In case anyone didn’t notice, yesterday, I attended DPAC 4. I sent out about 140 tweets from the conference. I received around 30 replies, many of them retweets of what I had sent out. A lot of the people were old friends from other conferences, but I ended up following about a dozen new people. I had a net growth of five new followers, but that is a little misleading since there is always churn as old fake followers get deleted and new fake followers crop up. I reality I picked up at least a dozen new real followers. More importantly, I had a lot of great discussions and gathered a bunch of interesting new ideas to write about over the coming month. These days, I’m interested in the number of tweets and the changes to followers and those I’m following as a metric on how good a conference is. It actually can be used to analyze how interesting each panel is, as well.

During my train ride into New York, I mostly slept. I’m hoping to build up my defenses and avoid what is going around. My daughter Fiona stayed home sick yesterday and is sick again today. She does not have a fever and I do not believe it is swine flu, or if it is, it is very mild. About 10% of the students at her school are out. The local middle school has about 29% absent, and at least three school districts in Connecticut, in Guilford, Middletown and Burlington have closed because of the swine flu. Meanwhile, I continue read more blogs about how this is just another fake media frenzy driven by evil operatives in the Obama White House. I just want to let people know that tin foil hats has not been proven effective in preventing the spread of swine flu.

As I headed from the conference to the train station in the evening, I saw a heading proclaiming that the Coast Guard exercise on 9/11 this year was ill-advised but did not violate agency policies. I would suggest it was ill advised because, my friends wearing the tin hats to protect themselves against swine flu have a good reason to suspect that the media is driving frenzies and not providing news. The same media that brought you Balloon Boy is bound to bring sensationalized fictitious information about Coast Guard exercises. My tweet, “[Steven] Brill [of Journalism Online, LLC asks,] will you pay for someone to make sense out of all the raw content? Brill thinks so. I don't.” was frequently retweeted. The only surprise is that in this day of Balloon Boy, Mr. Brill thinks there are people that would actually pay for that sort of editorial efforts to make sense out of raw content.

On the way home, I spent more time getting to know the characters that I hope to appear in my National Novel Writing Month novel.

Today, Fiona is still at home, still sick. It will cut into my productivity at a time that I really can’t afford it. I have over 4000 unread emails in my inbox, and a couple computer consulting projects to make headway on, including some work in Joomla. No, I’m not abandoning Drupal, but there are times that I work with clients that use other content management systems.

I also finally received an invite to Google Wave. What looks most promising to me about it is the integration with Google Gadgets. I’ve looked at Google Gadgets before as part of my explorations into Shindig, so when I get some free time, I want to look at Drupal to Shindig to Google Gadgets to Google Wave connectivity. Then, when I finally get around to getting an Android, I can have some real fun. But now, time to start plowing through some of the tasks at hand.