Geeks of London, first meet

Last week I went along to the Geeks of London meetup that I happened across on Twitter. As it turned out, it was the first such meet, and as such it was very successful. Melinda and Christian organised the whole thing, with help from others and a clearly generous donation from Nokia Ovi who not only put money behind the bar for drinks and some nibbles, but also offered a prize of a new phone which was given away during the evening.

The format seemed to work well, with general mixing around the downstairs bar area, and a couple of slightly more formal talks. There were projected slides for the one, but the microphone failed, unfortunately. The theme of the night was gadgets and attendees were encouraged to bring along gadgets to show off and discuss, and they ranged from Terrance Eden's videocamera glasses to my first ever experience of an in-the-flesh slide rule.

I have a couple of video clips to upload at some point as my own gadget for discussion was the non-glasses version of the videocamera sold cheaply online as a "spycam" - a fantastic gadget at a very low price. The quality isn't fantastic but what can you expect for the cost? I'm thinking of getting hold of some of the glasses style versions to modify and turn into kit for larp events at some point.

Meanwhile, I particularly enjoyed Melinda's talk in which she addressed the question of what defines a gadget. Portability? Novelty? Tech? She skirted around all these possibilities, pointing out that it's almost indefinable, you know it when you see it. Although she didn't mention it during her own talk, she did prompt me to recognise that one of the features of a gadget is that it is unnecessary. It might be nice, it's probably a talking point but it's not something anybody needs as such. An iPad is a gadget, while a laptop is less so, particularly in the realm of work. A freezer isn't a gadget, it's seen as a home necessity, but for previous generations perhaps it was. Definitely food for thought.

I will be going along again, some of the faces were familiar from barcamp style events I'd been to and I got talking to a few more people from all over, despite ducking out early due to my stupidly early starts on my daily commute these days.

The next event is to be movie based, probably a couple of meetups, one to watch and one to discuss a film. Look out for them, coming soon.

More info can be found on the website: http://www.geeksoflondon.com

Blog posts coming soon

Things to write about when I have time:
Using ifttt.com
The Geeks of London gadget meetup of last night

Bizarre

I bought Bizarre magazine this month at there was an article in it covering the larp system I play. It was a good article, quite sincere and interested rather than piss-taking. Shame it was surrounded by a huge number of pages of adverts featuring scantily clad women and cost over four quid. Still, I did get an article on Neil Gaiman in there as part of the bargain.

If this then that

I've just discovered a forthcoming tool by the name of "If this, then that" which is all set to start connecting together the social networks that are pervading everyday life. It looks pretty cool and I've signed up to be part of the beta as soon as they send out new invitations. My primary reason is that I want a simple way of archiving my Twitter feed in perpetuity without annoying other people with it. One of the irritations of daily online activity is trying to follow one person across multiple sites as man duplicate the content across streams. This is made simple by some tools that will cross post to a blog, Twitter and Facebook all at once. The problem, though, is that followers on each network then try to engage with the original post and the conversation is fractured massively.

http://ifttt.com could just increase the noise in that regard, it looks like it's going to be able to set up some powerful interactions across the board, but I'm hoping that it will also be something that lets me play with data I create in interesting ways when I get a chance to do a bit of hacking. We'll see. I have to wait for my invitation to come through first, anyway.

Optimising the commute

So, we've moved offices. At least, my team has. We used to work in central London, colloquially known as W1 due to the postcode, and we're now in W12, White City.

As an annoying consequence of this, my commute has grown significantly worse. For the first couple of weeks of the new regime I found that my commute was taking longer than it used to take me to get into work when I worked in London and lived in Peterborough - a trip of some 80 miles. I now travel roughly twenty miles into work, which is beyond the realms of cycling distance, even supposing I were fit enough to do so.

My old commute went like this:
12 minute walk to the station
35 minute trip to Charing Cross
25 minute walk to the office

The new one goes like this:
12 minute walk to the station
25 minute trip to London Bridge
15 minute tube to Bond Street
15 minute tube to White City
5 minute walk to the office

On the face of it, the timing looks much the same. Unfortunately, every time you introduce a change you have to allow for movement between platforms, and a massive risk of failure. And every day there was a different failure and it was a total pain in the bum. I have at least discovered that the problems are reduced if I start the trip at 7am instead of 8am. Total time traveling from 8am is just shy of 2 hours. Starting out at 7 means it's more like 1hr 15.

Of course, there are further problems to solve. I have to get used to being up and active before 7am, not an easy thing for a naturally night based person (when I am not working for whatever reason my sleep pattern is to be awake 11am - 4am). And I also have to find some way to fit 50 minutes of exercise per day back into my life. These are not insignificant problems, but at least now I have the timing better sorted.

The 7ish trains are much busier than the 8ish trains. I find this strange as the exact opposite is true of the tubes out of London Bridge. I also wonder how much this is true for trains running twenty minutes or so later or earlier. The investigation into optimal solutions continues.

Meanwhile, I'm intrigued by the train signs at Abbey Wood station. For some reason they have switched their display method from something along the lines of:

7.12 Charing Cross due 7.13
7.11

to

7.12 Charing Cross due 2 mins
7.11

Is the latter considered generally easier to read? Or are they simply deliberately obscuring the mismatch between the due time and the published time?