Back in the day, many people had a job for life. Today, the average number of jobs a person might have in their lifetime is six. In future, trends suggest we'll have 6 jobs at once.

I resemble that remark. This year I've found myself saying I have 5 jobs. 1 for each day of the week.

Mainly, I run my own business, Creative Contingencies, and have done so since 1997. But I'm also

• a member of the Open Invention Network's global licensing team,
• on the Drupal Watchdog team at Tag1 Consulting,
• on the board of the Drupal Association and also
• chair of the Drupal community working group.

I can't believe the year is nearly over. It's been a strange one for me. No key themes. Well, not that I can see yet. Maybe I need more time.

But I did a lot of travelling. A lot. More than usual.

Two trips to New Zealand, Three to the US, One to Europe, and a few interstate hops too. And I've already got Three overseas trips pencilled in for next year. It's not good for the planet, but it's always mind opening to be in a different place, outside my "normal" operating parameters. I'm particularly looking forward to going to DrupalCon Asia in Mumbai in February.

Open Source Software. Gotta love it.

I was fooling around with the second alpha release of the Bootstrap theme for Drupal8. I hit a snag, made a wish (by posting an issue to drupal.org) and Lo! and Behold! Not long after the wish was granted and a Beta was released.

If you're one of those people who uses Drupal to publish stuff online, and just want to get something up quickly without using Drupal's default Bartik theme, then you might want to take a look at Bootstrap.

I'm running a workshop at the Open Source Developers Conference in Hobart soon. It made me realise it's been far too long since I wrote about inkscape, or did a screencast. But I use this amazing tool all the time.

OSDC didn't seem to have any speaker badges, so I copied the image from their twitter account, and added words in Inkscape. It's so easy - I'll do it now, and do a quick screencast while I'm at it!

OSDC is a really fun conference - I'm looking forward to sharing some Inkscape joy!

You might want to check it out.

Communication can be surprisingly hard.

Human beings talk a lot. Well many humans do. Some less so, Some more so, but I reckon, in general, there's a lot of daily jibber jabber.

Some of that talking is light hearted "Small Talk". Some of it is world changing speeches. Some of it is the daily to and fro we need to get stuff done; at work, at play, at home.

The Drupal 8 Accelerate campaign has raised over two hundred and thirty thousand dollars ($233,519!!).  That's a lot of money! But our goal was to raise US$250,000 and we're running out of time. I've personally helped raise $12,500 and I'm aiming to raise 8% of the whole amount, which equals $20,000. I've got less than $7500 now to raise. Can you help me? Please chip in.

I often find myself describing the digital domain to people who don't live and breathe it like I do. It's an intangible thing, and many of the concepts are coded in jargon. It doesn't help that every technology tool set uses it's own specific language, sometimes using the same words for very different things, or different words for the same things. What's a page? A widget? A layout? A template? A module, plugin or extension? It varies. The answer "depends".

Analogies can be a helpful communication tool to get the message across, and get everyone thinking in parallel.

I've given a "Constructive Conflict Resolution" talk twice now. First at DrupalCon Amsterdam, and again at DrupalCon Los Angeles. It's something I've been thinking about since joining the Drupal community working group a couple of years ago. I'm giving the talk again at OSCON in a couple of weeks. But this time, it will be different. Very different. Here's why.