I went to BarcampBrighton2 last weekend, held at the University of Sussex student union (USSU). I normally don’t get excited about Barcamps on universities but I have to admit that this Barcamp was brilliant. The food was good, the rooms were great, the crowd was inspiring and the talks were exciting. I was actually amazed about the amount of new people (about 50%) which made the event yet again refreshing.

I attended a few talks including giving one myself on “Voluntary Economies” (more in a moment). During the day I visited quite a few talks, including:

• Barcamp Ephemera (by Ryan Alexander) - A quick and funny introduction to Barcamp
  
• Arduino Introduction - I got to play with an Arduino board to get a led light to pulse on and off with increasing/decreasing speeds. And all of that within 45 minutes. I need to buy an Arduino board and do something cool now.
  
• Open Rights Group (by Glyn Wintle) - A nice talk by Glyn on how the ORG prevents the UK government from making even more mistakes than they already do. His talks are always good for some interesting anecdotes.
  
• How to : Uncricket (by Melinda, Emma, and Patricia) - What i thought would be a lame talk by the girls on how to play something without rules that they had come up with in Berlin last year, turned out to be a lot of fun. It did lead to some bruises and swollen tongs though.
  
• The Origins of Design Patterns - What town planning, poetry and design patterns have in common
• Summer 2008 movie trailers (by Melinda Seckington) - Mel did a nice talk by simply showing all the coolest trailers of the summer movies on the big screen, with nice surround sound.
• Wine and Cheese (no really, eating and drinking) by Emma Persky - I think the title says it all. Good wine though and I could use some cheese by then.
  
• High-performance scalable web apps with memcached (by Marco) - Interesting talk on what memcached is exactly and how it can make your site so much faster.
• Ask the BBC ANYTHING! (by Ian Forrester, Sheila Thomson, Dan Morris) - Interesting discussion on the BBC, the fun they and we are having with the iPlayer, and the future of the BBC in general
• Delicious Pecha Kucha (by Tom Morris) - Pecha Kucha style session where people got to explain a random 5 of their last 20 del.icio.us bookmarks as they showed up on screen. I didn’t present as I was afraid it would be way to boring.

As i said I also did a talk myself on “Voluntary Economies” and the talk went pretty well. For most part I stole the slides from Alper and Reinier who gave a similar talk before during BarcampLondon3 and BarcampAmsterdam3, and I probably should have prepared a bit better. Still, people seemed to love it and we filled the 45 minutes with ease. Here are the slides:

Finally I made a few photos. I had a play with Mark Ng’s Sigma 30mm F1.4 HSM which resulted in some very nice photos during the uncricket session. I really need to get this lens, so can someone donate me £200 ?

So my second Geek Dinner is over and done with, and although I felt it went better, we still had problems with the venue and the food. We might be looking for a new venue somewhere in the future. DataPortability proved to be a very interesting topic as we had way more people show up this time. Lots of new faces which is always a good thing. Below are the photos.

We also tried to stream the talk, but the “The Cloud”-hotspot died after about 10 minutes making even normal internet communication impossible. Maybe next time. Improbulus recorded most of the talk though, which is actually interesting to listen at if you weren’t there. Click through to the full article to see the video.
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One of my photos I took last year has been used on Schmap!!. I don’t really know what Schmap!! does but they like my photo so why would I care.

Barely recovered from the Girl Geek Dinner Christmas Party it was again time for some drinks. This time with Hugh MacLeod, Robert Scoble and Dave Winer. We had quite a few drinks and the food wasn’t that bad either. Bit too much fish food though, but overall a good evening. We were planning to join the photo-walk afterwords, but we hung out at the ICA until 1am before heading home.

So, we had a busy week this week, attending the Girl Geek Dinner Christmas Party last wednesday, and the Geek Dinner last friday (more of that later). The Girl Geek Dinner Christmas Party was organized together with the BCSWomen and therefore there were an awful lot of people. The bar that it was held in was a bit echoey so we mainly sat downstairs in the bar talking with Imp, Hanieh and Patricia. Below are the photos.
Zo, we hadden een drukke week deze week, met een Girl Geek Dinner kerst feest op woensdag en een Geek Dinner op vrijdag (meer hoerover binnenkort). Het Girl Geek Dinner kerst feest was georganiseerd samen met de BCSWomen en het was daarom dus extra druk. De bar had wat veel echo dus we hebben vooral beneden gezeten in de bar aan een tafel en lekker zitten praten met Imp, Hanieh en Patricia. Hier onder de fotos: