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I&#39;ll be delivering the new improved version 2 of my &#39;<a href="/presentation/extending-drupal-crm">Extending Drupal with a CRM</a>&#39; talk at <a href="https://www.meetup.com/drupalmelbourne/events/97620592/comments/143010552/" target="_blank">Drupal Melbourne&#39;s inaugural meetup for 2013 on the 8th Jan</a>. It will be new and improved with a tour through integrating external commercial CRMs with Drupal, Drupal native CRM tools and more pictures of cats.

A CRM (Contact Relationship Manager or Constituent Relationship Manager depending on your sector) is a fantastic way to take your Drupal installation further and streamline your business practises.

<span style="line-height: 1.538em;">In this sessions we look at utilising a variety of Drupal modules, tools and techniques to create standalone campaigns for your non-profits (or company&#39;s) site. These could be sub sites, micro-sites or pages with a different look and feel.

2012 has been a big year, equal good and bad, extremely busy moments and dull moments to. I&#39;ve been to umpteen conferences, meetups and worked on about a dozen projects. Green renters stated the year really well, but dropped off massively after July, as did many other sustainability organisations and that was a hard hit for us.

Webform is a module that has equal parts lovers and haters... On one hand it makes creating complex forms with no technical knowledge extremely easy. On the other a lot of it's functionality is handled in a 'non-Drupal' way, although this has got somewhat better recently.

<a href="https://www.packtpub.com/news/new-drupal-mini-books" target="_blank">Part of Packt publishing's new _Mini Drupal series_</a>

I know it's kind of tacky, but this flyer attracted my attention at <a href="https://www.ntenonline.org/eweb/DynamicPage.aspx?webcode=NTCSessionsCurrent" target="_blank">NTC12</a> and I thought it was kind of clever... If a waist of dimes that I'm sure the homeless folks of San Francisco would have appreciated...

As is usual from my blog posts, this may or may not grow as I remember things&hellip;<ul><li>The visual discrepancy between rich and poor in San Francisco is extremely stark<ul><li>Add to that, the gap between white/Asian and black/Latino is even more noticeable.</li></ul></li><li>A lot of the Not-For-Profit sector seems obsessed with money and how to make it.</li><li>The tipping culture is weird&hellip; In that people don&#39;t tip because they want to, but because they feel obliged to. Which makes tipping and the divvying up of bills an awkward and bizarrely scientific process to watch.</li><li>Americans table manners, especially the way they treat servers, are peculiar&hellip; Perhaps related to above.</li><li>Sales people very open and friendly, I assume because they want to sell you something. On the other hand, Customer service, especially civil service, quite unforgiving and unhelpful.</li><li>A lot of things in Australia aren&#39;t as expensive as people think. Especially food and fuel.</li><li>Conferences in Australia are a lot more multi-cultural, with more people from overseas and we&#39;re more interested in those from overseas.</li></ul>

Here's a quote/analogy I've been using for a while to overarchingly describe a strategy for engaging on social media that I've found helpful and descriptive.

It's simple, updates regularly, synchronises between devices almost seamlessly and for the most part it's free! <a href="https://www.evernote.com" target="_blank">www.evernote.com</a>

With Green Renters we find the iCal feed from CiviEvent (part of CiviCRM) invaluable to keep track of events and workshops we have coming up, generally we use the feed pulled into our personal iCal and Google calendars for internal organising, currently the feeds aren't available to anyone outside of staff.

I love living on the cutting edge, many times to my detriment, but it never ceases to dissuade me. So after a brief delay due to being away from home and nowhere near a backup drive (which, of course, is essential before a major system upgrade!) it was time to get my hands dirty.

At the time of writing this website isn't quite finished and maybe you can't quite tell that I love <a href="https://www.civicrm.org" target="_blank">civicrm</a>. I won't go into too much detail of why and what it is now, best you do a bit of searching and find that out for yourself.

After two weeks with staying with family, we were pretty desperate to get to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwich">Norwich</a> and hang out with friends and kick back for a few days. Hence our enthusiasm on the journey there, punctuated by the discovery of a ridiculously cheap pub whilst transferring in Peterborough, that turned from a relaxing drink to a last minute mad dash to catch a train.

I've sometimes been critical of drinking control ads in the past, generally wondering how effective they really are, but I really liked this one I found in a London toilet.

The <a href="https://www.skegnesspier.co.uk/windfarm.html" target="_blank">Skegness Wind farm</a> as you can see from the photos, they've located a wind farm in the sea, a great way to reduce NIMBYism.

I generally find that in the process of migrating a website to a new system or framework, importing and moving data is the most fraught, frustrating and troublesome part of the process. If you're moving content from a vanilla installation to another vanilla installation you might be in luck, but really, what are the chances of that?

It's amazing what you can find in the country with a little digging...

I kept noticing these silver scratch panels on some receipts in china and assumed they were just some form of official symbol but it turns out there actually a cunning behavioural change policy on behalf of the Chinese government.

China is one crazy country. Even before we left Australia, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CD0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.airchina.com%2F&rct=j&q=air%20china&ei=Em8tTsH-H4fOhAfM2bmqCw&usg=AFQjCNGNWJqlHZ88hV2xYX6QjMI1QzFf1Q&cad=rja" target="_blank">air china</a> gave us a taste of the break neck speed 'efficiency' some of the Chinese like to operate on.

Take a listen (or read) to a light hearted and 'cheesy' romantic (and slightly explicit) short story I recently wrote about Doug, who bored in his office cubicle, fantasies about Julie...

Coffee is a very personal business.

According to a list I read some years ago, I regularly use several words in my lexicon that are considered 'old fashioned'. As that list was published nearly ten years ago and I'm still using most of those words, my language must be increasingly old fashioned.

'Concept albums' generally raise the heckles of most rock music reviewers, and an album that contains an 'artistic statement' emblazoned on it's inside front cover in two different languages even more so. It seems that Ember Swift travelled to China in 2007 and felt an unnerving feeling of having been there before, of deja vu and of an unusual one-ness and comfortable familiarity, thus creating the urge and need to write an album about her experiences.

The Thornbury Theatre is one of a growing number of old community centres and theatres around Melbourne that are being turned over from their traditional purpose into the hands of the youth to do what they will with, usually using their opulent interiors to host events that the original attendees would probably greatly object to.

A lot is being said about the Diamond Sea around Melbourne and a lot is being whispered about them in front of the stage tonight. What's wrong with them? Is it the bad and overly loud mix, their seeming lack of acknowledgement of the audience or something else that is reducing their usually sparkling and lively show into a rather dull and listless experience with every song melding into the next with very little dynamics.

Some of the best musical dynamics are created by three-pieces, anyone with half an ounce of musical talent can add sound to the silences with a lot of overdriven noise. Creating a full and interesting sound with the amount of instruments a three piece can potentially play, now that's a real challenge, especially when you stick to pretty much one guitar sound and use overdubs sparingly.It's a talent that a lot of bands from Brisbane seem to possess and have formed into a sound that 'I heart Hiroshima' were one of the first to perfect and popularise in recent times, so it's refreshing to see and hear that several years, one album and extensive touring later, they're still doing it exceedingly well. 'The Rip' is their second album, clocking in at just under 45 minutes, it's a concise, snappy and 'agitated', a wonderfully descriptive description of the album taken from their own press release (a rarity indeed) that sums up the up-and-down dynamics of the songs, like a complex cocktail with many subtle undercurrents that needs a good 'agitating' before serving. A well planned and arranged blend of precise percussion that forms the core of what gives 'I Heart Hiroshima' their sparkling dynamic, no straight and simple rock beats plodding along for three minutes. Layered on top are chugging fuzzy rhythm guitars, chiming, almost keyboard like lead guitars, alternated lead vocal duties, each band member adding their own personality to each track and any vocalist who can make 'yup' contain (seemingly) so much frustrated meaning in 'Got Out' deserves special mention. 'The Rip' is not-so-much beautifully, but appropriately produced in glorious lo-fi by none other than Andy Gill (formerly Gang of Four) who were one of the principal bands to hone this sparse, stripped back genre of music the first time around, so an almost ideal pairing of past and present to create an almost flawless alternative-pop record.

Live albums are always a dangerous affair, many will question releasing one at all, why not a proper studio album, is it a stop gap, a lack of interest or commitment from band or label? Quite often it's more because live albums simply don't sound very good, the quality is shoddy, the playing lax and the whole atmosphere is lost when listening on your home stereo. Fortunately for a hardcore-punk / Metal-ish band like Mammal with an infamously high quality live show, they're usually so damn tight and technically skilled that at least two of the concerns voiced are met, the sound quality is better than some studio based recordings, whoever captured the performance deserves congratulations. The audience sounds large-ish and seems to be enjoying themselves, screaming between and during songs, however some of the inter song introductions from front man Ezekiel Ox should have possibly been left out, being cringely cheesy in places, e.g. 'Sometimes you look around yourself and all is not to your liking, Mammal does this toî, said in a strong Australian accent loses some of it's bite when heard on record, that live, in the midst of a sweaty, raucous show would have been an awesome call to arms.The album also comes with a live DVD which, whilst the technical quality of the video doesn't match the quality of the live audio, goes some way to improving the atmosphere, actually seeing limbs flailing around on and off stage giving a little more atmosphere, though a lingering taste of cheese does unfortunately still hang slightly in the air, which is often a potential problem with a band that takes themselves seriously, it may not always come off that way post event.As a release, 'Vol2 Systematic / Automatic' is a gamble, will it connect with their fan base as the band's press realise so confidently claims? Are fans willing to buy something that they attended anyway, or will they consider it a somewhat flagrant attempt to make money out of them? Mammal like breaking rules, doing things their own way and taking a chance, so from their perspective, it will be a gamble worth taking.

Somewhere along the way in the past few years of his rapid rise, Jamie T has transformed from a charming cheeky London chappy playing anywhere that would take him with only his trusty acoustic bass as company into a cockier (but still fairly charming) world travelling, eternally casual superstar. His past awkward and apologetic inter song banter replaced with the trusty How are you doing insert town name? and I'm going to need help on the next one, you guys ready?.His wordy chatty, monologue, cockney, dylanesque songs are now packed out by a full and loud band that look like they were found ablimg South London streets, the key and complex lyrics sometimes getting somewhat lost in the noise. His newer material which is less original but more suited to a band follows a current trend in British music, attempting to make every song a jagged youth anthem.

'Does it Offend you, yeah?' lively blend of electro Indie rock bombards Billboard and the tightly packed boisterous Wednesday night crowd, not letting up for one minute or allowing a second of breathing space for the crowd or the band.