Melinda & Cristiano

Don’t want to wait for BarCampLondon3? Go to BarCampBrighton!

During BarCampLondon2 some people came up with the idea to setup more frequent BarCamps throug the UK, and one of the first places people came up with was Brighton. I personally don’t know that much about Brighton but many people at BarCampLondon2 seemed to be from there so it seems like the place to be.

Register at Upcoming quick because there are only 60 to 80 places and already 59 registrations. Thanks to Dan for noting this BarCamp to me an Ian Forrester and the others for (again) setting up a BarCamp in the UK.

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Since moving to London in January we have been trying to get broadband in our home. One problem was that we first needed a UK bank account to order a connection. Once (after 2 weeks) this was arranged, we ordered broadband with NTL (now Virgin Media) because cable internet saved us the cost of a unnecessary BT phone line (£11 per month). A fucked up company as NTL is, they didn’t bother sending us an email to confirm when they would come to install the cable, but after some calls they could tell me that it would take them three weeks.

When the guy finally came to install the broadband he couldn’t figure out how to (he was not quite a genius anyway) as we life in a flat. When he told me “he had to come back another day” I decided to call NTL, cancel, and quickly order some “normal” broadband with Orange. Orange also managed to be quite unclear in their after sales support but at least everything eventually was clarified by email.

On the Orange site it says that it would take them at most 10 days to connect you, which later on was changed to at least 10 working days. So after two weeks we finally got an email that all should work. Strangely their CD+manual was quite well assembled but totally failed to do the job. Manually connecting with a LAN cable to the router I managed to figure it all out, and now we have internet.

We still have two problems though. First of all they promised at most 8MB but later on they could only deliver 2MB. Now their site said that the speed might “be subjective to the quality of your telephone line”, but I more or less expected a maybe 6MB or 4MB line. Does anyone know if I can get a discount for such a setback in speed?

Epilogue: NTL was so upset that I canceled, that it took them two fucking weeks to do a follow up call trying get me back to them. After a short discussion with the salesperson who almost tried to force feed me a broadband package I decided to brutally make clear that they were inconsiderate morons who were unable to understand the concept called “service”. The sales person hung up.

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One good reason to have Twitter is to subscribe to Tom Morris’ special Twitter accounts that give scrape the London Tube status and post them on Twitter. When you activate mobile updates, you can have the latest Tube updates on you mobile phone. Cool how these kind of “mashups” (buzz-word alert) prove more useful than most attempts of the actual public transporters.

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One of the first people I met at BarCamp was David Hayward who was playing with a Nintendo DS equiped with a motion sensor. On the second day I atteded his talk about the effects of AI in games, and I was amazed with his “hand drawn slides” which was a style I recognized from a post once at PresentationZen (can’t find the link at the moment, but I will keep looking).

When I later on talked with David he tolled me that his was actually not how he intended his slides to be but just a result of bad preparation. The slides where actually handdrawn on some paper and shot with his nice DSLR camera in the gravel between some plants. I still think it brings some kind of Zen-garden style to the slides and it proves that you don’t always need fancy slides to make your point.

David on the left

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In response to my comparison between BarCampLondon2 and FOWA before, both Simon Willison and Dan wanted to note that they DID have a nice experience at FOWA. But then Alper came with this nice article on the Kwiqq blog where Raj Anand described his experiences at BarCampLondon2 and FOWA. Nice thing here is that Raj tried to quantify his grief in terms that you and I should be able to understand. I quote:

BarCamp (Tag: BarCampLondon2):

• Flickr: 1,545 results
• SlideShare.net: 10 results
• Google: 93,100 results
• Yahoo: 48,900 results

FOWA (Tag: FowaLondon07):

• Flickr: 930 results
• SlideShare.net: 0 results
• Google: 576 results
• Yahoo: 259 results

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