Montreal

Several BOFs were carried out last night enroute to Boston with Lisa, Susan, Jeannie, Travis, and myself. Incidentally we also got held up in customs due to yours-truly and I am greatly thankful for their patience (and nonchalance) at having to wait an extra 1.5 hours to cross the border. ;)

That said, I'm officially a glorified house-wife with a CAPITAL H-4! :) I still qualify for the TN and customs were happy to reassure me that I could return once I have a job offer suiting my credentials. PHEW!

The drive back was relatively uneventful for the first half with us trying to guess at what just crossed the road (otter or fox?, most likely the latter!). There were loads of discussions ranging from restaurants and karaoke joints in Boston to "how do you get that image to load onto your blog?".

The one most eventful thing was when a car behind us swerved off the road! Jeannie in her fast thinking sped up the car thus avoiding a collision and Susan called 9-1-1 to report the accident. We were all a bit shaken after that!

I'm looking forward to having all of my new found Drupal colleagues over to the apartment sometime for a group-problem-solving BOF & some kick-ass SLan food!

In the first one I look like I'm very intensely concentrating on understanding the french.. ;)

BTW, Picture credit goes to Christian Roy! (SORRY!)

After a long and fantastic day of sessions at Drupal Camp Montreal, I had the distinct feeling that my brain was fried.  I enjoyed the keynote which warmed us all up for what was to come. 

I took inspiration from Michael Collins talk on Extreme Navigation Tactics and can't wait to try out some of the jQuery tricks such as easing, UI, jScroll pane, and live hover (already using accordion on my recipe's page!).  I was also intrigued by the idea of sticky navigation bars and the rotating tag clouds. 

Can't wait to fully utilize the Internationalization (I18n) module mentioned in Suzanne's Tips & Themes for Building a Multilingual Website with Drupal.  Again, I've been messing around with French & English translations on that Recipe page - but it's not optimal.  You wouldn't know there's a 'Francaise' link unless you look for it!

Then after a FANTASTIC Lebanese lunch provided by the organizers - I took on the challenge of trying to understand Adrian Freed's talk on Taming the Media Monster - in French.  Impressive - I only got lost three times (but I would have prefered had the whole talk been in English - will there be a translated transcript available I wonder?).  He talked about how to integrate other medias such as youtube and guitar tabs into your website for a seemless feel.  The one cool thing I'd like to take from it is the ability to zoom into a picture with a mouse over.  But the unfortunate downside is the number of modules you may end up using just to get what you want working!

I also attended the talk on Apache Solr which is a promising tool - but not sure when and if I would take advantage of it as yet. 

Finally, the talk on Advanced Views Examples: Arguments and Relationships byMiche.  I had just been discussing using exactly what she showed us with someone else at the conference!  VERY helpful talk.  Now I just need to learn how to write tokens and I believe I will be liberated!

Following the Drupal Camp Montreal Photo shoot the original Drupalbostonvan party and several others managed to find a Japanese restaurant in the vicinity where we proceeded to gorge ourselves (at least I did) on Sushi. 

Had a blast in the #BostonDrupalVan heading up from Boston (and some of us from as far away as New York) to Montreal with Susan at the wheel and lots of talk and munchies!  Am really pleased to have met such a nice group of drupalers and looking forward to the talks for tomorrow.

At present being hosted at Casa De Silva (Samangi's house) for the two nights that I'm here.  Already made a run to Loblaws to pick up some tidbits for my better half who's slaving away at home.