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Unboomed, Rocketboom split before hitting the mainstream

I've not really mentioned the rocketboom split, I only found out when I noticed nothing was not being downloaded since the start of July. So I checked out the site and read the announcement

Amanda Congdon has decided to move to L.A. to pursue opportunities that have arisen for her in Hollywood.

We wanted to meet her demands to move production out to L.A., however, we are a small company and have not been able to figure out a way to make it work, financially and in many other ways at this time. While we continue to remain with open arms, Amanda has in fact quit and left Rocketboom. So sadly, we bid Amanda adieu and wish her all the best.

Rocketboom goes on.

Andrew Baron, the founder and creator of Rocketboom, will stay with the company in New York and will continue to produce and direct the show. We are in the daunting process of recruiting a replacement for Amanda.

While Amanda will be sorely missed, we have big plans for Rocketboom and are determined to make the show better than ever.

After Field Week and a week on hiatus, we know that you are hungry for the news! Rocketboom will be back with a news episode and an interim host this MONDAY, JULY 10.

But of course I followed a selection of links from the blogosphere and hit across a selection of, well lets say views and insights. Bear in mind that at the time Technorati's number one search was Rocketboom and sixth Amanda Congdon. First up this great thought from Tom

Amanda Congdon teams up with Cory Doctorow and friends and produces BoingBoingBoom? Quick, someone with a fashionable blog, write about it and tell Nick Douglas – it's a meme-in-waiting!

According to the huffingtonpost Joanna Colan is going to replace Amanda.

And of course before long, a link to Amanda's unboomed site and the now famous upside down map videocan also be found here). Its also worth reading in full Amanda's for the record post and the 180+ comments.

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Last nights geekdinner with Chris Anderson

Chris talking to Dedrie, Rachel and Chris

Well I'm still pretty speechless about yesterday's Geekdinner with Chris Anderson. Not only was it the most popular geekdinner I've done to date (between 80-90 people came along, not including the @media social) but it was also the most stressful in a good way. Before I go into details, I would like to say thank you to Dr Jo Twist, Rina Gill, Nizam Shaikh and of course Chris Anderson.

What made the geekdinner stressful was the amount of time between announcement of the event and the actual event, which was a total of 7 days. I found a venue the Bottlescrue on Holburn Viaduct which allowed me to have the back room free on a Friday night. The room held about 40-50 people maximum, but there was space outside of the room for overspill. This was great because according to the signups on Wednesday it looked like we may get about 35 people. (The maths I usually do according to most other geekdinners I've done is, take the signup half them and add a few more.) Well this time my maths was badly wrong. Almost everyone who signed up, came along and then some. So we quickly ran out of food. So half way through the night just before Chris talked, I pleaded with the manager to buy more food. And in the end all the extra cash went straight back into more food. Honestly, ask Nizam, we bought everything they had. Nothing was left after the geekdinner, no chips, no pittabread, no crisps, no nothing. So big cheers to the Bottlescrue for doing everything they could and coping under the massive pressure. I'm sure there profits for the night went through the roof. I'm also glad I didn't have to run to tesco and buy tons of stuff.

The only other negative for the night which was also related to the huge crowd of people who turned up, was the move to outside. Outside was fantatstic and the London summer air was warm and inviting. But it also meant traffic and noise from the street. When it came time for Chris to talk, he was always fighting against the background noise of the street and general bar area. I positioned him where I thought it might be best, aka noise behind the crowd but there were so many people it was hard for Chris to shout that loud. I'm very sorry to everyone who were around the fringes who found it very hard to hear him. If we were inside it would be very different and usually at geekdinners, I have a microphone and PA system setup. Oh and for the record, I did try and rent one from work, but they wouldn't let me take it out of the building. So I might have to invest a cheap one from ebay or something.

Ok finally on to the positive and frankly amazing night of fun the geekdinner was yesterday. Chris was on top form, I was worried because Rina did say he had just done 3 talks that day and was slightly tired but was very much up for the geekdinner. Actually talking to Chris briefly, he said he was actually look forward to the geekdinner more than anything else, simply because it was his type of thing. Who could say no to Beer, food and good conversation in a nice London bar during Summer? Anyway he was a little concerned about projecting his voice when he finally got to the venue but was happy to hang out and speak to people after a 45min Q and A. So while the food was being consumed quickly, I hit two glass bottles together and got the talk going.

Now I didn't record the whole thing but Kosso did. So as soon as he uploads the video, I'll link to it. I did however start to record the question and answers. And will have them up soon. As usual there are tons of photos by myself being uploaded to Flickr using the tags londongeekdinner and geekdinner.

I was highly impressed with the amount of new people who turned up and I have to say the percentage of women to men wasn't that bad either.

Thanks again to everyone who came, I'm planning the next one with someone from Amazon for late July. So keep your eyes on the geekdinner site for announcements.

The videos from yesterday are now up.. There a quarter of the size and encoded in Mpeg4. Quicktime and VLC will play it back no real problem.

Chris Anderson on the Long Tail – 4meg

Chirs Anderson starting the question and answers – 31.8meg

Chris Anderson on Net Netrality – 13.7meg

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1 year on from July 7th 2005 in London

London seems to be under a grey cloud today. I can't work out if its simply a Friday thing or people remembering what happened last year in the heart of central London. I wrote this long entry about the events during the day. Today in less that 30mins, I'll stand outside in the Kingsway and maybe just film the 2mins silence which is meant to happen at 12 midday. I'm considering just uploading it to Archive.org as a very Free Creative Commons licence. I was condering going up to Russell Square where the Bus Bomb went off, but I don't honestly feel like it right now.

So back from outside and people did come out to respect the silence at midday but the traffic was still going, so it was generally quite noisy. At lot of buses stopped but Taxi drivers didn't. Anyhow, I filmed about 5mins worth of sitting on the steps of the BBC Bush House looking northwards thinking about the people who were caught up in the bombs of a year ago.

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Geekdinner with Chris Anderson – Today Friday 7th 2006

After a weeks worth of promoting, the Longtail geekdinner with Chris Anderson is today. Funny enough, it may turn out to be one of the most popular geekdinner's we have done for a while now. The sign up looks like we may get close to the Dave Shea geekdinner which was limited by the venue more that anything else. I actually thought it would be a low sign up because Chris has been talking all over London the last few days. But then I saw this from Beers and Innovations Dedrie.

In addition to press interviews and the like, Google, The Economist, Reuters, IPPR, Amazon and the BBC have internal events with Mr A in the Greater London Area. All corporations (IPPR excepted) that produce and / or aggregate content, all looking to engage with a thinker and perhaps emerge from the meeting with a light dusting of Long Tail magic on their staff, processes and strategy.

For the rest of us outside the corporate walls, there’s a Geek Dinner this Friday 7th July at which Chris will also speak and partake in a Q&A with the crowd. To attend you just need to add your comment here.

If it’s anything like the last Geek Dinner I went to (which featured Marc Canter as guest) – this could be a better chance to get past the basics and really get the synapses firing than more high-profile public events.

The key part is the last part. See Chris won't have the chance to simply do his presentation again. There will be no projector or laptop, just geeks. This is certainly a chance to really get geeky and discuss the long tail at a level which you may not get anywhere else. To be honest, geekdinner is a great example of the longtail. Its very niche and wouldn't work as a mass market type of thing. This is what I don't get when people write to me and suggest that geekdinner could be something bigger that it is now.

Back to tonight. I've finally worked out all the details.

When: Friday 7th July 2006 (today)
Where: The Bottlescrue
53 – 60 Holburn Viaduct, London, EC1A 2FD
Nearest Underground: City Thameslink (Holburn Viaduct) or Chancery Lane Station
Time: 18:30 – 23:00
Special Guest: Chris Anderson
Cost: 5 pounds (Final price)

Hope to see you all there…

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When did police officers get machine guns in London?

I ride thought Bank in the City of London pretty everyday on the way to work. But today, while waiting at the lights a police women crossed the road. Nothing special there you say, and I would agree except she was carrying a sub machinegun. Ok when did the police get to carry sub machines guns around in normal use? Usually the police will radio in for the big guns once they know theres a risk or something, not just carry them around in everyday use. To be fair at the airport you do see them but not just walking around the streets. If I wasn't driving I so would have took a picture and uploaded it. Sarah was with me, so I got a witness. Scary stuff….

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Switching to Linux again…

Tim O'Reilly is on the money, there's trouble in Apple land. Jason Kottke and Cory Doctorow have made the switch to the Linux flavor Ubuntu for there operating system. This follows Mark Pilgrim and there seems to be more leading lights switching too.

Sarah really hates it when I say about switching to Linux, because she knows how outraged I get about some of the most simple things. But this really makes me want to switch even quicker. I've almost pledged never to run Windows Vista on my desktop or laptop machine. I'm not going to switch to OSX because I simply love the PC architecture and freedom it brings (Although I was tempted with the dodgy copies of running OSX on a AMD PC). So I'm going to move to Linux again. This time, I'm going to take it seriously and give it time. I already had OpenSuse 10.1 with XGL running on a spare machine. But now I'm talking about slowly switching everything including my Laptop.

I have already got a small list of some problems I'll have, such as my mobile phone which runnings on Windows Mobile 2005. My PIM syncing using Plaxo, and Hardware support such as my new Camcorder and weird motherboard. But with a year to get it all going, I'm sure to come up with the answers or another way to the same thing.

Ubuntu looks the way to go, specially if I can get xgl running too.

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Finally I bought and recieved a Sanyo Xacti HD1

I can't help but, say I love my new HD camera. Its a real pleasure to use and watch back. This also means my Sanyo Xacti C6 is up for sale if anyone is interested?

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Openness in data formats

Tantek wrote this thought provoking entry about data formats and openness. Which I can't help but kind of agree on and disagree on. So first his entry.

ASCII is dependable. Project Gutenberg insists on publishing their e-books as plain ASCII text as Mark Pilgrim noted, and their reasons are solid.

Compatible XHTML is now also dependable. In the 15+ years since its public introduction, I believe that HTML has established itself sufficiently prominently worldwide that I feel quite comfortable declaring that HTML will be accepted to be as reliable as ASCII in coming years. In particular, authoring what I like to call Compatible XHTML, that is, valid XHTML 1.0 strict that conforms to Appendix C, is IMHO the way to author HTML that will have longevity as good as ASCII. Note that files in most file systems have no sense of “MIME-type”, thus the winged-mythological-creatures-on-the-head-of-a-pin style arguments about text/html vs. application/xhtml+xml that are often used to discredit either HTML or XHTML (or both) are irrelevant for the most common case of keeping archives of files in file systems.

Plain old XML (POX) formats in the long run are no better than proprietary binary formats. XML, both in technology and as a “technical culture” is too biased towards Tower of Babel outcomes. I've spoken on this many times, but in short, the culture surrounding XML, especially the unquestioned faith in namespaces and misplaced assumed requirement thereof, leads to (has already lead to) Tower of Babel style interoperability failures. As this is a cultural bias (whether intentional or not) built into the very foundations of XML, I don't think it can be saved. There may be a few XML formats that survive and converge sufficiently to be dependable (maybe RSS, maybe Atom), but for now XHTML is IMHO the only longerm reliable XML format, and that has more to do with it being based on HTML than it being XML.

Formats that are smaller (e.g. define fewer terms) tend to be more reliable.

Formats that are simpler (e.g. define fewer restrictions/rules for publishers) tend to be more reliable.

Formats that are more compatible with existing reliable formats tend to be more reliable, e.g. HTML worked well with existing systems that supported “plain text” (AKA ASCII)

Formats that are easier to use, i.e. publish, and more immediately useful, rapidly become widely adopted, and thus become reliable as a breadth of software and services catches up with a breadth of published data in those formats.

The microformats principles were based on these observations. Now this doesn't mean I think microformats will replace existing reliable formats. Not at all. For example, I feel quite confident storing files in the following formats:

ASCII / “plain text” / .txt / (UTF8 only if necessary)

mbox
X)HTML
JPEG

PNG

WAV

MP3

MPEG

So my take on Tantek's thoughts.

Plain old XML (POX) formats in the long run are no better than proprietary binary formats. See I take issue with this, I understand what Tantek is getting at but I would say plain xml without a schema isn't leaning towards the Tower of Babel. And like Tantek already mentioned RSS and ATOM are pretty close to the non-tower of babel direction. I would also add FOAF and OPML to the list. I would love for SVG to also be included in this but alas its not. Formats that are smaller (e.g. define fewer terms) tend to be more reliable. Good point, hence why things should be broken down like how XHTML and SVG got Modularization.

My list of formats are slightly different too.

XHTML (Unicode)
XML (Unicode)
JPEG
PNG
MPEG3 audio
MPEG4 video
WAVE
SVG

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On work and life balance

Its funny I was reading through Furrygoat the other day, I found this very interesting entry but now I can't actually find it on the live site. I can only assume, it was removed. But its honestly too good to not blog. If I'm asked to remove it, then fair enough but till then…He's the entry titled Work life Balance.

Or lack thereof. And the worst part is that I've come to the realization that I have absolutely no one to blame besides myself.
It sucks – almost every day I go in to the office at 6am and work until 5, then I'm back on email at 8:30 until I go to bed. I check email all weekend long (which, when driving really pisses the wife off) due to the 'convience' of a smartphone. And to top it off, due to my obessive nature, I've realized that in many ways my work defines me. I am no longer the adventurer who went to Everest or the diver that went to Belize to scuba in the barrier reefs, I'm just a software engineer.
Sure, we've been in a super hard push the last few weeks (which is always tiring), but I've been wondering what's it for? In the end, we basically put pixels on a screen. You write code today and in a few years it's gone (unless it's 'Notepad' – that code seems to stick around forever).
After this push, I think I'm going to go back to having 'regular' hours of 8-4. Perhaps I'll start hitting the gym again in the mornings and enforce a 'hard stop' at 4. No more email at night. Liz, Tyler and our new son deserve that. *I* deserve that.

Being married myself and look forward to a kid at some point within the next 5 years, I think about the balance of professional and personal life (i hate to seperate them like that, but it will work for now). Me and Sarah were watching a Panorama documentary about the right time for a baby. I'll say little more, but its all about women choosing to work longer and not have babies till very late, sometimes too late. Its all stuff we've heard before, the middle classes waiting long and having less babies, while the lower class are have lots of babies. Nothing new here but interesting anyway.

But back to now, that work life balance is hard to get right. I'm always readjusting depending on events and how happy Sarah is. Its important and I don't have a rule or any wisdom to give in this area except to say its damm important. Those who get it wrong really risk screwing up more that they can ever imagine.

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Ultra Wifi is coming

This arrived in my inbox today.

Thank you for registering your interest in Ultra WiFi. We've been thrilled by the response to the offer and we are pleased to announce that Ultra WiFi will go on sale July 4th. It's a big step forward for WiFi in the UK as Ultra WiFi will finally bring people the great value, always on, internet access on the move they have been asking for.

Ultra WiFi is unlimited low-cost WiFi for just £11.99 per month. You commit to a 12 month contract and we commit to bring you low cost all-you-can-eat WiFi at Cloud hotspots and Hotzones across the UK.

With over 7,000 Cloud hotspots across the UK, including 9 city centre hotzones and hundreds of new sites every month, we are confident that no other WiFi provider can match this offer in terms of price and coverage.

We will email you next week so you can sign up for Ultra WiFi directly from The Cloud website.

Kind Regards

The Cloud Networks
Your wireless route to the Internet

Please see www.thecloud.net/ultrawifi for details.

Well like I said previously, its tempting. I mean its far off most broadband costs and everything mobile device I own, supports wifi including my phone. I like the idea of running Skype on my phone, specially now I know it works thanks to David. Yes I understand the cloud isn't everywhere and there are others like Fon arriving on the scene everyday. But to be honest, everywhere I tend to go has the cloud. Hummm, I might wait this one out a little and see what happens.

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The endless hassle of the Sanyo HD1 Camcorder

This long and complex tale starts when I was in America and looking for a camcorder. I wrote a blog entry from America talking about the differences in Camcorders and asking for which one I should go for. I was actually not looking at the High Defination (HD) cameras at the time because of the sheer price but did like the look of the Sanyo Xacti HD1. So after the blog post I got a couple of emails and comments. One suggested looking at Ebay.com because they seem to have lots of them on sale there. So I did while me and Sarah were staying with Birch in Minneapolis. I also looked at a few other places like ebay.co.uk, amazon.com, bensbargins, froogle, pcmag.com, etc etc. And of course Ebay was the best price by a long way. So I thought hummm, maybe this would be a good time to use ebay. Specially being in America and able to get things delivered to my in-laws address, plus of course the great conversion rate of the pound at the time (1.85 dollars to the pound). This is where the tale goes sour….

So me and Sarah decided to look at Ebay for the Sanyo HD1 Camera, we find a seller called Trading Circuit. It turns out that Trading Circuit is actually the online ebay arm of Circuit City (Like Comet in the UK). So basiclly if they can't shift something which has been returned in store, they will sell it on ebay instead. Makes sense and I'm not against this at all. Actually it would be great if Curry's Digital and Comet did the same thing in the UK. Anyway, so me and Sarah are thinking hey there feedback is pretty good and there not going to rip us off, so were looking through the closing auctions. We find one very close to this one (which ends in 2hours), but it only had 23mins remaining on it. I read very carefully thought the information and start bidding. Find out that I can't bid because my ebay account is based in the UK and trading circuit will only sell to the states. Which is stupid because I'm going to use an American credit card (Sarahs) and it will be sent to an America address. So in the end I rope Sarah into buying it because her ebay account is American. We finally finish and look at the bidding, well we lost out on that camera by about 2mins. So we look at the promo box at the bottom which reads See more great items from this seller. And come across this auction for a Sanyo HD1. Scanning quickly across the text, everything looks pretty much the same. Well I was just about to make a huge mistake.

If you look at the Item Specifics. It has 3 ticks, but if you read carefully (which I didn't) it says on the 2nd one AS-IS (Primary function does not work – see description). Then if you look down a little more you will also see this…

Unit will not capture/save pictures or video onto memory card (primary function) – LCD and viewfinder are black during recording.

Well obviously I didn't full read this and you can't really blame me when you look at the other Sanyo HD1 auctions which look exactly the same. Anyhow, me and Sarah did bid on the broken Camera and won the auction at just over a 100 pounds. I was thinking wow were really got a great deal. Then we went off explorering Minneapolis with Birch.

That night, I was up really late and decided to look around at some of the forums about the Sanyo HD1 camera. See I had looked around before, when deciding which camera to get, hence the Samsung and Panasonics didn't stand a chance really. So I found this one called Dvinfo.net and they had a forum just for the Sanyo HD1. It was very useful because it had shots and videos from a HD1, hence I know what the quality is like of the HD camera, etc. So I came across this sticky topic titled Black Screen on my brand new HD1 Help!!!!!!!!! I start reading and guess what…

http://cgi.ebay.com/Sanyo-Xacti-HD-5…QQcmdZViewItem

I found two HD1 items of ebay with the blackscreen problem. Being sold as a spare parts. I guess it's not completely uncommon.

one of the links points almost directly to the auction I had just won that morning. How do I know without clicking? Because the link was Purple not default blue. I honestly couldn't click it for a minute. In the darkness of Minneapolis at 4am, I could feel the blood just chilling all over me. Then I started to sweat, as my head got really hot thinking about the morning and how we had one the 2nd auction not the first one. The first one I had read really hard while the 2nd one I just scanned quickly. Then I finally clicked the link and bang there it was, except this time I could see all the flaws like unit will not capture. Trust me, I couldn't sleep that night and the fear of telling Sarah the next morning that we had just lost over 100 pounds on a camera which is used for spare bits. In the moment of disbelief, I wrote a email to trading circuit saying it was all a mistake and please don't send the package.

The next morning I did tell Sarah and we contacted Trading Circuit again but through Sarahs ebay account and offical means. Hoping they wouldn't ship the package and understand its all a big mistake. They did write back saying many people say this after an auction they won. We wrote back saying its honestly the truth and that we had bought the model below (Sanyo VPC-C6) at a Circuit City in Madison because we really did want the camera, but one which worked. Would they like to see the recept? We had left Minneapolis and ended up in Madison, so the email back and forth took about 3-4 days. Finally they asked us to fill out some form to claim back some of the money excluding a restocking fee of 10% (I believe). I hope to have all the emails available soon.

After we sent back the form, nothing. We did get the goods, and yes the Camera did turn on, but did not record of show anything on screen (which was not mentioned in the Auction only the forum). We decided to leave the camera and its almost useless accessories in the states, just in case Trading Circuit say yes, ok we'll have it back. I did buy the Sanyo C6 like I said in this blog post. And am happy with it except I had my heart set on the HD version with Widescreen video and external microphone port. So when I got back, I did bid on a few cameras which were just the cameras and no accessories, hoping to make up the complete package. But in the end got sick of the idea of buying another thing from Trading Circuit and decided to bid on this Refurbished one which includes the Manufacturer Warranty. So I shouldn't have the grey import problem which others have described in the same forum. The auction didn't have all the package of a new HD1, so those accessories will be useful after all. I'm still down on Trading Circuit and am choosing what to stick in there ebay feedback but at least I should have everything. Its cost me and Sarah over 700 dollars which is the same price as I could have got it for on Amazon or BestBuy but hopefully we will sell the Sanyo C6 in the UK and maybe beable to get the broken HD1 fixed or sold for parts.

I would love to say this will be the end, but I don't think it is. First it I'm not counting any chickens till both boxes are in my hands in the UK and it does work correctly. Second, I've been reading this blank screen of death or black screen disease is maybe common across all Sanyo HD1's! Which means at some point in the future everyone will have this problem? Geez, maybe the C6 was the best idea after all.

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Videos from the @media Social now online

At the @media Social, there were some talks given by some of the speakers of the @media conference. And I managed to stick slightly smaller versions on my server. There in Mpeg4 format because thats what my new Sanyo shoots in and VLC compresses nicely into. I've tested them with Quicktime and VLC but nothing much else sorry. I may try compressing to Xvid at some point in the future if people ask for it. Enjoy… and I'm sorry the Javascript one is slightly cut, my camera battery died near the end.

CSS get together

With Molly Holzschlag and Andy Clarke

Have I got Accessbility for you?

With Andy Clarke, Patrick Lauke and others

Javascript get together

With Jeremy Keith, Dean Edwards, PPK and Chris Heilmann

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The Roaming GPRS and EDGE bill comes

So following on from my earlier blog post about EDGE coverage in London, where I wondered how much my next phone bill would be. So I finally got my Orange Bill and its a total of 68 pounds, which to be honest isn't as bad as bills I use to get 3 years ago. The interesting part of the bill is my Data charges.

Originating Network	Place Called	Call Class	Megabytes	Cost
Orange	Orange WAP	Data	5.3058	5.895
AT&T Wireless	#Orange WAP	EDGEdata	1.7179	17.180
Roaming Call	#Orange WAP	GPRSdata	0.751	0.751
Orange	Orange Internet	data	0.0031	0.000

Total exc. VAT 5.90 pounds (# incidicates that an item is non-VAT applicable)
Total non-VAT 24.69 pounds

Well how about that then? Talk about steep charges. To be fair I setup my phone to check for emails every hour plus I was on online all the time and I did do a little bit of IM and browsing on it. I'm somewhat suprised I only used about 5meg while I was out there in the Midwest. Its not all bad though, I just got a new contract which pretty much covers everything else I do including 500 texts a month and 200 minutes of Calls. Also now I'm riding around again, I'll be using GRPS a lot less again. So from now on, I'm expecting much cheaper bills of less that 30 pounds a month.

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The @media Social

Well what can I say, the event was successful and unsucessful in the same day. The event attracted its fair share of @media attendies plus a whole range of people who didn't go to the conference. We also had quite a few speakers from the conference including Molly, Andy Clarke, Tantek and Dave Shea. But thats not all, also in attendies during the event were, Cameron Adams, Rachel Andrew, Andy Budd, Jeremy Keith, Peter Paul Koch, Patrick Lauke and Dan Webb.

I got to the venue (thelivery) around 12:30pm and there was already someone there waiting for everything to start. By 1pm, there was a crowd of at least 20 people waiting outside the door looking in. My plan of projecting images uploaded to Flickr with the tag atmedia was flushed away, when the venue manager showed me the wet vga cable which had been hanging in the water from the boiler breakdown 2am last night. I have to say, I was so very suprised by 2pm when Molly and Andy Clarke had also joined a quite crowded bar now. I thought most of the people would come between 7-11pm rather than 1-4pm. But took it as a good sign that the evening would be very busy. The only event which I found out which was on via Tom, was Om Malik or Gigaom.com was in London. Someone had arranged a event on the same day in Holburn. So I was still feeling very confident, yes even with the World Cup going on. I later found out via Sheila and Paul that Foofighters had a concert in Hyde Park also on the same day. All this I guess had a effect on the turn out later. I think at the peak of the event, sometime around 4pm, I counted close to 120 people. Unfortually, the peak was too early and as 7pm came and went, we started looking at about 40 people in total.

But on the plus side, everyone I spoke to had a great time and for those who stuck around till the very end, was a expensive champagne suprise. I don't believe I've ever seen a grand plus worth of drink go in less that 45mins. Even I had to take glass (i don't usually drink) and toast Patrick on running such a great @media conference this year.

I have videos of three of the Get togethers (CSS, Accessability and Javascript/Dom scripting). So I will put those up online soon. I just need to compress them down a little bit. The Sanyo did a great job but I should have recorded at QuarterVGA instead of VGA so I could have put them straight up.

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