Cutting to the chase: It was easy, if tedious.

Onward.

Where have I been for the past few months? I wrote 50,000 words of a novel in November while maintaining a full work schedule. Most of the novel was written after midnight; just thinking about the process of writing it makes me feel tired. Work's kept me pretty busy with lots of Drupal work. I've been flexing my artistic muscles a bit, doing some logo work for myself and for friends. I've done some troubleshooting on websites; last week I helped fix the theme over at the Panthers BBS my friend Eric runs. And three weeks ago, I upgraded Hackwater.com to Drupal 6.

Over at The Quagmire, Eric writes that he's picked up, among other things, a new Terry Pratchett book. As it turns out, I picked up Pratchett's sequel to Going Postal earlier today after I enjoyed a delicious Sandrine's creme brulee at their booth in Harvard Square, which was turned into a mini-fair to celebrate Oktoberfest.

I forgot to mention that I finally got my DVD copy of the British sitcom Spaced. It is like geek candy. In a similarly geeky vein, I've been very much enjoying the third season of Venture Brothers.

Between Venture Brothers, the novel Soon I Will Be Invincible, and Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog, which is one of the best things I've seen this summer, I've been covering the root-for-the-villain angle quite well.

I sacrificed some of my hearing to see Brendon Small and Dethklok live. I've also managed to go to the drive-in. Yes, there are still drive-ins.

Hello, Internets. It's been a while.

I've had quite a busy few months. I've installed a photo gallery that embeds in Drupal (but I think the standalone version is nicer). More photos to come there, but likely at my typical posting pace, which can charitably be described as glacial.

Hey, you know what's fun? WYSIWYG that isn't.

Neil was trying to increase the speed of Drupal on one of the New England Region SCCA sites, and he told me about the early success he's had using eAccelerator for caching. So I decided to try it out.

I'm looking forward to the first week in March, because I'm going to Drupalcon with my co-workers. I've been using Drupal for almost a year now, so I'm still a relative newbie, but I feel I've learned a lot, and I've gotten to really enjoy hacking on modules and theming using templates. I'm very excited over what I might learn in a couple of weeks.

It's probably cold when you can legitimately confuse your car's gear indicator with the temperature display immediately below it. In this particular case, when I left the office, the temperature was only a couple of degrees higher than the number of gears in my car. I shudder to think what the temperature will drop to in a couple more hours. Or maybe I'm just cold.

I wanted to see how difficult it would be to update using my Wii, and while challenging, the auto-match makes it easier than I would have thought possible. Coolness.

ETA: space to my title. Also, Gmail is manageable on the Wii, but you really have to play with it to get it to work properly. Still, the Wii got the job done.

I think Silversun Pickups is my new flavor of the month (last month it was Feist). I'd been hearing about them on various blogs I read, and after the umpteenth Wil Wheaton name-drop, regarding how Lazy Eye should be on the Rock Band set list, I decided to check them out. Thanks to YouTube, I heard the song while watching the video, and thought, "eh. A bit Smashing Pumpkins. Not bad. Let's check out the rest of their stuff, see if it's better." And it was. My favorite song: Little Lover's So Polite, followed closely by Waste It On, All the Go Inbetweens, Booksmart Devil, and Creation Lake.

Speaking of Wheaton, his latest book is pretty good. Too short. But like they say, always leave them wanting more.