Toast IT

Lately, I've taken to using my Pocket PC device as a camera at my Toastmasters meetings.

This week, I'm looking forward to tackling one of the issues that so far has kept me from moving Toast IT Toastmasters from the current (lame) website to a new one I'm building in Drupal. The problem has been that while there is a module for signing up for nodes, there is no module that does the same thing for CCK user reference fields. (Well, that's the one I'm tackling, anyway. There are others, but not as important.)

Wow, was November ever a hectic month for me. Between working on Toast IT and TIGC I didn't even make it to 10k words on my NaNoWriMo entry.

In the end, though, Toast IT is doing fine (in fact, probably the best it's been since I became club president). TIGC is unfortunately on hiatus now, due to organizational issues that I won't get into (as well as OMDC scheduling their own game development event at the same time as ours, which certainly didn't help).

And so, after three weeks without blog posts, I'm finally writing in here again. So it might actually be worthwhile to keep an eye out on the site again! Especially since I'll be posting my NaNoWriMo entry up here shortly. (EDIT: It's up.)

For those of you who actually read this blog, my profuse apologies for my horrible lack of posting over the last month. While some of you might think it has to do with my novel for NaNoWriMo, the truth is that many things have been getting in the way. If it were just my NaNoWriMo entry, I'm sure that my wordcount would be much higher than it is right now.

This is a bit old in the telling, but my Competent Communicator award from Toastmasters came in the mail yesterday, along with two Advanced Communication manuals. I completed my ten speeches at the end of September, but getting my award application in was somewhat delayed, leading to the reception of the award and manuals being about a month later. (On the other hand, two weeks is the shortest time I've seen Toastmasters International ship something this big!)

At last night's Toast IT meeting, I finally completed my Competent Communicator manual, giving an insprational speech almost off the cuff to complete project 10. I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn't figure out how to express it when preparing the speech, so when I stood up to present, everything just came out unprepared. And yet, brilliance! I was amazed at how well it came out. Although it wasn't perfect (no speech ever is) I think I did a great job for a speech with very little preparation.

Well, it's the first day after Labour Day. And that means that kids are back in school, summer is only a couple weeks away from ending, and Toast IT Toastmasters is returning from its own summer break! As usual, the meetings are at Metro Hall (55 John St. at King) but we've only got a small room for today's meeting. Still, we are in regular sized rooms for the meetings following, and I'm still on track to complete my Competent Communicator before the end of the month. That means two speeches, one next week and one on the 18th or 25th.

Over at TIGC, we've announced new dates for the conference. It's been a while in the works, but all sorts of logistical issues (as well as issues with Toast IT) have been holding up the arrangements and announcement. I'm glad that it's finally out of the way, but there's more to come on that front, as well as for Toastmasters.

While I've not been able to do much development lately, things have been keeping me quite busy recently. With the computer I'm currently using, it takes a lot to do a little, but I am getting a bit of work done on my projects (mainly redesigning them since I've given up all the old code for dead). I've also been doing a bit of work on the site, such as adding Twitter support (check out the Current Activity section on the sidebar), and figuring out how to package Freebasic for distribution with Ubuntu.

I opened up a Toastmasters meeting for the first time as club president last night, and was I nervous! It was a really strange feeling. This hasn't been the first time I've opened up a meeting of Toast IT, but it was the first time in my new officer role. Still, as stressful as it was at the beginning, the experience was exhilarating and fun.