I’m leaving on a bus to Washington DC during a state of emergency just to see George take off in a helicopter. It has been a long eight years, and I am willing to do just about anything to witness this occasion. I’ll be on the lawn with some friends (around 2-4 million) to watch Barack Obama ride off to the helicopter with George to wish him farewell and good riddance.

This will be an historic event indeed, with record turnout on the National Mall. CNN estimates that if 5 million people show up, we will have one square foot of space each. I’m hoping it is more like 2 million, but it should be a fun time.

I will arrive for the inauguration at 11:30pm on Monday night, and we will do our best to stake out a spot on the lawn. I will be going with the College Democrats of New York, and a few close friends. We worked together for this victory on a national and local level. We made two trips out to Pennsylvania, and several tours around Long Island to canvass for the local, state and national elections.

We had a massive campaign effort on campus by raiding the dorms each week to register voters. Stony Brook University registered the most voters in New York State. We were also very proud to send a massive group of people to paid canvassing for Brian Foley during the last weekend. His opponent Caesar Trunzo attributed his loss to the help that Brian had from the local Universities (Stony Brook).

There couldn’t be a more fitting conclusion to our efforts and George’s reign than this pilgrimage to Washington. Of course it isn’t over yet, because we now have to fill Brian Foley’s vacant seat on the town board with a new and rising democrat; Mark Lesko. I can’t wait to vote again on March 31!

I have a late winter break this year. My last final was on December 23, and I still have 2 weeks left. I decided to spend my break doing freelance and volunteered web development, as well as looking for a summer internship. I am still working on THiNK Magazine’s Drupal website, which became a much larger project than I expected.

We started in september deciding between Wordpress, Joomla, Movable Type and Drupal. I’ve known about Drupal for a while from old hosting clients, but this was the first time I actually worked with it. It isn’t as easy to start using Drupal as they claim it is, and using it for a magazine presents a unique set of challenges. A magazine is focused on strategically placed articles and imagery. Drupal is not inherently good at handling article placement or featuring images. Both require a wide array of modules. Behind the website there also needs to be separation of issues and a special hierarchy of users. Luckily I found an installation profile developed at RIT called “Innovation News.”

I had a lot of hope that Innovation News would make the project easy, but the project grew to be much larger than I expected. I am facing layout problems that I thought would be very simple. I haven’t touched the CSS much yet in order to keep it simple. The other main component we want is a “slider” on top of the front page to showcase the featured articles. This requires some information to be dynamically exported to an xml file, and there really isn’t any module written to do that. There is one that is similar for Drupal 5, but I am using Drupal 6. I have decided to take the module and modify for my needs with Drupal 5, and then try to upgrade it to Drupal 6. If anyone has suggestions please leave it in the comments.

I’ve learned how a team could really help to complete this project. I would love to bounce ideas off of people, and also handle the project in parts. It would be easier to look at the big picture that way. Sometimes I get lost in the details. I don’t have access for a project like this that was supposed to be small. On top of that, I am volunteering my time for it, but it has been fun to learn more about the concepts of a CMS. I’ve jumped right into the fire, what a mess…