Last
year (and to my very great surprise), I was asked to go to Sydney on a
business trip during the first month into a new job. I stayed in the
Central Business District, slap-bang in the heart of the city, and
although I worked fairly solidly throughout the two weeks I was there, I also managed to make good use
of my moments of free time. Got a few friends there and a relative or two as well,
so I made sure I caught up with a few folks and saw some great sights while I
was at it - the Opera House, sunset over Harbour Bridge, Bondi and
Manly Beach, the Blue Mountains.
As I thought it would, Sydney shot up
the list of favourite cities in the world to somewhere right near the
top. I also got to set foot on Continent # 6 for the first time - just Antarctica to go!
The
job's been super busy ever since then and I also started my MA when I got
back, so there's been all sorts of stuff that I've not had much time to
catch up on. This summer's turning out to be a good chance to do some of
the catching up that has been on hold for so many months. Last month, I
finally managed to get a selection of the Australia photos online. Take
a look at the slideshow above (link) and drop a comment below if ya dig
'em. As with most of my Flickr photos, these are free to use as long as
I receive an attribution in return.
Brighton held its annual Zombie Walk today, from Victoria Gardens near the Pavilion, through town, and on to Marine Parade. Now in its fifth year and better know as Beach Of The Dead, the parade is one of many that go on around the world.
I didn't end up following the parade, but stayed in one place to get my pictures. It was a sunny day, which resulted in some good lighting on the subjects, and I was able to grab a few fine portraits before I made my way back home.
It was a three-year wait, and ultimately a short city break. But this summer, my wife and I finally managed to get what we could call our honeymoon. We had a long weekend in Barcelona - her first visit, my second - and it was well worth the wait.
Day One was a Gaudi day, with visits to Sagrada Familia, Park Güell and La Pedrera. I'd been outside the remarkable building that serves as a cathedral before, but this was my first time inside. It was fascinating to gain an understanding of how much Gaudi was inspired by nature and how that informed his work. This was demonstrated even further with the park, where the architecture was fused with the natural environment rather than just inspired by it. The roof of La Pedrera was unlike anything I'd seen before, and was a most striking example of what can be done with a building when the architect's imagination is the only limit.
Day Two took in the ocean and the hill that looks over the city. We started off with the wonders of La Boqueria, Europe's largest food market, then strolled down La Rambla to the sea, taking in an exhibition on Latin peoples at the Museu Marítim, the sights of the marina, then a cable car ride up to Montjuïc. The whole trip ended up being heavily loaded with with museums and galleries - up on the hill, we took in another two. These were Fundació Joan Miró (an artist whom I was intrigued to learn had spent some time in Japan and been greatly influenced by his time there) and Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, a seriously impressive building housing 2,000 years of Catalan art from Roman times to 20th Century photography. The day ended with a fountain show set to lights and music, in the grounds of the museum, which amusingly was also flanked by a Spanish bikers convention.
Day Three saw a longstanding ambition of my wife's realised - a visit to the Picasso Museum. With that one under the belt, we took in the neighbouring Chocolate Museum, where I learned of the role that the cocoa bean has had in the Spanish Empire. On the way out, we were rather shocked to be standing around in the street an witness a police altercation. Two cops appeared from nowhere on bikes, one started shouting at a man with no shirt on, then chased after him and knocked him to the floor - with the motorbike he was riding! The man was still on the floor when things began to flare up with other onlookers, and we decided to slink away.
The photo gallery above contains images from some of the highlights of the trip, plus a few other sights not mentioned above. Really a fantastic city, I could easily go back again and again.
August has been a pretty funny month so far. I taught my last classes to ESL students, roughly 15 years on from my first ones. I turned 40, with the joy of a surprise party thrown in to the mix. I started a new job today, at the same company that I worked for before but in a different part of it (and now as IT Trainer rather than IT Teacher). Things are going to rapidly run away with themselves before I have a chance to catch up with them.
With that in mind, I'm hoping to be able to get a few short bursts of blog post in over the remainder of month. Next month it's going to get even busier again - I'll be starting an MA at Sussex University too (part time) - so I'll hopefully be able to fit a few of the things I've been meaning to blog about in that time.
Had a visit from my mother too. What do you do when your Mum comes to town, and that town is Brighton? Why take her along to Pride, of course! We did the same thing when my wife's Mum was over a couple of years ago, and that seemed to be a hit.
Once all that was over and there was a day of sunshine to contend with too, we took a short walk over the South Downs. Beautiful weather and great for clearing the head.
I was recently introduced to Pummelvision - an online tool for making videos from photo collections - and used the service to make a video of some of my Flickr-held images of Tokyo. The service produces a snappy little clip with a choice of displaying the images 'fast' or 'very fast' (hold on to your hats, I chose 'very fast').
It's very simple to use, taking pictures from places like Facebook, Flickr or Instagram and putting them up at either YouTube or Vimeo. Once a collection of images has been chosen, Pummelvision throws them all together and syncs them with an audio clip that matches the speed of image navigation.
For a 30-second clip, it's quite nice. I'm sure that such a tool could have some effective classroom uses, such as producing a video to showcase steps of a project or something like that, but at the moment it's also fairly limited. There is only one choice of song, for example. Still, a bit of fun all the same with potentially wider uses.
I first became aware of Gil Scott-Heron around the early to mid-nineties, while I was at university, although it was a while till I actually got where he was coming from. He was often listed on posters around town as playing at something like that year's Jazz Bop or some festival or other. Regrettably, I never did see him live.
His recorded music, however, became something very special indeed. A combination of deeply soulful and funky tunes, with a killer voice and a unique ability to tell the truth in song - in ways that few others ever came close to matching. His final album came out last year (listen to it in full here) and although he was clearly sounding more frayed than in his earlier years, it was glorious to hear him producing something new and equally up to standard as the rest of his work. Turned out to be his swansong.
I now never will get the chance to see him live, but when I heard that he had died, I immediately wanted to pay some form of tribute to the man. The above video is the result. The audio track is taken from an audience recording of an NYC show from '88, shoved out into the public domain and left on archive.org. The images are largely a combination of Creative Commons images sourced from Flickr and scraps of cutting-room-floor footage from the BBC's 'Digital Revolution' doc, plus a few other bits to pad it out.
The video is probably a little scrappy, both in audio quality and in the state of the editing (both feel free to diss it in the comments), but I hope that it can make for a slight contribution to the range of other content on YouTube that serves to give those that never listened to the man a chance to do so. I also hope that for those that know him or his work well, they'll feel that this humble clip is a worthy tribute, however slight.
This set of pictures were taken at the Jardin Flambeau (Fire Garden) in St Ann's Well Gardens, Hove, as part of the 2011 Brighton Festival. It was an enchanting event, with all sorts of breathtaking fire installations and sculptures, plus an array of musical performances in near darkness - low-lit by the glow of the surrounding fires. Organised by French company Cie Carabosse, I'd never seen the likes of it before and was thrilled to have been witness to it.
Sometimes, you throw a bit of content out into the wilds of the web and it comes back with surprises. There's often no way of knowing which bits will be a hit and which'll be a miss. This one seems to have become a surprise hit.
I'm not quite sure what makes this picture such a special one, but as it's not been up long and as of today, it's my sixth most viewed picture on Flickr. Took it in Shibuya last September.
It's got a certain symmetry to it that has an appeal, but it's also just an office building with a Coke ad on top of it too. It's not a great use of light through the canvas of a camera lens either, but it's always a pleasure to go down well somewhere.
This post is my first one coming direct from Flickr. An experiment, if you will. It might need a little formatting afterwards, but it could well be an interesting place to blog from...
The above set is a gallery of pictures shot today at the Brighton Heroes Run on Hove seafront. The event has been going since 2005 and is organised by the charity Passing It On, in aid of schools in Africa.
It was good to see so many people getting into the spirit of things, and there were some fabulous costumes on display. Obviously, there were plenty of Supermen, Batmen and Spidermen. Dig a little deeper and you'll find people dressed as characters from more obscure cartoon series. Even the Flintstones mobile made an appearance!
Sometimes life just moves faster than you can keep up with. Perhaps it's the times, perhaps it's my age, perhaps it's my ongoing refusal to stop taking on more than several things at a time that I don't get enough of a chance to reflect on them. Whatever it is, I seem to be constantly running to catch up with my shadow, which remains too far ahead of me. It's been a pretty whirlwind six months - finished the DELTA, then there was the Arab Spring, then the Japanese earthquake, IATEFL, a Masters application, now the Brighton Festival. A full-on wrapping up of my thirties anyway. All good.
One of the things in my backlog of 'stuff to get out there' has been a bunch of pictures from my last trip to Japan - shot during a few hours walking around Shibuya. Strangely enough, they almost seem like images from a different world now, a pre-earthquake one. Anyway, better out than languishing on the old hard drive anyway. There's more to come from that trip at some point - probably drip fed out over the next six months!
Images can define an era more than a multitude of words. Even in our Digital Age, notable for the challenges of information overload and multiple media on demand, a single image can still have a deep impact. The United States has long known this and has often demonstrated its power through a single photograph - the hoisting of a flag over Iwo Jima or a man on a moon being two prime examples of an outward exertion of this power and a napalmed Vietnamese girl running towards the camera or an airplane hitting a skyscraper being images that critiqued or challenged this power.
Whether the picture given above joins this canon remains to be seen, but I would say that the image - taken (with permission) from the White House's Flickr profile - is one that speaks volumes about a blip in the American narrative that will be long remembered. It captures if not the moment but at least one of the moments during the killing of Osama Bin Laden, which was reportedly being livestreamed to the watching crowd via a camera in a Navy Seal's helmet. A mediated virtual reality, given meaning and validity by the screen the action appears on.
The audience for this 'reality show' sit rapt, eyes transfixed on the action unfolding on the screen in front of them. It could be a football game, looking at the expressions on the faces, but we the viewer of the viewers know better than that. The President is almost squeezed in the corner, a bit player in the room. His Secretary of State wears the tension in the room more visibly than the other assembled military personnel and support staff. Laptops and coffee cups cover the table and 'the winning goal' is yet to be scored.
What a contrast Obama makes with his predecessor, both in the images that he chooses to project of himself and the approach he takes to vengeance. Of course, he remains the President of the United States and 'killing the bad guys' is his job (or at least acting as commander of those that do). Guantanamo is still open. Afghanistan drags off. But Obama is no George Bush.
A chapter closed yesterday in the global narrative currently being told by the United States that began before the planes hit the World Trade Center. If history teaches us anything though, it should be that the story is far from over...
I took the plunge a little while ago and went for issuing my Flickr-hosted photos under the least restrictive CC licence (a simple Attribution one), with the intention of allowing people to make use of them as they see fit. This essentially means that anyone can make use of the images without having to ask my permission, so long as they give a credit and (ideally) some kind of link back to the original work. The theory is that the more they are opened up, the more likely it is that other people will make use of them. The more others make use of them, the more my name or work gets spread around, bringing more visitors back my way (which is basically the essence of Creative Commons licences).
It's not immediately easy to keep a track on who does actually use these items. Ideally, whenever somebody uses your work, they would tell you and you'd be able to keep track of what has been used. This would add more levels of restriction to the use of the licensed work though, which runs counter to what a culture of sharing is trying to encourage. Instead, I believe that good 'CC practice' is to tell someone when you've used their work, expecting nothing back in return but embracing it when someone tells you 'Hey, I did something with your picture/tune/words (delete as appropriate)'. Admittedly I've not done it that often when I've used another person's CC-ed works, but have had a positive response on the occasions that I have.
Stumbling over my Flickr stats the other day, I found out that one of my pictures had indeed been used in the manner I was making them available for - in the legal parlance, a 'derivative work' had been created. Having never previously made any knowing contributions to the culture of steampunk, I was intrigued to find that a photo of a Nagano ski-slope I'd taken had made its way into an image at steampunkwallpaper.com - a place I'd never knowingly have stumbled across. There's an intriguing element added to the original picture that I would have loved to have seen first time around!
Have you had any interesting re-uses made of your work?
I've got some stuff coming up here soon on using Creative Commons licenses, so thought that I'd put money were mouth is and open up the content of this blog for licensing. I'm not really sure how much blog content gets used out on the wilds of the open Web, but there's a chance of finding out with this little experiment. My pictures at Flickr are already CC-licensed, so I can now add this blog to them as repurposable content.
Have gone for the least restrictive licence, a simple Attribution one. If you want to use any content from this blog, in part, in full or for remixing, please attribute it to Dom Pates and link back to http://www.patesonline.net - full terms available at the bottom of the site.
Kicking off this year is a gallery of a few moments stolen from last year. Contained in the above slideshow are a selection of Brighton pictures that never made it online last year, including of the Children's Parade that kicks off the festival, the Brighton Beach Boys from their concert at St. George's Church in Kemptown, snaps from Hove Champagne Festival and a few obligatory ones of the beach.
Over on my Flickr site, there's a few new pics of Tokyo too, coming before a stack more that should be due soon.
Dear readers, the stats tell me there's quite a lot of you out there, and from all over the place too. Do drop by and say hello from time to time - I'd love to hear from you!
Although I lived in Brighton for about 11 years prior to moving to Tokyo, I never really saw much snow in this town. This weekend, that all changed. Brighton is one the parts of the UK that experienced much higher than usual snowfall and it makes for a beautiful cityscape. You can follow live reports of other snowfall around the UK by following the Twitter hashtag #uksnow.
Yesterday, I went down to the beach with my camera and found that it too was covered in snow. To my delight (and to be expected for an arty place like this), the seafront was full of sculptures - snowmen, snowwomen and even a large snowcat. The above photo set shows some of what Brighton looks like in the snow.
All of the pictures are issued under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0). This means that people are free to share (copy, distribute or transmit) or remix (adapt) the pictures, so long as they meet the following conditions:
Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.
For attributing photos, please use 'Globalism Pictures' and link back to the following URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/globalismpictures/
I also took the plunge this week with the rest of my photos on Flickr and issued that same license for all of them. There are plenty more Brighton pictures, extensive collections of images from Japan, plus sets from several other cities and locations around the world.
Feel free to use them in blogs, flyers and posters, websites, presentations or other similar ventures, and please get in touch if you'd like to use a picture for commercial purposes (I'm happy to do that too, just would prefer to be asked before an image is used!).
Rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights.
Notice — For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
Call it going viral, call it protocol migration, call it global memes or whatever you will. Nowadays, it's not just corporations that spread across the planet at dizzying rates. There are also an increasingly large number of ideas, events and happenings that start somewhere and through a combination of 'being a good idea' + 'the existence of the Internet', spread across the world rapidly. This trend is becoming more and more interesting as it develops, both in terms of the emergence of a globalised yet decentralised world culture and with the blurring or even disappearance of barriers between the online and offline worlds.
One example is Pecha Kucha, which I wrote here about the last Brighton event. Another is TEDx, a larger scale and more formalised format of presentation event that blends sharing knowledge with franchising to grow the TED community and the reach of 'ideas worth spreading'. Yet another is BarCamp, the latest Brighton version of which I spent most of this weekend at.
an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants who are the main actors of the event.
Wikipedia describes it as 'an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants.' This also works to define an unconference, where participants all contribute to the agenda which is set at the beginning of the day and often changed during the course of the event.
I attended my first unconference in London last year, but never quite managed to get round to blogging about it (find the full public released book for the 'One Media Unconference' here). The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California in 2005 - organised in less than a week, from concept to event, with 200 attendees. Since then, BarCamps have been held in over 350 cities around the world and six continents (anyone up for BarCamp Antarctica?).
BarCamp Brighton is now on its fourth event. While previous ones were held out on campus at the University Of Sussex (where the birth pangs of the modern internet were first unveiled by its midwives, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn), this year's event was switched to the Old Music Library in the centre of town.
The venue was very appropriately Brighton, looking like a squatted art gallery, with dusty floors, chunks of plasterboard missing from walls and ceilings, and crammed with exciting, esoteric or exotic street art and sculptures. Given that this town always tends to make effective use of abandoned space, particularly in times of recession, it was a most suitable place for a geek meetup. It also enhanced the informal nature of the event, rather than putting the happenings into a more sterilised environment.
The Beast tries to escape through the Old Music Library window
Given that from Monday to Friday these days, I deck myself out in a suit to go to work, it was good to don my geekware and slip into the crowd for a while, who were a motley crew of techies, creatives, Brighton geeks, amateurs, professionals and the self-taught, leftovers from the dConstruct conference and visiting BarCampers from out of town.
What is BarCamp Brighton? - a few words from a couple of the organisers
As with most conferences, the common complaint was that there was too much going on of interest to be able to take it all in. There was certainly plenty to take in. Given that it was my first BarCamp, I wanted to get a feel for the thing before diving in and playing a more active role. The first sessions that I sat in on were outside ones, while the sun was still shining. Steve Purkiss hosted a session on developing the building into a more permanent hub for Digital Media in Brighton (Google Group here), while Richard Vahrman took a nostalgia trip through analogue computing and his part in its downfall.
Heading back into the building, I caught a little of a talk from Melinda Seckington, who blogs as missgeeky and was offering up tips and tricks. I picked up a few interesting snippets, such as inviting guest posters being a good way to grow a blog, and the point that a large number of blogs serve particular niches but as readers tend to have a wide range of interests, it's not a bad idea to reflect that in the content provided. There was also a free wine-tasting event going on as part of the Brighton Food and Drink Festival, so I ducked out of the place for a while to join my wife in tasting samples. Sometimes, one is really spoiled for choice in what to do in Brighton!
Lunchtime sandwich breakout
A difference with the London One Media event was that hosts seemed a little more surprised when participants left their talk to wander off into another one. One Media was notable for participants behaving just like they would in online chatrooms, by dropping in and out of conversations, contributing nothing, something or plenty to a discussion. In Brighton, it seemed that there was a bit more of the feeling that it was not so much 'the done thing' to disappear when someone else had got going on their presentation. There must be all manner of other varieties of social behaviour at other BarCamps that reflect the local area more.
The afternoon included a session on Web Typography from digitalblonde, Visualising Home Energy Use with Laurence and a tour of The Skiff, one of several coworking spaces in Brighton and Hove. The first session went through a brief history of type families from the fifteenth century to today and covered general rules on font usage, which was rather handy.
The second one had plenty of useful information on how much energy is used in the home and different ways to monitor it. Items like air conditioning, fridge freezers and plasma screen TVs consume a lot of power, and desktop computers suck up more than laptops. There are, however, items such as smart meters that can be used to monitor one's home energy use directly, meaning that it's a lot easier to see when you're using too much or have left something on that doesn't need to be.
Costing around £50, they can be clamped on to existing mains supplies to monitor the data, which is then fed into a PC and then some sort of visualisation software. This means that surges are easier to spot and users can get to know how much energy they use (rather than just waiting for a utility bill that will likely charge them for using energy that they have to waste). Useful resources to find out more include Google PowerMeter and Current Cost for monitoring, and Pachube or Sensorpedia for visualising.
In The Skiff's basement, with extra large cushions
The Skiff was very near to the main venue, so the tour was a short trot away. Described as 'like BarCamp every day', it is modelled on San Francisco's Citizen Space, one of the many initiatives that bubble out of the US East Coast's prime location for the blending of the tech/creative worlds. Taking the best elements of a coffee shop and of a workplace, these are combined to provide a sociable, productive and affordable space for independent workers to do their thing without having to stay at home stuck in front of a screen all day. They also have a webcam that shows live whether a desk is available or not. People drop by to network, participate in activities like robot building or join in with some of the events the space has been able to host.
Ambling back after the tour, I got down to a bit of networking and mingling, given that the main workshops seemed to be winding down by then. I had a very interesting chat with the organiser of a UK version of BarCamp Africa (and was surprised to later find out that there are several BarCamps all over the continent), before heading upstairs to find out what all the noise was about - discovered myself amidst a geek singalong of Foreigner's 'I Want To Know What Love Is' (see video here).
Pizza frenzy begins
By then, all that remained was to hang out and eat pizza, drink beer and wait for the musical entertainment to start. An intriguing feature at this stage was the way that information was delivered. Pizza, beer and band times got juggled around a little, and given the informality of the event, it wasn't necessary to go around making big announcements about time changes. As all participants were permanently clamped to some sort of mobile web-enabled device, all that was needed was to tweet the information using the '#bcb4' hashtag. That way, anyone could follow a live information stream about the event and contribute to it themselves by tagging their own tweets in the same way. Twitter Search became a powerful tool for real-time information dissemination.
Described by cminion as 'Brighton's geekiest band', an accolade later wistfully refuted to me by drummer toastkid, 100 Robots took the floor as house band when all work-related stuff was over. An electrorock trio reduced to a duo for this performance, they let go in the subterranean basement to the gathered crowd, who dug them very much. The material was fast-paced, it rocked and included songs about subjects like the recent financial meltdown, the election in Iran and a gene therapy cure for AIDS.
'Deep Underground' by 100 Robots, live at BarCamp Brighton 4
With the day clearly done I made my way home, not having the desire to sleep on a dusty floor in an abandoned building when I had a bed to go back to. The next day, I was due to pop my BarCamp cherry and hold my own session. After all, everyone's expected to make some sort of contribution at these things.
Day Two
The agenda for the day
The second day was shorter yet (for me) deeper, as I dared to get a little more hands-on. The first session I ended up in, almost by accident but actually being one of the most fun, was titled 'Using Agile to Build a BarCamp Theme Park' and was hosted by Jez Nicholson. Agile is something that I'd heard of before but didn't really know a great deal about. Essentially, it is a software development methodology (see original Manifesto for founding principles), but seems to be a way of working that is very suited to the connected post-Web world we are all building these days.
Working with physical tools (plasticine, pipe cleaners and string) to meet a client brief rather that virtual ones, it made it easy to follow the operating methodology. The team that I was part of were tasked with producing 'something to do with Google' as part of the 'theme park' and came up with the 'Google Search Bar', as seen below. Although the picture may not convey the entire project that fully, it was fun and an effective exercise in collaborative teamwork to a timescale.
As with the other participants, I got rather caught up in the exercise, to the extent that I almost missed my own session. Titled 'Shall I Give My Stuff Away For Free?...or The Creative Commons Dilemma', I decided that I wasn't going to use my slot to present my expertise in one area or another (my skills are widely but thinly spread), but instead try to crowdsource a solution to a quandry I've set myself (in other words, ask some other people what they would do in a similar situation).
Full slideshow of my pictures from BarCamp Brighton 4
I have almost 2,500 pictures hosted on my Flickr site. I tend to get a good amount of views most days and have occasionally had people ask me to use them in their blogs or websites. However, I'd like it if this resource were put to greater use and get a wider audience, perhaps with the possibility of even covering the costs of a Flickr Pro account or at least driving more traffic back to my other sites. Therefore, I've been debating with myself whether to issue them all under a Creative Commons licence.
'A Shared Culture - Saving the world from failed sharing'
What is Creative Commons? It's a form of licencing that offers an alternative to full copyright and which enables increases sharing and improved collaboration. Essentially, while a content creator retains the copyright to their work, they also allow other people to use, share or remix that work, thus giving a bigger audience for the original piece. It's all very well creating great work, but if no-one knows about it (increasingly more difficult with the vast volumes of material available on the Net) an artist doesn't get anywhere with their work. As Tim O'Reilly said:
Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
There are six kinds of licence. These are Attribution, Attribution Share Alike, Attribution No Derivatives, Attribution Non-Commercial, Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike, Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (further information about each licence can be viewed here). The discussion went well, with contributors giving me good advice based on their own experiences of using these licences. I was even thanked at the end for 'one of the more interesting sessions' at BarCamp, which I was pretty pleased with. After giving it much thought and throwing the debate open to the crowd, I decided to go ahead with freeing all my photos. One thing that I still have to decide is which licence to use, but that's an issue for another post!
The remaining sessions that I ended up in - all very enjoyable - were on haiku and other forms of Japanese poetry, fetishism (the emotional value we attach to our possessions rather than sexual preferences - thanks Ellen!) and differences between Western and Eastern styles of animation.
At session end
How was it for you?
General consensus garnered from conversations and the tweetstream seemed to be that it was a very enjoyable event, with a range of great sessions, an amazing venue and a lot of appreciation for the hard work put it by the organisers plus the back up support from the sponsors (Paypal, Yahoo! Developer Network, The Guardian Open Platform, Metranet, Madgex and Vodafone My Web) for enabling it to happen.
It was also fascinating to be a part of a localised version of a global movement, and will be most intriguing to see where this BarCamp thing goes in the future. I'll certainly be signing up for BarCamp Brighton 5. It goes to show that if you're in need of an answer, geek and ye shall find!
+++++
Appendix
Obviously, at such an event it's impossible to see everything. I've put a small handful of some of the content from sessions I missed but which have since gone online below. If you have something that was presented at BarCamp Brighton 4 and would like it included here, please drop me a line through this blog and I'll update the post.
A mention here to other attendees that haven't been covered above. Again, if you were at the event and would like your name, Twitter page or blog link included here, drop me a line through this blog and I'll update the post. Likewise, if you are linked to on here and would like the link removed, get in touch. Apologies to anyone missed out - I think everyone appreciated everyone's contributions!
Comments on this post also highly appreciated...:)
With a little bit of time to myself this week, I had all sorts of plans for making effective use of the time. In the end, life rather got in the way of my plans and I didn't get anywhere near as much done as I'd wanted to. However, I did at least manage to get a few hundred pictures uploaded that have been hanging around waiting to be shared with the world for a couple of months. As usual, they've all gone up on my Flickr site.
This album is a short one that may in time grow. Before I left Scarborough, I took a couple of PCs apart in order to destroy the hard drives (which is a really difficult thing to do, even with a hammer - they're pretty solid). I found a kind of mysterious beauty in the parts and bits of broken kit so took some pictures of them. It's not an original view I'm sure, but I felt that motherboards and chips resemble streets and cityscapes in miniature and was keen to try and capture that.
I took some shots of cables and wiring today, which I'll add to this album if they come out good enough.
Shortly after my wife and I moved down to Brighton, we spent a sunny Sunday in the rather pleasant village of Rottingdean, just a little further along the coast. While she had some company to keep, I took a wander around the village with my camera.
It was very a quaint place and somewhere that I hadn't really explored much in the past. A real old feel to it, with a sense that time might just have stopped there. It also has a famous windmill up on the hill that overlooks the village, setting itself out as a local landmark.
Her mother is also visiting at the moment, over from Japan. Aside from catching up with family, this also gives us a good opportunity to go out and do some touristy things too. I've chalked up two UK firsts this month.
The first of the above albums is taken from an afternoon spent at the Brighton Carnival 2009. It was a glorious day weatherwise and I'd never seen my hometown's stab at a splendid parade before. Admittedly, this particular version began in 2007 (when I was living in Tokyo), but it seems there have been carnivals in Brighton on and off since 1923.
We had a great vantage point, right near the tail end of proceedings, and got to see the whole thing. I was very impressed with the fabulous costumes that people went past in and we all got swept up in the lively atmosphere.
Last weekend, we got in the car and trooped off to Britain's best-known contribution to world heritage - the mighty Stonehenge. Again somewhere I'd never been, it was pretty impressive. More in a conceptual sense and a 'How did they do that?' sort of way I suppose, because when you get there it really is just a stone circle on an open plain surrounded by hordes of tourists. Mind you, on the stone circle front, there's not really anything else to beat it!
Not too far away from this country's most ancient piece of heritage was Avebury, another set of standing stones from roughly the same era. There were far fewer people there and the stones were more spread out, but it was a great little add-on for the day out. Pictures from both places can be found in the album above.
One more before calling it a day. The Brighton album has now almost doubled in size, with the addition of several new shots taken from this year's Brighton Festival and some summer beach fun too.
If you like any of the pictures, do please feel free to head over to the page and leave a comment - all input is much appreciated!
I'm in a short period of transition at the moment. It's a positive one and in the right direction (after being in limbo for too long), but it means I'm only with very intermittent internet access for now.
Having the tap turned off for a few weeks certainly makes me realise how much of my life I usually spend online. It's actually quite nice in a way. The birds seem to sing a little more brightly and I've been interacting with people that live much more of their lives offline. I'm still rather itching to get back on though.
The first year back in the UK was spent in Scarborough, on the North East coast of England. It's a place that is not entirely without its charms, but after the thrills of five years in Tokyo, was a significant comedown. Browse through the pictures below to get a bit of a feel for the place:
After six years away from my birthplace and the town where I also spent my twenties, I have now returned to Brighton, with wife in tow. We're about to get ourselves set up a little more solidly. It's going to make a radical difference to being stuck out on a limb in Yorkshire or rushing headlong through the madness of the metropolis, and is suiting us both very well so far already. I hope to get a bit more involved with Brighton's netheads too, but all in good time.
In a fortuitous piece of timing, we've arrived in town bang in the middle of the Brighton Festival too, giving a whole stack of things to see and do. For non-British readers of this, the pictures below will give you an idea of this fair English seaside city I am now calling home again.
I won't write too much now as this is just a snatched moment online amidst all the mass of sorting out of a new life. When the dust has slightly settled, I'm hoping that this blog will gain a new lease of life. Until then, I offer a final group of pictures from the last place that I called home before returning here - the city that marked such a major turning point in my life - Tokyo.
