The Venue

The venue for BCL7 was the IBM offices in Southwall, London. And very nice they were too. A good selection of meeting rooms ranging from sizes of 60 people right down to 12 people. Top that with loads of seating areas and a canteen that served us some delicious meals and you had an amazing BarCamp venue.

The Talks

All the presentations were around 20-30 minutes long and were on techy subjects such as “Enterprise Software Patterns” to non-techy subjects such as “Art Pet Project – Lego Portrait”. Some notably good ones for me were Anna Debenham’s talk on CSS Nuggets, Natalie Downe’s discussion on recovering from RSI and Richard Quick’s HTML Emails 101. Unfortunately for me though, a lot of the stuff I wanted to listen to shared the same time slots while the stuff I wasn’t so fussed about didn’t. But that happens. Better luck next time to me.

The Evening Entertainment

There was tonnes of geek fun in the evening. For me the pasttime of choice was playing Werewolf. I think we ended up playing till something stupid like 4am in the morning. There were some seriously good players amongst us too.

My Mistakes

The biggest thing I have learnt from the weekend is to plan for the next one in advance. I hadn’t had the time to do my presentation before the event and this cost me sleep and maybe a chance to see a presentation more or two. The next is that Ian Forrester is always the werewolf. I got told this a lot before we started playing but it was amusing how many times it was actually true!

Anyway, hopefully I’ll get to the next BarCampLondon and before then there is also BarCamp Cornwall and perhaps a BarCamp Cambridge I’d have to attend.

My iPhone Home Screen

• Contacts, calendar, camera & maps – Nothing unusual there.
• Spotify – I’m paying the £10 a month at the moment to allow me to have my music offline. Add this app to a pair of iPhone speakers and your got yourself a portable party DJ.
• Tweetie – After a while on TweetDeck, I’ve switched back to Tweetie for the newer version. It’s quick & simple with the more powerful features just a tap away. Exactly what I want on my secondary Twitter platform.
• Birthdays – Because I’ve got a terrible memory at times and I hate to miss a birthday!
• Rightmove – Lucy and I are trying to find a place to buy at the moment so a daily search on this app means I can keep an eye on the property in the towns/villages I’d most like to live in.
• Remember The Milk – My todo list of choice. A lovely app and it’s web based, and therefore isn’t Mac only like Things or OmniFocus. Oh and I love the alert sound. Moo!
• RunKeeper Pro – An absolute must for any runners out there. Totally worth the money I paid for the pro version. RunKeeper just goes from strength to strength. I’m trying to get in shape again and exposing my poor runs to the world gives me some incentive.
• Peggle – I like to keep one game on my home screen for when I get a spare few minutes. Currently the peg busting adventure that is Peggle takes this place.
• Flickr – Lovely Flickr app that I like to keep handy to show people various trips Lucy and I have made over the years
• App Store & Settings – Nothing special here.

And that is what is on my iPhone homescreen. Does anyone think I am missing a must have?

If you are going too, make sure to pop over and say hi!