That's in a little under 15 minutes and the tickets will most likely go within the first minute, so don't be late!
I'm going to be attending and Singularity is sponsoring the first day's breakfast.
Archive for the 'Brighton' Category
There are only 50 tickets left for BarcampBrighton2 and they're going to be available, on a first-come-first-served basis, at 12.30PM today (Wednesday, February 13th) from this site.
Rosie Sherry has a very useful site called Project Brighton for keeping track of all things geeky in Brighton.
If you're a geek living in Brighton or the surrounding area (like that little place you might have heard of called London, for example), you should really check it out.
And for general geeky news and happening around Sussex, don't forget to check out Sussex Digital by Dave and Josh.
I'm sitting in the living room fuming for having been woken up at 6am again by the delivery van for The Pier.
It starts with the beeping of the huge van reversing into the square outside and parking right in front of my building. That's just the opening salvo though.
It gets better when the metallic back door of the van clanks open and he driver starts unloading the heavy bits of furniture onto his metallic trolley. The fact that it's metallic is important. It means that it clanks like crazy, reverberating in the otherwise silent square, as he repeatedly unloads and drags the furniture in front of building. For a whole damn hour.
So today, I did something completely out of character. I opened the window and unleashed a can of premium whoop-ass on the driver. His response: "Don't live here if you don't like the noise."
See, as someone who pays a ridiculous amount of Council Tax (that's what the municipality gets from you here in the UK), I feel I deserve a little better. There are environmental noise laws that state that noisy work should not be untaken before 8am and definitely not before 7am.
I've just written to the council to complain to them and I'm going to call The Pier when they open in a couple of hours time.
And it's not just The Pier either. One of the biggest culprits is Donatello, the Italian "restaurant" (if you've eaten there, you'll understand the need for the quotes).
These guys routinely clean up at past midnight, usually at around 1am or so. And cleaning up includes tipping a dumpsterful of glass bottles (after dragging said dumpster across the square) into the trash bins. (If you're wondering how much noise that makes, I've seen people who actually dump the glass bottles wearing industrial-grade hearing protection.) If you're lucky, it can also involve the crew shouting at each other in various languages across the square. And, of course, their delivery vans sometimes forget what hour it is too in the mornings.
Finally, let's not forget The Druid's Head pub which, on a weekly basis, gets beer deliveries from Carlsberg at around 7am. This involves people throwing empty metallic beer kegs from their basement onto the street, rolling them to the van, and rolling full ones from the van to the pub. It's an amazingly full, rich and continuous metallic sound that needs to be experienced to be believed.
All in all, the combination of all these factors means that you're lucky if you can get about five hours of sleep in between Donatello closing up and the square emptying of loud drunken people at around 1am (or 2am, if you're unlucky) to The Pier van arriving at 6am. Surely, that's just not acceptable!
This noise issue is not just a cosmetic "pea under the mattress" thing either, with reports that thousands of people die prematurely due to coronary heart disease caused by prolonged exposure to excessive noise.
Needless to say, I don't see myself living here this time next year. And it's such a shame because I otherwise love the place.
Big ups to Seb, Peter and the other volunteers from FlashBrighton who organized FlashBrighton's Big Day Out yesterday: it was a resounding success (and I hope the first of many more). Thanks also to Adobe, Influxis, and the other sponsors.
My favorite bit (apart from surprising Seb with my count-down timer -- more on that later) was the 30 minute snowstorm hackathon by Dom (who got 15 minutes to draw a shivering man) and Seb (who got 15 minutes to make a particle-based 3D snow storm in AS3 -- while writing all his own import statements in the Flash IDE!)
And I had a great time presenting my session, Beyond the Buttons. So much so that I think I'll develop it further and present it at some of the conferences in 2008.
Sussex Digital, the community initiative by my friends Dave and Josh, has just published a page that showcases conferences taking place in Brighton, UK. Currently, BarCampBrighton, d.construct, and Flash on the Beach are listed.
Check out Sussex Digital for all things digital in Sussex!
I'm going to be doing a short 5-10 minute presentation at the Flash Brighton relaunch tonight at 7pm so if you're in Brighton, come on down!
Flash Brighton is the new Flashcoders Brighton group. Why the name change? Here's what the official invite says about it:
On this special relaunch night, we’re re-establishing ourselves as a group just as welcoming to creatives as to techies, and the first night celebrates this, with a collection of local Flash stars showing their work. Meetings will then subsequently be every Tuesday, alternating roughly between slightly geekier and slightly creative, with some overlap
There will apparently also be a raffle for a copy of an Adobe product as well as other Adobe freebies.
I was so busy in the past two days that I couldn't even blog about the conference. Flash on the Beach kicked off for me with the party I threw for speakers and friends on Sunday. It was a blast and definitely helped warm up the new place (seriously, it was packed; I turned the heating off!)
Yesterday, I presented my session and caught bits of Craig's before heading back home to undertake more domestic duties (someone had to clean up after the party.) Funny thing is, I must really love my new place 'cos it was actually fun to clean up for a change!
I sat through Jeremy's session today and it just plain rocked. Best presentation I've seen in a long time and his message was loud and clear: The Flash and Ajax worlds have a lot to learn from each other and Flash and Ajax can live in harmony. Jeremy sees web projects on a slider with document-based sites on one end and application sites (RIAs) on the other. He sees Ajax as most useful on the document end (with its usefulness diminishing as we approach the application side) and Flash/Flex as most useful on the application side with its applicability being reduced as we approach the document end. As the crossover point, his rule of thumb was that if you cannot apply progressive enhancement to a site (for example, using his Hijax method), then the application is probably too complex for Ajax (or will require lots of effort to implement in Ajax) and you should use Flash instead. He also mentioned that Flash is currently more accessible than Ajax and that Ajax developers can use FlashAid -- a little tool we developed together with Jeremy -- to enable Ajax sites to ascertain whether a screen reader is present and disable the Ajax functionality (the enhancement) in response to that.
I also caught Joey Lott's session and it was great to see design patterns in Flash presented by someone else. I also managed to see some of Craig's and Keith's sessions. All in all, the conference appears to be shaping out quite nicely indeed. Kudos again to John. I look forward to many more Flash on the Beach conferences in the years to come.
While I was busy meeting a deadline on my latest project, my friends at ClearLeft released the podcast of my interview for this year's d.construct web applications conference in Brighton, UK. In the podcast we talk about smashing myths about Flash usability and accessibility, touch on FlashAid, explore OSFlash and Flex 2, and discuss common issues and concerns shared by the web standards and Flash communities.
You can listen to interviews with d.construct speakers on the d.construct web site.
I love Brighton. No, it's not because two very hot chicks just walked in front of my house, hand-in-hand. (OK, so I'm not compaining) I just love the vibe of this town; the people.
Case in point: I went down to the coffee shop at Borders to do a little work and ended up talking to B. (Finally, someone else who wants a pair of Heelys!) Of course, B.'s not her real name but I couldn't see her name on her band's MySpace page so I'm thinking maybe it's a mystery thing and I shouldn't ruin it. Anyway, so B. has a band and they do electric hip-hop (or "electric-ironica", according to their band's website.)
Check out her songs. "Polaroid" is the best thing I've heard in a while.
I can't help thinking how cool it would be to have them perform at Flash on the Beach. John, you listening?
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