Kevin Baringer

I am jealous of ants. I've never felt that way before (Except maybe their proportional strength... that would be awesome). My feelings about ants have ranged from indifference to annoyance to vehemence when they invade my washing machine.

Just a quick post to share this article: Drupal has a Liquid Network, from the GoodWheelMedia blog. It expounds the virtues of the Drupal community as one that is " flexible without being rigid", creating a balanced environment that provides enough structure to capture lessons-learned and share information while still allowing the random connections between contributors and ideas that can result in brilliant innovations.

I'll be attending Drupal Design Camp Boston (D4DBOSTON2011) this year and I'm stoked! Dries is the keynote, there's lots to learn and I finally feel like I can contribute back to the community. I'm also looking to pick up good ideas for Drupal Camp NH 2011 which will be happening in September this year.

Browse around the Drupal Design Camp site and you may even see the photo I submitted as a background!

In an environment where Drupal development has been going on for a while and people have been doing the experimentation required to gain familiarity with the platform, it's common for a lot of wayward Drupal installations to accumulate. Add to this a system which hosts numerous Drupal installations anyway (such as a university, large enterprise or a hosting service) and it can become challenging to keep track of them all.

Pete Seeger is my hero. In this day of transparency and tell-all-books, it's hard to hold anyone up to the standard that let's us use the word "hero", but for me Pete is the real deal. Do a little reading and make that call for yourself, but beyond his humanitarian ideals and convictions and his strength to stand up for them, I revere his dedication to the fact that people can share experiences which raise us up emotionally, spiritually and idealistically, and engulf us in the power of love. Yes, it's mushy, because cynicism and sarcasm and all of the social armor we go around in falls apart when confronted by Pete's ability to make us sing along with him.

Open Source is the way of the future. It's just true. There was a time when only the elite received education. Then it became plain that society as a whole benefits and advances when education is available to the public. The same theory applies to technology. When a tool is made freely available, people find better and more innovative ways to use it. The internet saw this with images when browsers first grew out of their text-only roots, and now it's beginning to happen with video.

Putting together a community-oriented online television channel is turning out to be a lot harder on the technical side than the content side. As soon as I put the word out that I was looking for content for Bare Arts Media, interested folks began coming out of the woodwork. Writers, Filmmakers, Documentarians (is that a word?... Drupal doesn't think so), and a plethora of people willing and interested in this venture. It's really quite gratifying. I mean, that's the whole point really.

Get in the Way Back Machine and think about when you were a kid and stayed home sick from school ... if it was in the 80's then you watched Leave It To Beaver, I Love Lucy, Hogan's Heroes and other classic gems that informed us about how it was in the "good ole' days". Now think about rainy weekend days, or late Saturday nights, when the black and white monster double features where on... schlock at it's finest.

Welcome, and please forgive the lack of theming on this site, I swear that shall be remedied, and soon! This is the future location of the KevinBaringer.com blog, which will document my journey into the web. My perspective is that of a software quality engineer who has been tucked away in a code-mill, where process and procedure ruled and creativity came second (or third) to navigating the treacherous red-taped waters of bureaucracy.

Please contact me at kevin@kevinbaringer.com