I totally agree that Drupal falls short when it comes to "out of the box" support for image/video integration. I find it kind of baffling, actually. Drupal is so wonderfully flexible for developers, but fails so completely at this issue. And for anyone who builds websites for clients who want to use their new CMS to maintain their content, the terrible image/video integration issue is bound to come up. I just don't understand the line of thinking that led to the conclusion that good i/v integration shouldn't be built in.

My (web design) company has switched over to Drupal for all of our clients' websites because of its flexibility, but we're still struggling to get the i/v integration up to a solid, consistent level. Like you, CCK, views, image, and panels have also be come part of our "standard library." The flexibility of Drupal makes it an easy sell to potential clients (assuming that their project is appropriate for Drupal, of course)... but the i/v issue can be something of a deal-breaker if the developers don't know how to bring it up to an acceptable level.

If the burden of providing adequate i/v support is going to remain on the developer, I'd like to see a third-party i/v support module that mimics the way the base WordPress system handles the issue. WordPress, for all its failings, handles i/v support better than any other open-source CMS that I've seen.

The urban sprawl here is phenomenally bad. Particularly up in the North end. On the other hand, if you want to live/work downtown in the old part of the city (as I do), you can do so without every going up to the North End. More importantly it seems like the people from the North End stay up in their end of the city. I'm not sure if they're scared of the downtown or what, but it doesn't bother me at all. ... As for the line in TFA about how nobody in Nanaimo actually knows about the extent of the Google-age of our town, I can confirm this. I work in a 35-person tech company here in Nanaimo and I'll bet that no one in my office knows about this. It's pretty funny to learn about it by reading it on Slashdot.