I swear I’m alive! I just kind of disappeared for a bit.

School got really busy, and then I ran off to Paris for the Multimedia Usability Project Meeting. It was massively productive, and I got to meet a lot of really cool people I’ve known for a long time online but never met in person. Also, major thanks to Delphine for putting the whole thing together and doing a generally fantastic job. A lot of really good work was accomplished while we were there. We spec’d out a new upload form, we discussed staging areas for new uploads while licensing stuff gets sorted out, the GLAM folks talked about their interests. We had a very good group dynamic of developers and non-developers, and I think it worked out very well in the end. We talked about getting similar small-ish focus groups together in the future; we seem to get a lot done. I’m not sure how these public links work, but here’s my pictures from Paris (if you’re my friend already, they should be viewable from my profile).

Flew back to Richmond, massively jet lagged. Then I got sick. Like, really sick. As in, I ended up in the hospital for several days kind of sick. In the end, they determined I had viral encephalitis caused by the herpes virus (read the scary article). They don’t know how I got it, but the best we can guess is that my immune system was shot from being low on sleep, stressed out, etc. And since the herpes virus is in a huge percentage of the population anyway–myself included–it took advantage of my poor brain. But I’m fine now, and just trying to catch up on life.

Maybe over winter break I can finally do something with MediaWiki again. Maybe we’ll actually get 1.16 soon too ;-)