blacknight: January 2007 Archives

I started writing this yesterday evening, but then I got distracted .... Anybody who knows me will happily agree that I am not a morning person - not unless I've had enough caffeine to kill an ox! However yesterday morning I was up at 7 in order to drive down to Waterford for BarCamp Southeast. Since there were a few of the Blacknight team going down we had arranged wakeup calls, which after the previous night's shenanigans were probably a really good idea :) I picked up Keith shortly after 8am and we hit the road. I must say it was a lovely drive down, as there were hardly any cars on the road! I pity Keith, though, as I have an awful habit of chattering away incessantly ..... The directions we'd been supplied with were spot on, so we'd no issue in finding the venue and actually arrived earlier than we'd planned. (I'd had visions of driving aimlessly around Waterford for hours!) Coffee and pastries devoured the other delegates started to drift. There were plenty of familiar faces, such as Damien, Jon, Donncha, Keith B (not to be confused with Keith G), Berni, Conn, Laura, Grainne, Elly and plenty of others (Do you really want a list of names? :) ) The venue, which is nestled in the Waterford countryside, is beautifully equipped and there was wireless access throughout. The lineup of talks was overwhelming, but I did manage to get into a couple of them, as well as trying to learn to juggle. With my total lack of co-ordination that was no easy task, though I did sort of manage to juggle (more "sort of" than "manage"). The first talk I got to was on podcasting, while the second was on a slightly different topic - death and divorce in a digital world (which deserves a post of its own) After the last talk a bunch of us headed down to the Ramada Viking. Most of us were staying there that night, so it was simply a matter of booking in and dropping bags off in rooms etc., Over the past year or so I've stayed in a lot of hotels. They all seem to merge into one. The Ramada Viking's staff, however, were extremely helpful and the room was fantastic. I've stayed in a few of the supposedly "good" hotels in Dublin and been completely underwhelmed, whereas this time I paid a lot less and got fantastic service in charming surroundings. After a couple of beers in the hotel we all piled into the city for food (which we were sponsoring) and then back out to the hotel for beer and banter. Unlike the first barcamp I actually made it into my bed before dawn :)

Do you know where you live? That may seem like an odd question, but judging by some of the stuff Keith's found in our backend systems it might be a valid question to ask. NB: I have no way of seeing who supplied this information as we just ran queries on a section of the table... Ireland has 32 counties. 26 counties in the Republic and 6 in Northern Ireland.. or at least it used to have... According to some people the land mass has expanded considerably. While I know that some of the confusion may stem from wording on a website I still fail to see how "region/county" could have led to some of these gems (in all cases the country selected was "Ireland") | 9666663696h | << em. Ok... I'm really worried about you | asdasd | << you're not even trying | Éire | << presumably a nationalist / republican | berkshire | << after 800 years the roles are reversed ? | Canada | In Ireland? | CO | << interesting | County | << but which one? | FL | << Disney in Ireland I guess | Florida | | Murcia | << porque no? | n/a | | na | | none | | Pennsylvania | | poland | - that's not that surprising :) | Random | - some people like to keep us all guessing | Region | | Surrey | | sweden | | Tennessee | | test | | uk | | united kingdom | | United States/CA/Goleta | - covering all bases I guess..... | W | I now feel more sympathy toward my postman! :)

Laura has put a gun to my head. I have to decide on a topic for my talk at Skycon and I've got about 24 hours to do it. For once I won't be the only representative from Blacknight presenting!! Paul, in a possible moment of madness, also agreed to give a talk. As he's a hardcore geek he'll probably be right at home, whereas I'm a little more wary. What should I give a talk on?? Bearing in mind that it's quite a technical conference, judging by the timetable, what would people recommend? I was contemplating doing something on email filtering. (The last talk I gave in UL was on SEO) Any thoughts?

And for once they're not mine :) Paul has finally got round to enabling comments on his blog - the aptly named weird.ie. Niall didn't jump on the bandwagon - he climbed onto it slowly - anti-blog style, so it's only a matter of time before we'll have the rest of the Blacknight staff blogging :) I've no idea what he'll blog about, so it'll be interesting to see