Garrett's well placed to give this talk, having been an administrator of evolt.org and instrumental in the now very successful Oxford Flickr group, which has recently exhibited in central Oxford. He's also fresh from discussing these very issues at the Leeds GeekUp in 20/20 form, so it should be pretty exciting. If not, then I know where he lives.

Brillskills. OGN16 is shaping up to be pretty darn fine, though I do say so myself. Be there, or don't, fool.

Interestingly, we've ended up with common threads through the two quite different keynote talks. Fintan Galvin, who's talking about the semantic web and its effect on marketing strategies on the web we're more at home with, will be explaining how the former will change the way we think about such priorities as SEO with regard to the latter; along the way he'll be mentioning Drupal, which is an ideal solution to a whole host of web content problems. Meanwhile, Jeni Tennison will talk about a new initiative in open UK government, data.gov.uk, which is currently in closed beta and uses a complex stack of technologies including... Drupal and RDF! RDF takes centre stage in the forthcoming Drupal 7 release, so more by luck than judgment our common topic is a pretty hot one.

Of course there's microslots and the Pitch too---contact me if you want to volunteer for the sixty-second open-mic Pitch, as we've still got some spare slots---and we've got sponsorship to make sure the whole evening is not just free as in beer, but free as in... other beverages that are available. The Guardian Open Platform are sponsoring drinks again, and Apress have promised us some books for the book raffle. Torchbox is as usual very kindly sponsoring my time, venue costs and infrastructure for the night. Thanks to all our sponsors for their generosity.

Almost everything is in place, which means I might get away with a few days off before the night, but I promise to turn up on the 25th fit and rested. Assuming I'm not still stranded in Birmingham New Street. But then how likely is that, really?

We try to always have a book raffle at the end of each Oxford Geek Night, where anyone who's stuck a business card in our magic business-card box gets a chance to win one of several books donated by a generous sponsor. So thanks for Apress for stepping up to the crease and fielding a whole over of books in our direction for OGN14: we're guaranteed a great selection of books for local geeks, and another great reason for coming along to OGN14. How can you not?

In fact, after I came back from conference and waded through my emails (sorry for anyone who had to wait forever for a response) I realised that we'd ended up having a surplus of microslots. But I've been mean; I've been cruel; I've been sending a lot of slightly frantic emails. And the end result is that we've probably got a couple of potential microslots already lined up for OGN15 in November anyway. See? Nothing gets wasted at an OGN, especially not good, locally grown ideas and talent. The upshot of all of this is that both keynotes and microslots are confirmed for OGN14.

Speaking of local talent, we've still got spaces on The Pitch, which is our sixty-second open-mic session. You can say whatever you like for a full minute: introduce yourself or your company; advertise a vacancy, product or service; discuss a neat idea you had; announce a conference or local meet-up: anything, really. If you're interested email me at jpstacey.info or find @jpstacey on Twitter.

Otherwise: stick OGN14 in your diary for Wednesday 23 September. That's in just over two weeks' time! Turn up, kick back with a beer, and get ready for some extra full-on chatting. Grr!

Much of the changes do actually impact on clients: they help to bring in things like content delivery networks (e.g. Amazon S3) more easily, and improve permissions systems to the point where there's less custom work required to get things to do what you want to do. In short, now that webchick's talk has convinced me that D7's going to be pretty exciting, it's time for us at Torchbox to convince our clients. Or at any rate get ourselves more familiar with D7, to try to ensure smoother transitions of our development teams to the new ways of working.

I've been trying to keep up the live blogging of the event, although webchick's lightning-fast delivery nearly killed me. Props to Baris Wanschers for also live-blogging and hopefully filling in the gaps I've left.

Last night we all went to the Rue de Cannettes for various food and drink: crêpes and cider, beer, wine. There's photos on the Flickr DrupalCon pool among other places. Tonight is the Drupal UK meetup at the Le Financier pub (and then moving elsewhere, if I have anything to do with it.)

I'm also hoping to help out with the Saturday code sprint. Tuesday's sprint faltered a bit at the start (although it was fun when we had some raw issue numbers to work on and it all started moving) so I hope to help out in making Saturday's a bit smoother. The starting point could be Dries' "ten carefully crafted exceptions" so as soon as Bryan sticks the photo of that particular slide up then I'll make a start on that.

All in all, I'm having great fun. It only takes a few dozen developers to reach critical mass on enjoying yourself within the context of a project: Drupal has 800+ enthusiastic attendees at this conference, and you can feel the energy in the air. Or maybe that's the smell from the university kitchens.... Anyone want the rest of my boiled courgettes? I was thinking of becoming a freegan anyway.