I’m heading back to Boston tomorrow. (I say back because I grew up just north of the city.)

I’ll be speaking to the New York Press Association. Twice. One is on our use of Drupal in Bluffton and Savannah, and what we learned along the way.

The other is more interesting. I’ll be making a philosophical argument that newspapers (and other news orgs) should use open-source publishing tools whenever possible. The talk is meant to be provocative, and I’m still wrangling the details. I’ll post more after it’s over.

For those of you in the Boston area, we’re planning a small meetup on Friday. I’m also free on Saturday evening. Ping me.

Well, I’m back from Barcelona — at least for the day. Here’s one small camera phone pic that captures part of the trip: Correfoc. If you don’t know what that is, Google it, or look it up on Wikipedia.

Oh, and DrupalCON was excellent. But you already knew that, right?

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.

Very excited to be attending the upcoming OSCMS Con to be held at Yahoo! HQ. I was in Vancouver for the last one, and have learned a whole lot more since then.

Don’t know about it? Read up: http://2007.oscms-summit.org/

Now I just have to work on my session proposal(s).

So it turns out that the short, rainy period of time we spent in Utrecht was significant after all.

Visiting relatives over Thanksgiving, I learned that one of our ancestors was Jacques Cortelyou — which is a Dutch mangling of Cortellion, as the family were French Heugenots looked for refuge. Apparently, they stopped in Utrecht for a bit, and married locally before emigrating to New Amsterdam.

It seems I am distantly related to this chap, though I will write a better entry after making some notes at home tonight.

Found this cafe in Maastricht (NL), on the Grote Markt.

It’s been awhile. I was in Europe for 16 days, touring Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands with my wife. Since it was pure vacation, we passed right by OSCon Brusells and DrupalCON — though we arrived on the day of DrupalCON.

Oh well. We’ve been back two weeks now, so old routines are coming back. For those keeping score, here’s a quick rundown of the places we went.

1. Belgium
   • Brugge
   • Brussels
   • Antwerpen
   • Ostende
   • Liege
   • Namur
   • Durbuy
   • Bastogne
2. Luxembourg
   • Lux. City
   • Remich
   • Echternacht
   • Vianden
   • Clerveaux
   • Diekirch
3. Netherlands
   • Maastricht
   • Utrecht
   • Rotterdam
   • Den Haag
   • Delft
   • Amsterdam

That’s about the size of it. We have a ton of photos.

Favorite spots: Vianden, Maastricht, most of Flanders.

It was very good to get away from Americans (they don’t go to Belgium or Lux); only French-speakers go to Waloonia, it seemed.

Overall, a very very good trip. Anyone want to pay me to move?

We have left the Ardennes, and after a terrible traffic jam in Liege, dropped the car and headed to Maastricht. After 3 days in the rolling hills, Maastricht is quite different.

We arrived at 6pm on a Friday, which is an excellent time for Maastricht. People are out, bars are open. On 29 Sept, it was still about 72 degrees, so everyone was taking advantage.

Maastricht is a cultural capital. We are very much looking forward to exploring.