Tonight I attended the local Ann Arbor Drupal Meet-up.  It was the first a2drupal meet-up birthday actually.  It was nice to get to sit around at talk to some people about Drupal. This last time I went to one of these meet-ups was this summer.  Tonight was a little different because it was more of a social meeting than discussing drupal and it's technical aspects. There was a lot of free food and drink. A special thanks to Mike Hofmockel and Ann Arbor Spark for making this a possibility.  It is nice to see there are people that are very involved with Drupal. There were about 20 people there, many more than the last meet-up I went to and it was interesting to hear what many people are actually using Drupal for. Mike also told me about the keynote that Dries Buytaert gave at Drupalcon earlier this month. Mike was also talking about some interesting things that he is trying to do with drupal (decentralized social networking). I also won a Drupal 5 Themes book in a drawing, so a special thanks to Packt publishing for donating those as well. Overall it was nice, I plan to attend next month as long as my schedule permits.

If you are in Michigan and are interested in Drupal I suggest checking out the meetings in Ann Arbor. You can find out more info here.

It has been a while since my last blog post because I have been very busy since then.  But I decided it was finally time that I update my blog.  I have since added a news section that gives articles on various technology I read about that I find interesting.  A lot have things have happened since my last blog post.  I have finished school and now have my Software Engineering degree from Michigan Tech. I now have a full time job, been trying to build websites on the side, as well as trying to enjoy myself amongst other things.

I have recently found out that I didn't make it to the 2nd round of the 2007 Knight News Challenge, which is probably for the best because I have been so busy I don't know if I would have the time to devote to a project like I proposed. They didn't give me much specifics, just that the technology is already in development that I proposed. Winners of the contest will be announced at the end of may. I'm excited to see what type of proposals win and wish the existing contestants luck in their endeavours.

I tend to spend a lot of time on the internet.  I rarely ever watch television. Much of my time spent on the internet is learning about new technologies as well as was I can increasing my browsing efficiency.  I have been using the internet since probably around 1994, and have seen a lot of changes come and go since then.  Being a daily user of the net it's always nice to see advancements as well as passing that information on to other individuals whom may not be aware.

I am an avid user of open source software.  I run Linux as my primary operating system, as well as any other form of open source software that I can when using windows or mac.  The more I use the Internet though, the more I see it becoming a platform in itself.  I recently decided to install the latest beta version of Mozilla Firefox, which at the the time of this post is firefox 3 beta 3. In addition to installing firefox 3 I installed the weave add-on, and prism add-on.  I have to say that I am fairly impressed.  Weave is an new add-on being developed by the mozilla foundation that allows you to sync your browser across multiple machines.  Prism is an add-on that lets you run web services as applications.  I have installed prism in the past, but there have been vast improvements made for the 3rd version of firefox.  There is also a plans to have online/offline syncronization between the applications and data, making the internet truly an application. Now I had used the google sync add-on before to sync my stuff, but I think in the end weave will be better because it plans to also sync your add-ons and seems to be much faster.

I have seen many other changes just in the past few years is the adoption of many open source protocols and applications.  I have been using google reader for quite some time, so RSS isn't anything new for me, but I have to seem to become more and more dependent on it everyday. It allows me to shift through a large amount of data very quickly from various sources, anything from news, podcast, calendar events, twitter updates, facebook updates, etc.  I have used last.fm to track my music and it now suggest local music events in my area that I may like.  I have used stumbleupon video to suggest videos that I like right in my google calendar.  There are other various technologies like Bittorrent DNA which allows the streaming of high definition video.  I have seen a lot of sites implementing OpenID for login recently as well as big players such as Yahoo and Google supporting it.  Facebook has seen considerable growth in traffic in just the past year, as well as launching their application platform, which soon is suppose to allow you to post them as external widgets within websites as well.  Linux is making huge headway as an operating system, especially in the mobile device market. There has been the launch of Google Android as well as the Open Moko platform.

It is very interesting to see how rapidly the internet is changing as well as changing the world.  It seems to be growing and changing at an exponential rate.  Mobile devices and becoming ever ubiquitous, and I think we are going to see the culimination of the internet and embedded devices within the next 5 years. And not necessarily mobile devices like cell phones, but other devices controlling many other various things such as sensors, home devices, etc.  I think open source technology has open the door for many people to help innovate and change technology at a very low operating cost.  It has been very interesting to see how the internet has greatly changed in the just the last 10 years I have used it and I think it will be very exciting to see where it will be 10 years from now.