the semantic graph will connect _everything_

There were open questions at the end of the keynote, and again (as in barcelona) the theme seems to be on test suites and automated testing. This is obviously still a major issue in Drupal. The other focus this year seems to be the semantic web. A lot of interesting stuff.

Lunch was insane. 800 people all at once in a 5 restaurant food court. I don't think so. In addition, the food there was total nastiness. I really wish I'd recorded a video of the insane line. I ended up with a bag of chips and a milky way. But went back at 2pm for a burger (which I regretted shortly after my first bite).

Went to Boris's session after lunch (Mapping business requirements to Drupal modules: a gap-fit process). Really enjoyed it. Don't really remember what he was talking about... but I'm /really/ excited about it ;-p. Just kidding! It was a good talk... more of an overview of various PM things, how to deal with changing requirements, yadda yadda.