walkah: toronto

The third annual Drupal Camp Toronto event is coming soon. On Friday May 23rd and Saturday May 24th join the Toronto Drupal Users Group in celebrating two days of Drupal at the University of Toronto!

We're putting together an exciting event this year. We have John Resig coming to talk about jQuery and ActiveState will be giving away prize packages. Plus we'll have two full days of information - tips, tricks, case studies and howtos. Make sure to register soon! We already have over 100 people signed up!

Also, we are actively seeking both speakers and sponsors. Propose a session or contact us if you're interested in sponsoring or have other questions.

Hope to see you there!

I know it's late notice, but I'll be hosting a free workshop tomorrow night, April 2nd at 7pm as part of the PHUG + RMI free workshops.

For those of you here in Toronto that are unaware, PHUG is the new local PHP User Group. They have a lot of momentum and are an exciting group - I look forward to more collaboration in the future betweeh PHUG and DUG-TO.

The workshop will be Drupal Basics - a crash course in everyone's favourite CMS. We'll look at the core Drupal concepts, how building sites in Drupal works, and some basic theming tricks.

It's a free event, but space is limited so please register. Looking forward to meeting some new faces!

UPDATE: P.S. this isn't an April Fool's joke ;)

Dear Canada, you're doing it all wrong!

OK, so I love my adopted nation. I do. But, what's a guy (or gal) got to do to get affordable, unmolested bandwidth in this country?!?

I've written before about the abysmal mobile data situation in this country. Canada has one GSM network - and we pay the price for it.

But, until recently, my internets were safe at home. See, I'm a very happy subscriber of TekSavvy residential DSL: clean, clear, reliable, affordable bandwidth. Well, that's until Canada's copper monopoly decided to start throttling my bandwidth.

People have been talking and blogging about the events. You can follow the events at Free Our Bandwidth and, if you haven't before, read more about net neutrality. It's time for some real change. CRTC, where are you???

Canada, I'm fed up. Oh, and ketchup chips suck too.

I need to do a quick shout out to some of the cool stuff happening in our local Toronto Drupal User Group:

• As previously mentioned, Khalid was elected to the Drupal Association.
• Dan Kurtz - who was instrumental in the organization of last year's DrupalCampToronto - recently released a really neat looking module called Teleport which aims to be the Quicksilver of Drupal. Sweet!
• Inspired by our last meetup, Jason Swaby went ahead and ported a template to a Drupal 6 theme.

Way to go, guys! It's so awesome to see the local gang rockin' out in the global community!

I finally made it out to another DemoCampToronto last night (my first since presenting back at DemoCampToronto13) and my first at the Toronto Board of Trade. I have to say, I'm continually amazed at how these events have continued to grow. Major congrats to the "stewards" (c'mon, guys, you're the organizers ... really) : David, Jay, Joey, Leila and Greg.

That said, the character of the event sure has changed... grown up? Sold out? Not sure. They're certainly *big*. There's lots of time spent on the sponsors (who's generosity I don't mean to belittle). There's little time for questions to the demo'ers. Few of the new people stuck around for drinks after the event and there were people in suits!?! Maybe I'm crazy, but perhaps the disruptive, un-conference events need to get disrupted?

There were some interesting demos/talks last night. My highlights were:

• SlashID : nice to see another Canadian identity startup. I have to admit, their demo wasn't great, but talking with Zeev afterwards was interesting. They took some pot-shots at OpenID which made for good debate. Enough to warrant a post of it's own... to be continued...
• ShapeShop (Ryan Schmidt) has a pretty awesome looking 3d modeling tool and was able to at least bring a laugh or two to otherwise well-behaved crowd.
• Mark Kuznicki: *rocked* the ignite format with Co-creating the Creative City. Good timing and good execution on a topic heavily laden in it's own jargon. I encourage you to check out his slides for all the missing info he wasn't able to get into his allotted 15 seconds per slide!

I will say, it was great to see everyone and it was really nice to not have to drive home afterwards ;) See y'all again in January (I hope).

For those of you who hadn't heard: two weeks ago (on November 1st), I moved. I have finally said "so long" to the suburbs. If you're familiar with Toronto, I'm now living on Gladstone Ave, just north of Bloor (near Dovercourt Park). I have to admit, I'm pretty darn happy about it.

Despite having been on the road for 11 of my first 15 days in my new place, I feel like I'm already starting to settle in a bit. I've already met 4 neighbors, am walking distance from pretty much everything I need (including Rosie's convenience on the corner which just so happens to stock organic dairy and organic coffee!) and it turns out a handful of friends already live in the 'hood.

More soon I'm sure, but expect to see me around the city (and at the office) a whole lot more now!

It's mid-October which means it's nearly time for one of Toronto's best run tech conferences again: Seneca's Free Software and Open Source Symposium happens next week, October 25-26. I had the pleasure of being asked to speak last year, and even managed to get asked back this year. Naturally, I'll be talking about Drupal... twice:

Drupal Hands-on will be a workshop-style crash course in building sites with Drupal. I really dig doing these things, it's amazing how much you can do with Drupal in a few hours.

Drupal under the hood is my "formal" presentation. Essentially, I'm going to give a brief hour-long overview of Drupal's internal architecture and hopefully inspire some hackers in the audience to dive in.

Some might say that alone is reason enough to attend, but if you're not convinced check out the rest of the awesome speakers. I can't say it enough, I think this is a really well done event and there's still room so register now!.

This is gonna be a fun week! Starting on Wednesday afternoon, most of team lullabot will be coming to town for some work and hopefully a bit of fun.

If you missed the announcement, we're going to start things off on Thursday with the Toronto Drupal User Group meetup - for regulars, please remember we're at 215 Spadina (4th floor) this month and on Thursday (not Tuesday).

Friday night through Saturday night we'll be taking part in the Ontario Linux Fest. We've sponsored a welcome party on Friday night (and, yes, the location is so secret I don't even know where!). Angie is speaking Saturday morning and we'll be hanging out, probably in the Drupal BoF room (check the schedule). There's still space, so register now!

Come on out and say "hi"!

I was contacted last week by Greg J. Smith to do a little interview for a piece he was doing for the Torontoist about the Toronto Drupal User Group. I just got word that the post is up! Thanks for the coverage, Greg! Hope to see a ton of new faces this month :)

I suppose it's no surprise given that it's Toronto Tech Week this week, but my week so far has been filled with more TorCamp events than my typical week. On Saturday, I had the opportunity to attend my first official BarCampToronto. Seems kind of odd, given that I go to lots of events with the local "barcamp" crowd, and I've been to other official barcamps, but this was my first one in Toronto (technically BarCampToronto #4).

As I've related to some folks who've asked already, I thought BarCamp went really well. My entire morning was packed with very interesting conversation : talk of a Canadian mobile users advocacy group (to help instigate change in our wireless data rates, followed by an excellent discussion about Mozilla with Mike Beltzner, and then a pretty killer debate/discussion about the new Facebook developer platform. Perhaps it was just me, but I was pretty well spent by lunch so the afternoon seemed a little less jam packed. I did lead a session on OpenID which spurred some interesting questions and discussion, but after that I kinda just hung out.

Yesterday, I spent the day at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference down at the Metro Convention Centre. While sometimes referred to as "enterprise camp", this was nobody's unconference. Despite some scheduling snafus (we ended up having to hold both tracks in one room and things ended up over an hour off schedule), I think it went well. Of course, I was there doing my OpenID song and dance again (to a slightly different crowd). There was more interest in OpenID than I had guessed there would be amongst "enterprise" folks. I also learned that a very large insurance company here in Toronto implemented a very openid-like identity system in house a few years ago, and are considering migrating it to an openid-based solution. Very cool!.

Sadly, however, I think that about wraps my participation in tech week. No, for those who keep asking, I will not be attending Mesh today and tomorrow. Maybe next year...