Technology

Antonio first contacted me over a month ago, with a Drupal support question — by sheer coincidence, this happened to be just when I'd arrived in Mexico. Antonio is the leader of the Linux and Open Source community here in Peru; and he knows everyone, everywhere, who's a part of this community.

Well, OSCMS 2007 has now finished, and it was an absolute blast. PHP kicked ass, Drupal kicked ass, and Open Source in general (and its grand plans for world domination... bwahahaha) kicked ass. In case any of you have missed these, here is: a link to my slides from my presentation on site structuring and navigation in Drupal; as well as links to some collections of resources from the summit.

Spent all day today down at the Sunnyvale Sheraton, where the Drupal folks managed to hire out a big room, and to fill it with an abundance of Wi-fi, coffee, and donuts. So that we could conduct the Drupal Hackfest. The day was a great success, with close to 100 developers churning away code throughout the room, and working through the core issue queue, and with three core committers present to help get those patches in once and for all, by making core CVS commits.

More of the same, really, except that some of it I did myself. After the big night out and the motel room crash last night, I was feeling pretty wasted; but I managed to get through the day, and to pull off my presentation reasonably well.

The first day of my first-ever DrupalCon was very full-on. Jam-packed with meeting famous people, having heated discussions, and attending a plethora of sessions. It felt absolutely gawddamn amazing to finally make it to one of these things. Read on for my shpiel on the various sessions that I attended today, and on what happened at them.

I can understand that hiring a laptop is not the most common thing in the world these days. After all, why would you hire a laptop when it's so cheap to just buy one? And if you're going overseas and you need a laptop when you get there, why not just bring your own? But I would have thought that despite these things, there would still be enough demand to make it reasonably easy to find places that rent laptops. Especially in the San Francisco bay area, which is one of the most hi-tech and online places in the world. Considering what a hard time I had finding a laptop hire service, I guess not.

I found this place from the Rough Guides online accommodation directory, and boy, is it good! Although it's surrounded by strip clubs, it's in a good downtown spot, it's got great people, it's got free dinner 3 nights a week, it's got free Wi-Fi, and it's got bike racks inside! I tell you what: there are some things you can only find in California. Despite it being rainy when I got here, I think this really is the Sunshine State.

I bought myself a long-distance phone card, called Marca Ya, when I was in Veracruz. Ever since, the damn thing has given me nothing but problems. First, it refused to work at all. Then, when it did work, it seemed to charge more per minute than it was meant to. And now, it's expired itself about 2 months before it was meant to. I am officially a dissatisfied customer. If you get to Mexico, stay away from Marca Ya phone cards: they suck.

San Cristóbal has an enormous selection of Internet cafés, none of which are rubbish, and none of which charge more than 8 pesos / hr. But there's one that stands out way above the rest. Over 40 brand-new PCs. Very high speed Internet. Everything working perfectly. And all for just 5 pesos / hr! The cheapest and the best Internet in Mexico.

I tried out the Internet café at El Panchán, and I'm sorry to say that I wasn't impressed. When I got there, the Internet wasn't working at all. Then, when they finally got it restored, my mouse didn't work, the connection was slow, and the PCs were filled with more spyware than a James Bond movie. And all for a ripoff rate of 15 pesos / hr.