Another snowstorm

We've had snowstorm after snowstorm during the first week of classes, closing the campus again this morning. The snow banks next to the driveway are so high, I can barely shovel anymore. But since the campus is closed and it's still snowing, I can take a few minutes to take stock of the past few weeks. I've been busy.

I've spent the past two or three weeks shepherding the migration of resources on the BCRC server to new hardware. I had wanted to do it immediately after grades were due, back in December, but with everyone's schedules, it didn't happen until early January. Since then, I've been putting everything back together and then building new resources for the spring. It's been an incredibly time-consuming process, but nearly everything critical has been done. At the same time, I needed to get my course set up and prepare for my presentation at Western Mass Drupal Camp.

We had a snowstorm on the day of my first class meeting. It looked to me like the University shouldn't have tried to open in the first place, but they did. I came and worked on getting ready for class. I checked every few minutes to see if class was really going to happen, figuring they'd probably close just after we were supposed to meet. But they surprised me and closed two hours before class. When you're class only meets once a week, missing a meeting is a big deal for the schedule. But I think we'll be OK.

I'm really excited about Drupal Camp. I think it was Kelly Albrecht who first proposed organizing the camp. My main contribution was to organize the venue: I made a pitch to the dean and the chair of Chemistry to let us use the new Integrated Science Building at UMass: we've basically taken over the entire building for the day. And it looks like the weather will push on through today and we'll have good weather tomorrow for the meeting.

I'm presenting How to Say L10n and i18n in Drupal. I tried to come with a topic where I thought I might be more of an expert than most of the people there. My knowledge about Drupal is broad, but shallow -- I'm not really an expert in anything. But I think I'll know more about localization and internationalization than most of the people there and will be able to say something interesting about how to do it, having recently gone through building libroj.bierfaristo.com as a multilingual site. At least, I can identify the basic tools and some of the pitfalls.