All I can say is WOW. The New York City Drupal community is large, healthy, inquisitive and growing. I enjoyed the first day immensely. What's amazing is that I actually found myself answering a lot more questions than I got to even ask. This significantly helped me get over the "suck factor" hump, now maybe if I actually blogged more about my experiences I could feel I've accomplished more and help others more. Drupal is really a very robust, flexible, modular content management system. Some would argue this point and say it's much more than that. I couldn't agree more.

Its been debated which CMS is best. I've done some work in Mambo/Joomla, MediaWiki and Zen-Cart, had a little experience Wordpress, but I've decided that Drupal may be most complex most flexible system available to todays webmasters, so its off to Providence RI. to attend a Lullabot.com Drupal training seminar for a week. Then I start a new contract position at MYU Medical Center, this should be exciting.

Well, it's official, I'm no longer unemployed. Got my first paycheck. Pretty cool company. They were a combination Java and .NET shop up until now, but they started having clients ask about open source software, so they hired me and another guy (I think he's on contract?) as Php/Lamp developers.

Wow, started my new job today. It's been exactly 1 year since I last wrote anything in my blog, and almost exactly 2 years since I held a steady job. Today was mostly mad install day, loading Eclipse and Php Development Tool, web developer toolbar for both IE7 and FF2 + Firebug, MySQL GUI tools, Xampp, Cygwin. Have to get the key to install Dreamweaver 8. Probably install UltraEdit tomorrow. Nice big display, little pc (one of those shuttle boxes). Now I'll have to explore midtown Manhattan, find some nice places to eat. Had sushi today with my new boss in Bryant Park, not bad.

Ok, so I'm set to use CentOS 4.3 for my server needs and I'm fairly sure it will work out well. However, now I need a distro to work well on my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T60p. Since the wireless bits for the Intel ipw3945 chipset call for a 2.6.13 kernel or higher, CentOS won't do for this laptop, at the moment CentOS repos only have up to 2.6.9-39 for the kernel.

Spent a week on the NYSE floor clerking for a customer, his clerk took a vacation to Key West. I'll tell ya, I love the job, hate what it does to my feet, ankles and knees. It was really good to see all my friends again, and to hear the bell, eat like we do, etc....

but it's gonna be back to workin' the program after this week.

P.S. Chrissy graduated last Wednesday, the ceremony was at Radio City Music Hall of all places, WOW.

Congratulations Chris and all the best of luck, Love DAD.

Tha School of Visual Arts had a screening yesterday, Chrissy's film was well received. We were so happy when laughter arose from the crowd several times during her film. During some others it was quite quiet. Some of the animations were very good, looking very professional in every respect from opening title to closing credits, even down to having business cards and promotional postcards. Some of these students will do well in the world, but may have to move to California to do so. Kudos to all the SVA 2006 class.

Mysql5 Php5 and Apache are living nicely on Atlas. Boss is comming along nicely. Boss is Brokerage Operations Support System and it's my all engrossing project right now. I want to use the new features of MySQL and Php 5 with Apache 2 or maybe 2.2 if it's better in some way. As always it'll be better with a little help from my friends. Got the trade data sorted out ok, now I need to stitch the customer side of the database together in a logical fashion, and link these to the trades and orders. Most of this is being done using SQL.

Success, Php5.1.2 is compiled. Very excited, but I'm gonna get straight to work and I'll document what I did here on a special page. More too come.

Now let's compile Apache2.2. 1st get the latest source tarball from Apache.org, then move or copy the file to the /usr/src directory. Next extract the files, I cheat, I use Nautilis and Archive manager. The command lines are 'gunzip httpd-2.2.0.tar.gz' then tar something or other, I'll look it up later. Next, 'cd httpd-2.2.0' and type './configure --help > conf.help' as the output from this is large so capture it in a file and open your favorite editor, (I'm not going to get into a fight about emacs v.