Thanks to Diana Porter for a new mugshot! I’ll have to incorporate it into the site.

That’s me, in my office, in front of a print of Mark Rothko’s
Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red), 1949.

For those of you playing our home game, here’s the photo I use as an avatar.

It is, appropriately, named BigHeadKen on my local machine.

I took this photo almost 10 years ago. Strange.

I took these this morning in the back yard. Hoping to print them and hang them in the bedroom, but my printer ran out of yellow!

Note: These blooms are about 6 ft (2m) off the ground. The day after I took these, the stalks collapsed under their own weight (it happens every year).

So I got back on Monday. This is the height of Spring in Augusta, which means two things: azaleas and pollen — are everywhere. Below are some pics to give you an idea.

Azalea blossoms

Full blooms

Japanese maple buds

Pollen everywhere

The highlight of the morning was Dries’ “State of Drupal” talk. The main thrust was that successful web projects disintermediate existing social structures. He suggested three things that Drupal could (or does) replace:

1. The Webmaster
2. The developer (with Views & CCK)
3. The Designer

The other high point was Rasmus imploring Dries to drop support for PHP 4, so that he wouldn’t be known as “the guy who dropped PHP4 support.”

In other news, a very successful Lightning Talks session. As Dries said, there is a lot of innovative work going on.

Two good, but complex talks today. chx on the new menu system for Drupal 6 and merlinofchaos on how node_access functions and why it might get rewritten.

These are both topics for developers, and node_access is pretty advanced. Had a good time wandering around and having lunch with folks, putting names and faces with IRC handles.

Some pics are up on Flickr. Look for the ‘oscms2007′ tag.

Two action shots of our presenters:

chx

merlinofchaos

I’m on deck, as the “Is Drupal an Enterprise Solution?” panel starts in a half hour.

The estimable Rasmus Lerdorf, inventor of PHP, kicked off day one. We’re on the Yahoo! campus, sequestered in a side building. True story, I spent 30 minutes cursing the Y! wireless network. Turns out they printed everyone’s password in Helvetica, so a 1 looks like an I looks like an l. Apparently, my pwrod had a lower-case L in it.

Then I took some really bad photos before finding out that the camera settings had changed. Candid (?) snaps below.

Rasmus on stage.

Michael Meyers from NowPublic.com getting some work done.

Angie (webchick) traces Chad (hunmonk) for a cardboard effigy. It’s a DrupalCon tradition to stand in for missing developers.

DrupalCON (technically, OSCMS 07) starts today. Came in last night and ran into chx and hunmonk in the hotel lobby. A quick introduction and some time later…. and you’ve got 28 Drupalers invading an Indian restaurant in downtown Sunnyvale.

The first place had closed, so we all waited for someone to find an alternative.

Thanks to jjeff for making everything work out.

Safe to say that everyone is excited to be together.

I’m not a huge photographer. Never liked it as a child. Complex terms, and I wear glasses and could never focus an old 33mm.

But digital makes it much easier. For years I had a Nikon Coolpix 3100. And I finally got decent enough to realize that it kinda sucks. I especially wanted a zoom upgrade, so I can get good closeups.

So yesterday I bought a Canon PowerShot S3. It weighs three times more, but it has a 12x optical zoom and actually has realistic color capture.

Check out the detail on my dog, stalking her brother in the backyard.

Click image to enlarge.

I think I’m going to like this camera.