Yeah, I'm still alive. One of the things sucking up my time has been beep, a joint project between Medill's Media Managment capstone project and Chicago's suburban Daily Herald newspaper. Rich Gordon gives better background over at E-Media Tidbits.
Working on this project served as a nice, real world introduction to Drupal. I've mentioned before that Drupal is a next step blogging tool. Actually, the built in blogging module is quite marginal from my perspective, especially in comparison to something like Movable Type. Example, getting a solid multi-user blog is fairly painful. (Yes, I know about taxonomies, but that's not the built-in blogging module now is it?)
HOWEVER! Drupal has a very nice extension framework. The system supports the creation of conceptually new types of content much better than Movable Type. And the ability to escape hatch and create nodes of Php code is huge, especially since such pages will automatically be integrated with the rest of Drupal's permission, logging, theming, etc. mechanisms. Theming and URL management is also well done in Drupal.
In short, I think Drupal is a great tool for breaking out of the blog model and thinking more of microcontent creation.