Wow, time flies when you're having fun. I hadn't intended to spend the day playing with Drupal, but the incontrovertible fact is that it's almost ten already, so I have. The idea was to enable the Pirate module (Arrrr!!!) and then take care of a couple of security advisories that affected my installation, requiring that I update Drupal core and the Date module. This ultimately ended up leading to my creating a sub-theme for the Marinelli theme.

Today is (was, if you're reading this FROM THE FUTURE) International Talk Like a Pirate day. So wake your inner captain, growl at the nearest serving girl, and demand some rum (or liquor of your choice). I'm rocking my pirate bandanna and a pirate shirt, but the eye patch was just too much; your mileage may vary on this last.

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.