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Giant Antarctic ice shelf breaks into the sea | Environment | guardian.co.uk
Giant Antarctic ice shelf breaks into the sea | Environment | guardian.co.uk — The largest ice shelf to collapse - "I didn't expect to see things happen this quickly. We predicted it would happen, but it's happened twice as fast as we predicted.".
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Site Launch: Django People
One of the many sites Simon and I are collaborating on at the moment came into fruition in the (very) early hours of this morning.
Djangopeople.net aims to unite the Django community in their common allegiance of development environment. Until now the Django community's spirit had been a victim of the documentation's success, with such conclusive coverage people commonly don't feel the need to venture into IRC channels, or mailing lists to ask for help.
A very simple site, Djangopeople is (currently) just a mechanism to say who you are, where you live, what your skills are and provide links to sites you have contributed to that run on Django. Naturally there are plans to develop this further.
So far uptake has been great, since we launched—About 15 hours ago—a total of 633 people have signed up and added their profiles. Which is really exciting!
If you develop in Django head on over to Djangopeople.net and add your profile. We welcome feedback and bug reports.
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Berlin Day 1 : The journey
As with usual Day 1 of our holiday / conference trip primarily consisted of travelling to our destination. It had been an unusually frantic yet fun week the week before what with one thing and another, though we knew the transition to Berlin would be tricky for Simon what with talk, tutorial and various other deadlines, as dutiful girlfriend I was on hand with help and assistance. After two hours sleep in a faceless chain hotel but armed with Uncle Nuri's tasty Turkish canape's as breakfast, we set off for an early flight to Berlin.
We observed of the prettiest sights I have seen when flying, there were so many wind turbines on the flat plains approaching Berlin, the low fog was being interrupted and altered like ripples of rocks under a wave.
Arriving in the airport we picked up a fellow Web2expo-goer and headed forthwith in a taxi so Simon could finish his slides in a corner in the conference centre somewhere.
Our first crisis occurred when we couldn't find the entrance to get into the conference centre! Now this wouldn't have been an issue if we had come from the S-bahn, but having come from the road we could see the main entrance to indoors with the very fancy enormous web2expo signage but we couldn't get in. We bumped into a girl who had been all the way round one side and back to where we were, everywhere was shut and the guard wouldn't let us through the one entrance we did find! it might have been frustration, persuasion or an example of group-think but the four of us decided our only option was to jump the fence, fall down the 2 meter drop to the steep incline of the muddy shrubbery below.
Narrowly avoiding the guard who had told us to get lost, and fortunately away from the industrious gardeners nearby (having landed on it now appeared a freshly planted steep shrubbery) we were down. Running conspicuously and into the main entrance hall and leaving slightly muddy footprints, I can only imagine the impression we four must have given!
The nice web2expo people gave me a pass to watch Simon speak (for moral support, I had seen the same presentation at 2am that morning!) though misreading my passport my name is now 'Natalie Citizen Downe' apparently.
In the speakers lounge setting Simon up to make last minute touches to the slides; we discovered after some investigation that the power cords all around the room didn't actually plug into anywhere, nor did there appear to be any plugs in the room. Today was a day of workshops, the actual talks didn't start till the next day so construction of the venue was still going on.
Some searching led to the fire closet where there was one solitary plug. Some dangerous daisy-chaining later 4 power hungry geeks were satiated, if there was still no wifi there was at least some power now.
A little while later power was no longer enough - 5 of us went on a little wifi hunting mission which culminated in a small room behind the keynotes centre with cardboard boxes as a table, where a woman had a laptop plugged into ethernet. It looked promising ... though investigation proved the exceedingly long ethernet cable didn't actually provide internet. Never mind.
Slides done but too late for me to hunt a printing press for handouts - Simon commenced a very fine 3 hour tutorial
Talks done our happy band of fellows trudged back to the 'Hotel California' to change for dinner. We ended up having dinner in a lovely - 30 years back in time - traditional German restaurant, with fantastic foods if slightly odd coloured traditional Berlin beer!
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'Networking'
I entirely agree with this chap when he talks about being in someone's company because you want to be, not for what advantages it can get you in life.
I have been in situations at conferences where you think you are having a nice chat with someone and then they get starstruck and leave suddenly - even mid-sentence on occasion - to talk to the object of their admiration.
John Scalzi's article makes for a far more articulate rant:
The most successful networkers don’t 'network.' It’s an odious term. The most successful networkers ignore the grasping patheticness of the term altogether. Rather, they talk. They laugh. They share the moment, and enjoy other people’s company; are generous with other people and help them celebrate their successes, rather than asking to scrape up against that success so some of it might crumble off on them. It works the same online and off.
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Settling into Brighton
It has been roughly a month now since Simon and I have moved to Brighton. Our lovely if tiny flat has been suitably warmed and we have happily settled into Brighton life now I think. I have recently been contracting 3 days a week for Clearleft and as well as working on some personal projects and tech reviewing a book I am currently looking for freelance projects in the local area.
There have been a healthy amount of events since we moved, both social and tech-related, Brighton is definitely a nucleus of exciting things to do and it is great fun. It has been a bit of a conference season too, what with the awesome dConstruct directly after we moved, the great (if slightly hungover) BarCamp Brighton, followed shortly after by an equally great FOWA Expo. It has been fun meeting new people and catching up with ones I know, both those who I am in regular contact with and people who I haven't seen for years!
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Awesome art exhibition
Awesome art exhibition — Absolutely amazing large art exhibits to help us understand the implications of statistics, my favourite is the office paper one near the bottom.
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Oxford Geek Night 2 call for proposals
As there are limited places available for microslots and demos at the forthcoming Oxford Geek Night in April, I have set up a wufoo form (I really love wufoo!) to manage talk submissions.
If you have a talk proposal please fill it out the form below or go to the wufoo form:
Powered by Wufoo -
Offset Your Carbon Footprint to Reduce Global Warming--BeGreen Now
Offset Your Carbon Footprint to Reduce Global Warming--BeGreen Now — another carboon footprint counter.
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The first BarCamp London
I now have suitably recovered from This weekends frivolities at BarCamp, brilliant conference complete with all the bits needed to make it work well ... interesting people, some fun and informative talks, a bazaar late night card game, magic tricks and even lots of lovely free food and beer.
One of the highlights for me were watching Simon speak 'off the cuff' on Open ID, possibly the least preparation I have seen him do, but at the same time a subject he feels so passionately about that it really came across. After the talk, others in the audience looked really fired up and inspired about the potentials for Open ID.
There were a lot of really good speakers this weekend actually, it was amazing to watch. Both on a technical level because the talks were really good and informative, as well as being inspirational. The free food was nice, masses and masses of it! but I don't think anyone was complaining. The barcamp formula worked well I think, possibly one two many rooms, I felt like I missed a lot of interesting talks, even so, as everyone was encouraged to give a talk or chair a discussion the emphasis was more on "so what are you talking about" rather than "are you giving a talk". This encouraged information sharing and made it slightly less intimidating to stand up on stage.
I must find a way to overcome stage fright though, I chaired a discussion on Usability experiences and I still managed to mess it up, struggling to form sentences and remember to breath. I really hope what 'they' say is true, that its never as bad as it seams because you are your own worse critic, the fact it was discussion took the pressure off, and it could have been a lot worse. Still, there must be a way to learn not to be embarrassed talking to groups of people without committing professional suicide in the process, just knowing the subject matter doesn't seam to be enough.
Some other really good talks that I saw (bearing in mind I missed some good ones) include Andy Budd's talk on User Centered Design, and Matthew Westcott's on 3D graphics in Javascript, I was also exceedingly impressed by Paul's Magic tricks! Another highlight ... other than werewolf naturally! ...was the del.icio.us Pecha Kucha session, 20 slides 20 seconds per slide only this time your slides are your del.ico.us stream which you are not allowed to look at in advance, great fun!
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Index of /pages
Index of /pages — .
10 items tagged "conservation"
Look at "conservation" on del.icio.us, Flickr or Technorati