Mike Ryan

Sarah and I got back a week ago from a week in New Orleans, and I've finally got a little time to start writing about it. Arlington Street Church, where Sarah is very active, has a partner church in NOLA - First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans, in the Broadmoor neighborhood. She's a member of the PC³ (Partner Church Coordinating Committee), which organizes regular trips to help rebuild.

Transitioning to the MacBook, I've set up my display(s) to rotate the background among several pictures. This one just popped up - a rare candid of my mother (10/7/39-2/3/07), at the Grand Canyon a few years ago when I visited my folks at their Arizona winter place.  She hated having her picture taken; I've never been much on photography - but here I captured something...

Today is a milestone for me - last day working fulltime on the day job. I will still be there two days a week for the foreseeable future,  but going forward most of my "work" time (no longer constrained to the office business day) will be Drupal-centric.

Seems a little quiet around here... I got a MacBook this week, the past few days I've been migrating stuff from my old Windows system. It's coming along slowly, had a couple little glitches (the first sync with my iPhone wiped out my contacts and calendar, and then I had problems with Quicken Mac 2007). I'll be more verbose once my platform is stable...

In terms of blogging my experience at Drupalcon, I only got partway through Day 2 last week, and it's getting harder and harder to make out my own chicken-scratching. For the moment, my time is better spent actively Drupaling - I hope at some point in the not-too-distant future to review the videos and report back...

This may be slightly out of order, since I've still got a ways to go in blogging my notes on the specific sessions I attended at Drupalcon, but I want to get my overall thoughts and impressions out as quickly as possible.

First, expanding on my comment on Drupal.org - I'm re-entering the Drupal community after some time away, and it feels so right... There are some acknowledgements I need to make:

First and foremost, my significant other SIGNIFICANT Other, Sarah Richards, has been supportive above-and-beyond of the time I've spent Drupaling on top of my day job (and of the constant whining over how little time I have left to do all the other things I want to do). I hope her patience continues, because I have a lot of catching up to do in the Drupal world. And I hope some non-profit working on progressive change out there can use an anthropologist with project management experience (contact me if you can...).

Popular Science - Case Study

pingVision presented a case study of the migration of the Popular Science site to Drupal. Since I'm joining Moshe Weitzman in Cyrve, specializing in content migration, this was of particular interest to me.

I made a stab at live blogging with the usability session, but I think it will work better for me just to jot down the random points that particularly strike me at the time, and fill in more thoughts later. Hopefully most if not all sessions will be on video, so there's no need to be a scribe...

Report from formal Drupal usability testing at the University of Minnesota Libraries

The target for this round of testing was "sub-admins" familiar with other content management systems. They were exposed to Drupal 6 with CCK. Eye-tracking data was gathered, and we saw the animated results - not very pretty.

Another day, another ball game. More typical of early spring training - the Rangers beat the Royals, something like 15-7.

Must be in the front row!

Action photos - a little "Oops" there on the left...