Archive for the ‘misc’ Category

minibar meets geomob

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

I went to Corbet Place in London yesterday night for Minibar.

MiniBar is a social evening in Shoreditch, which offers people a chance to snaffle some free beer while discussing p2p, web applications, start ups, social networking and general Web 2.0 mayhem & fandango.

photo 016I’ve heard of Minibar before, particularly from Andy and Roo, but never actually got around to going to one. In fact, the main reason that I went to this one is because it was being done as a joint event between minibar and geomob (a geo/mobile developers meetup group which I have been to before).

Despite being a newbie, I had a few ideas of what to expect. Andy described the place as a “dimly lit … brewery bar“, which pretty much sums it up. And more usefully, warned me to turn right when I arrived, to stand a decent chance of hearing the presentations – definitely a useful tip. 🙂

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Twitter Developer Nest

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

Last night, developers of twitter clients, apps and mashups came together at Sun’s Customer Briefing Centre in London for the first London twitter developer nest.

I’m not really a “proper” twitter developer, but I’ve thrown together a twitter client and a web app before, so I figured I could pretend for an evening. 😉

It was a very interesting evening, and I’ve copied my (sorry – fairly sketchy and incomplete!) notes from the evening below. If you really want to see what you missed, Chris did a great job filming all of the talks for UStream.

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BathCamp evenings

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

bathcamp T-shirt

In September last year, a barcamp was held in Bath. It was called, somewhat predictably but not unreasonably, “bathcamp“. 🙂

I blogged about it at the time, but in short it was a fascinating weekend that brought together a great group of people.

But it didn’t end there.

There will be another bathcamp event, but the organiser Mike Ellis had the very neat idea to keep the momentum going in between the full barcamp weekends with a series of monthly evening meetups.

The first Wednesday of every month, BathCamp becomes an evening event at Revolution in Bath. It works really well, keeping the sense of community going in between the full barcamps. Many turn up early, in time to have a drink and something to eat in the bar downstairs. You get a group of people all sat together, but it’s very welcoming and friendly. You can sit next to anyone there, and get involved the conversation – not always the case with every geeky meetup I go to.

At about 8pm-ish, everyone goes upstairs for an informal presentation on some tech topic of interest. Then there is a break where everyone gets themselves a drink, and talk and bounce around ideas about the presentation.

Then another (generally somewhat related) presentation from a second speaker, and another chance to talk about the topic with everyone else there. These bits make a difference – sometimes these events can drift into “turn up, listen to talk, go home”. But so far, the Bathcamp meetups have been a long way from that.

The talks so far…

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Lapland UK

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

On Friday, we took the kids to Lapland UK.

The first reaction I got when I mentioned this to people generally went along the lines of “OMG, you’re going there?! I heard about them in the news!”.

It’s not the same place. This isn’t the New Forest Lapland-themed attraction that made the headlines so spectacularly a couple of weeks ago – it’s a place in Kent.

Even their website has a banner on the top to reassure visitors saying: “Please be assured Lapland UK has NO association with Lapland New Forest”.

Hmmm… I guess they have a bit of a brand problem, at least in the short-term.

With this in mind, and as we had such a lovely day there, I thought I’d do my little bit to help their image by sharing our experience.

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A letter to Littlewoods Direct. Or why you’ve got to read the small print

Monday, December 15th, 2008

People who follow my tweets may have already heard my moaning about Littlewoods on Friday, but I’m still hacked off about it enough to post about it here too.

I have written them a letter (in the perhaps misguided belief that paper letters get more attention than emails). The contents are posted below to share my ranting and whining more widely.

Comments are very welcome… am I being too ranty and unreasonable? How much responsibility do we consumers have for reading small-print?

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Two is enough, thanks

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Warning: If you’re squeamish or easily offended, this post is probably not for you!

If you are reading this on dalelane.co.uk rather than an RSS reader, the header and photos on the right are probably a small clue that I have two small girls: a nearly-four-year-old whirling dervish of gobby bossiness, and a six-month old monster determined to be the loudest thing within miles.

I am an insufferable bore when it comes to my girls. They are awesome, and barely a conversation or a twitter goes past without me mentioning them (sorry about that, by the way).

But as much as I love them both to bits, two is enough, thanks 🙂

The plan was always to have two kids. Not sure exactly why.

I guess it’s partly because it’s what we are used to – both my wife and I each have a single sibling, so that’s what feels right.

It’s partly financial – kids are not cheap. Even with economies of scale and all, the amount of stuff you need to get for a kid is staggering, and we couldn’t afford another! And that’s just the day to day stuff – with bills like monthly day care fees for Grace that were higher than our mortgage for a long while, I can only wonder how people with big families afford it.

The difference from two kids to three kids feels bigger than the difference from one to two. For example, it’d mean needing a new car (I couldn’t fit three kids in the back of my little Fiesta). It’d probably mean a bigger house (would be difficult to squeeze a bigger family into our mid-terrace).

It’s partly time, energy and a desperate need for sleep. One child is exhausting. A second makes exhaustion a dim, fond memory. A third? There just isn’t enough caffeine in the world.

In short, a third kid would be a game-changer, and not one that we’re ready for.

This, combined with knowing that you can’t rely 100% on contraception, is all a roundabout way of explaining why we decided for me to go for a vasectomy.

Weird choice of topic for a blog post? Perhaps. But going on the philosophy of sharing experiences that might be new or interesting to others, I figured “why not?” So if you are curious to find out how you go about getting yourself neutered, read on 😉

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Five years at IBM, and a new start

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

Five years ago today: 6 August 2003, 9am. I turned up at main reception in IBM Hursley Park for my first day. I was excited, dressed far smarter than I have for work since, and had absolutely no idea what I was going to be doing.

Five years later, today is the (official!) start of my new job in IBM, and a shift in my career: I’ve joined the “Emerging Technology Services” team.

I tried to find a good description of ETS on the interwebs that I could link to, but not had any luck. I found a description on a few intranet pages, which I’ve managed to mangle below:

Part of IBM Software Group’s Strategy and Technology Division, ETS focuses on emerging technologies and how they can be used to meet business needs. They work on customer problems to create innovative, bespoke technical solutions, which can include “architectural consultancy, technical solutions, demos, proof of concepts, pilot systems, and reference architectures” combining experience of working with customers with first-of-a-kind technologies.

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last.fm for books?

Friday, August 1st, 2008

my 'goodreads' bookshelf

I’m rubbish at choosing books to read, so recommendations from friends who are better read than I am are very useful. I enjoy using last.fm as a way to discover new music that I might like, so thought I’d look to see if you could get the same for books.

I’ve found two sites that I quite like:

goodreads
This is a lovely site. Track the different books you have read, and are reading. Sort them into different “bookshelves” if you want to group them.

It’s got a ton of RSS feeds, and it’s focus absolutely seems to be to make it easier to track what your friends have read and are reading, what they like and don’t like.

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