maemo.org - Talk - Barcamp Manchester day out

Barcamp Manchester 2
part 1 (Saturday)

Last week I took part in the latest Manchester Barcamp organised at the Contact Theatre (#bcman2), this update is a little lagged because on the Monday I started job @ Collabora.

http://liqbase.net/bcman2/20091107_017.jpg

Arriving in the morning there was the usual throng of people comprising regular campers and new people alike.
After speaking to some folks and grabbing a couple of essential cups of coffee it was time to head into space 1 for our initiation.

one thing, IT needs more beatboxing.
the intiiation was livened up by an impromptued rap about tech from our host involving beatboxing the internet

(including all the 404s)

then it was time to meet the people near us...
we swapped badged and learnt a bit about our neighbour before pretending to be them to the next person, was terribly confusing but fun!

the sessions during the day took place in a strange combination of spaces and dressing rooms, heres the map:
(google maps can't help here, I just took a photo so I could remember)
http://liqbase.net/bcman2/20091107_007.jpg

it was time to build the wall!
http://liqbase.net/bcman2/20091108_002.jpg

For Saturday, I chose a nice middle of the day slot to give an intro the N900, it was really cool and I was asked lots of questions and we ran through the system really well and people played for ages and the session continued afterwards as usual.

People were impressed by the device and its capabilities as well as my enthusiasm at what we can make it do now and in the future :)

during the day, there was a live tweet display on the wall in the main area.
http://liqbase.net/bcman2/20091107_026.jpg

I saw some cool presentations (and missed some I wanted to see too! there was so much going on)

There were 2 sessions about the arduino and there was even an interactive exhibit which blew bubbles when you sent it a tweet!
I went to a great little presentation about polygen which is an app for generating automatic texts based on a grammar, its sort of an inverted compiler which takes the rules and produces real text.
looks very useful for automatically generating real looking random code ;)

ice cream and pizza.
we had ice cream in Manchester in November.
it was very cool (literally) and well received.

the pizza was even better, there was 10s of pizza boxes all delivered and containing hundreds of slices of heavenly pizza.

after a few more sessions the night crew started to take over and it was time for me to head back home for the evening (living nearby was great)

part 2 (Sunday) to come..