rare pattern

So by the time the party started, I was totally and profoundly exhausted. Kate and I had done our best to recharge with a yummy Thai dinner following a brisk walk up Market Street, which had been just the trick to recover from the way-too-dance-clubby music and the way-too-comfortable comfy chairs in the W lobby, where we had been attempting to relax after a several-hour client meeting where I had walked client and web developer through the web design process I was envisioning, which, in the end, was the reason I was even in The City -- not for the party.

But here I was at the party, not quite awake, not at all alert, and, among all these brilliant, beautiful and oh-so-hip and in-the-know BlogHers, feeling like a total dork from the boonies -- and probably acting like a pod person. And this was not good, considering that the celebration was for the official beta launch of the BlogHer website, which was designed and developed by yours truly.

"Hi, I'm Marnie Webb. I'm involved with a lot of web projects that use Drupal and CivicSpace...." I prepare a response and she's now ten feet away, turned in the other direction....

Several people came up and introduced themselves like this. A big guy named Marc came up and sat at the next table, and I listened to him talk about structured blogging. Elisa and Jory introduced themselves. I had moments of clarity, but otherwise I was on the event horizon of a black hole, moving in slower time relativity, not quite able to keep up with everything. In fact, I think what shook me out of orbit was Jennifer Myronuk's Sony DV camera. Here I was, tired after 20 hours of driving, untold hours of website preparation, several hours of client meetings and not nearly enough hours of sleep, and feeling like a tired kitchen towel; there was no way anyone was going to get me on tape. She was quite insistent. I was quite resistant. Jennifer is tall, and I appreciated the company above 5'8", but I did not appreciate the camera -- or, rather, the tape inside it, ready to roll.

Suddenly, Lisa Stone was in front of me, saying, "Make your escape now, while you can!" It took a moment to register, but then I saw Jennifer's camera pointing my way and I dragged by rolling computer bag on out of the restaurant.

#

I have a general sense that people liked the site. It took a lot of doing to pull together. I had to hack several of the modules, and write a few php calls to pull up content dynamically in ways Drupal and its contributed modules don't quite do. But that wasn't the hard part.

The hard part was getting the theme to work on all major browsers. (A pox on Internet Explorer!)

In the end, it came together and, if I do say so myself, the site looks pretty good, and people are using it in the ways that it was designed for. And as things progress as they must, the designer/developer fades from their awareness ... until there's a problem. Such is life.

I still have to clean up the theme -- there's some extraneous stuff in the stylesheet, for example, from things tried and nixed -- and make sure there are no unused data calls in the custom php. And then, over the coming months, the evolution takes place as the site grows from what it is to something akin to what it could be.

But thankfully the launch parties are behind us. I appreciated the kind words and well wishes, and I look forward to meeting these women again for the first time ... when I'm just another person in the room.

(Thank you, everyone!)

This has been a strange holiday so far. I've been stressed, but not in the usual holiday way.

The usual holiday stress would be all wrapped up in gift idea angst, anticipation of extended family gatherings, air travel butterflies and a general sense that I should be happier than I really am (which, of course, would not bring much joy).

This year's holiday stress is all about work, and feeling not really able to truly justify just taking some time off and enjoying myself. Rather than offer up a list, I'll just put down a ramble:

I'm building a rather involved website right now. It could truly benefit from the new features in Drupal 4.7, but since that's still in beta and many modules have not been ported yet, I can't really base their site's fortunes on it yet, so we're sticking with a modestly hacked Drupal 4.6. Of course, Drupal 4.7 could reach final release status sooner if I were participating in the debugging of the betas and, once they come, the release candidates. But I don't have the time, as I'm doing this community site. Not only that, I'm also doing a redesign on a popular blog site, a project that looks to be rather enjoyable. Meanwhile, I have the mega DVD project that has so overloaded my media drives that I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm going to have to dump all the media, restripe the drives and redigitize the footage -- which, even if I just go with the semi-fine cut timelines, plus handles, will still add up to 5-6 hours; yet that will give me the room to digitize the several hours of new footage of pick-ups and our beautifully shot introduction; which will allow me to finally lock picture and work on sound and titles, at which point I can start encoding to mpeg-2 and AC-3 and getting on with the actual DVD menu design, which will be the real fun part, except for the part of handing to the client her completed DVD masters, which is a moment a long time coming because I did not realize just how involved the subject matter was and I don't think she realized just how involved the DVD production process is; but still every day that I fail to boot up the editing system adds to that stress. And this all is while I prepare for a design job starting late January. And it really is wonderful to be busy, really busy, but right now, this week, there's a lot of pressure not to be busy, not to work so much, not to be staring at various computer screens and video monitors all day, and to be just relaxing and hanging out and "getting in the Christmas spirit," which is something I've always wanted to do but never really quite got the hang of, I think, and so my heart is in work work work but the week is conspiring against me to the point that I'm even feeling guilty just typing all this nonsense here, so I'm going to wrap it up, except to say that these are the reasons why I have not yet prettied up this little blog, because if I really did have time I'd be playing with the design and, who knows, perhaps even upgrading it to Drupal 4.7 beta just to get things moving along on this front. But alas this blog is a little side project at this point, and it doesn't pay the bills, so maybe I should stop typing this post and just upload it.

Happy Holidays!