Matt's blog

A few weeks ago, I went on a couple of job interviews. Sadly, all the firms I interviewed with ultimately turned out to be what I consider bad citizens of the Drupal community, and of the open source development community in general. That is to say, although they were using Drupal and other open source tools and often running quite profitable businesses as a result, they seemed to have zero interest in contributing back parts of their work or even interacting with other community members to help with documentation, logistics, etc.

For the better part of last week, I was in Washington, DC attending this year's North American DrupalCon. Although a bit exhausting, mentally, it was a pretty interesting and enlightening experience. My first foray into the wider Drupal community was at last year's equivalent of this event, in Boston. It was there that I was more or less hired on the spot by the New York Observer, where I still find myself today. This year's conference was considerably larger (1400 attendees, up from 800 in Boston). I also noticed a distinct shift in tone. A year ago, the economy was still booming (or seemed to be). Development shops, media companies and even non-profits were in a hiring bonanza and looking to crank out new sites left and right. This year, everyone seemed much more contemplative.

I'm currently in the midst of rebuilding Politicker from scratch with Drupal 6. It's a lot of work, but a good chance to get some things right that have always dogged us when maintaining the current (Drupal 5) iteration. One particular vow I've made is to avoid ever querying a CCK field or type storage table directly in the custom modules I'm writing. This is a common practice in most Drupal sites that I've seen and/or developed. It's a convenient shortcut, but it can cause problems.

A few months ago, I joined the ranks of the 45,000 some New Yorkers who commute to work by bicycle. I don't ride every day, unfortunately. I skip it and take the subway if it's raining, exceptionally cold (as in, below 30 with a significant wind chill) or if I have some plans after work that would keep me out until some very late hour. I'm also fortunate that both my apartment building and my office building have space to accommodate my parked bike. I've noticed some things about biking in New York.

Much ado has been made in the last few years about how print media is dying. It is pretty obvious why this is case. Practically everyone my age -- and a good amount of people older than I am -- want to get their news, analysis, gossip and so forth online. I'm probably the only one of my peers who gets home delivery of the print edition of the New York Times, and I will be the first admit that it's more about the chic than because that's how I legitimately prefer to read it. So let's assume that everyone will be phasing out print over the next decade or so. What then?

I was pretty confident that Obama would win, but seeing it actually happen was pretty amazing. Moving, even. Most of my political life has involved seeing George W. Bush be elected and then reelected, during which Democrats either failed to gain ground in Congress or actually lost a bunch of seats, as in 2004. Both those elections lasted long into the night as the "swing states" were agonizingly pontificated over by guys like Wolf Blitzer. And they both ended with me and everyone around me being pretty miserable. I was at Wesleyan in 2004, and the morning after the election, the campus felt like a funeral.

I guess you could say I am totally "in the tank" for Barack Obama. In fact, I could've told you at least 8 years ago that I would be voting for Obama (or whoever the Democratic candidate ended up being) next week. I would almost venture to say that in the entire time any member of my family has lived in the United States, none of them has ever voted for a non-Democrat, so it's just part of my upbringing. Now, I also live in one of the bluest congressional districts in one of the bluest states in the country and I work for a pretty left-leaning newspaper, so not many of my friends, neighbors, or co-workers are particularly disinclined to vote for Obama either. So, while we're mostly not worth canvassing or get-out-the-vote organizing here in New York, we're still good to hit up for money.

I just finished reading Michael Chabon's excellent The Yiddish Policeman's Union (for which there are total spoilers below the fold, by the way). A very interesting read, having just visited Israel recently. For those who are not familiar, the novel deals with an alternate timeline in which the United States offered a large tract of land in Alaska as a safe haven for European Jews fleeing the Holocaust (a plan that was proposed in real life, but killed in committee in the Senate. In the book, the main detractor of the plan is killed in a car accident). Incidentally, or perhaps because there were not enough refugees to populate the then-fledging State of Israel, the independence war of 1948 is lost to the Arabs (in real life, it was won) and Israel collapses. Only a few die-hards remain in Jerusalem, which is otherwise entirely under Arab control.

Ted Kennedy's speech tonight at the Democratic Convention in Denver was one of the more moving ones I can recall. While in general this year's convention is already far better than 2004's total snooze-job of a convention for a total snooze-job of a candidate, this speech was pretty special. The words themselves were not as significant, one might say, as the fact that Kennedy managed to deliver it more or less full-tilt despite his highly malignant brain tumor. Still, though, I found his references to his brother's push to go to the moon personally relevant (as a student of astronomy, I suppose).

Those who follow the local news in New York have no doubt heard of the MTA's plan to raise subway fares next year and again in 2011. People and politicians in the city and suburbs love to whine about the fare hike and how it will hit working people the most. Honestly, I don't mind that much. A few extra bucks a month is not a big deal to me and to most people. I still no car-related travel expenses and I still know that the subway here is cheaper than smaller and less useful mass transit systems in many other cities, both in the U.S. and the rest of the world.