Dominic "The Hodge" Hodgson

Last weekend, Heather and I packed our bags (okay, she packed the bags and I carried them) and went off to Barcamp Blackpool, the Barcamp was great but thats not the point of the post, We stayed a very nice B&B but sadly booked it a little late, there were two options, a twin room or a triple… as it was the same price I went with the triple.. Continue Reading…

This weekend will see the first ‘Leeds Gamer Night’, a trail event I’m putting together for LAN gaming.

It was due to coincide with the release of TF2 for the Mac but Valve being Valve, it looks like we will have to play other things as well.

Best of all, its now completely free, places are limited to 30 so there is a £10 deposit but we will refund that on the day.

You don’t have to be a massive gamer (we’d prefer you not to be really) and you don’t have to have the latest graphics card, we’ve got a tonne of games which can play nicely on mac, windows and linux on everything from a MacPro with 8gigs of RAM to a netbook that you’ve had for a few years.

The venue is in the city center, from Saturday Noon to Sunday Noon.

We have space for people to bring there main machines, laptops, NAS boxes…

For the past 2+ years Tom and I have been doing a quiz at barcamps, a couple of months ago the folks at TeamLebowski invited us to do a quiz for them and the wonderful folks at eBay / Gumtree gave us somewhere to host it (bearing in mind the last time Tom and I were there someone got a little excited on the spinny chairs and a cabinet was broken..) Continue Reading…

It’s not often I’m positive about the film industry on this blog, I have issues with several things they are doing but I’ve blogged about them before, last night I broke three rules I set for myself with regards to film viewing. Continue Reading…

The word is out, the Digital Economy Bill has passed and people are pissed… or rather people on twitter, blogs and online communities are pissed.. the ‘nerds’ as referred to during the 2nd reading. Most of the british public won’t know about this bill, infact the first time they will even know of its existence will be when Virgin Media send them a letter saying ‘we know what your doing’, by this time anyone with any technical sense will have moved to tor, vpn technology, torrent encryption or the next new fangled technology (and yes that includes anyone using piracy for profit).

What is interesting this morning as I read the feedback and backlash isn’t about the bill, sure a lot of people are annoyed at the contents but its more the process that has shocked people, I don’t know how many people tuned into the debate last night via the BBC feed but I bet it was a lot more than usual, I’d probably go as far as to estimate that it was the most watched stream that BBC Parliament have ever had (but I’ll bug one of my friends at the BBC to confirm that )

I won’t repeat again how much money had been raised to put up a newspaper ad, the calls weren’t  just even stop the bill but rather carry on the debate, there just wasn’t enough time publicly to get a proper sense of what the bill would actually do.

Many of the MP’s last night used terminology which they obviously weren’t comfortable with, with one MP spouting off names of some recent bands then looking chuffed at himself for looking seeminly ‘with it’.

With all the letters, emails and phone calls, less than 40 MPs stayed for the whole debate, many of the MP’s just waited in the halls to vote nay (I learned yesterday what a 3 line whip was)

So what do we do now?

I’ve joked on twitter about running as an MP and whilst yes I could raise £500 and run, would that make the best difference? with my local area already so wrapped up in labour (and no if that’s what your asking)  that I have to wonder if my time would be better spend somewhere else?

Do we start a group that has the objective ‘to work with the government on technology and digital issues’, if we started this, would they even listen or would they just pass us off as a group of nerds?

Do we start our own party? Digital Democrates

Do we just shout and moan a lot on twitter?

Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying I know everything and have all the solutions, like many people in the UK I know naff all about the day to day work of an MP (I have been reading a lot), but we’ve had so much scandal, back and forth and lack of anything that I’ve got to at least give something a go.

I support both the pirate party and the open rights group (although in honesty I’ve given money to neither) but I feel that they both come with strong opinions (and in one case – a stupid name).

I firmly understand the need to cut piracy and have a few ideas myself but its give and take, it took an hour and 20 minutes yesterday for someone to mention the fact that the creative companies haven’t exactly made it easy to get media online without piracy (and for a reasonable price), Mike Butcher mentioned rightly that the record companies own a good stake in Spotify and yet, I didn’t hear it mentioned once yesterday as a viable alternative to piracy and to be honest, its a damn good one, I haven’t downloaded any music since I got my invite, the system works well and is multiplatform, I know there is a problem with the artists and record companies not getting enough money but we can work these things out, lets look at product rather than prison.

Like many others, I want to give a special thank you to Tom Watson who seemed to be the voice of the 20,000 ‘nerds’ who emailed, wrote and phoned. If I do become an MP, will you be my Obi-Wan?

I watched BBC parliament for over 5 hours yesterday with the digital economy bill being debated, I wasn’t 100% sure of the process or how the house of commons works (there seems to be a LOT of repetition and thanking him honourable friend which slowed the whole process down to a crawl. Continue Reading…

After every Think Visibility we send out a questionnaire, which attendees fill in anonymously, we’ve already had some great responses but because we cannot directly respond to them… I’d like to do some of them here.

Lunch could have been better with more variety – Food is one of the areas than can bump up a ticket price very quickly, adding a few extra sandwiches can add £5 / £10 per person very quickly, we decided to sacrifice a massive range of sandwiches and concentrate on the amount of food we received (after last years ‘lack’ of food)

Sandwiches need to have labels to show what they are – Yep, we will do this.

Change the coffee and tea - This was brought up several times and it’s something we will be looking at (if your interested, we actually drank over 8 times the amount of coffee we paid…so we got in trouble)

Sponsors didn’t have high profile – We encouraged all sponsors to send us a display or bag drops but in some cases the times were just too thin, I’ve spoken to a few of the sponsors about this and they were very happy with the coverage received at the conference.

Why was it Beer and Wine only? – That was my call and I apologise, we had some technical difficulties at the start of the party and I wasn’t able to sort the bar properly, we restrict to Beer and Wine to stop people taking the piss but had I thought cider and some other drinks should have been on the whitelist (next time I forgot, just poke me and I’ll sort it) as for subsidizing the cost of higher value drinks, It’s something we will certainly look into and talk to the venue about.

The After Party started too late – starting the after party at this time allowed us to clean up and set up each room.

The After Party started too early – you just can’t win sometimes

Dom went to bed too early - What can I say, I’m a lightweight

More hands on talks, with take home information, too much duplication from the first and second conference – Take home information is one of the things Think Visibility tries to provide so I’m sorry that we may have failed with it,  as for the duplication point, we try and mix things around each time so duplication is avoided but we will look into this a bit more.

Pre Party BOGOF Deal Didn’t Happen – That wasn’t intentional but the bar changed the offer without telling me, I will be sitting down with the pub manager next week to discuss the party.

More networking opportunities - A few people have noted that they were on there own and wanted a hand being introduced to others, we tried to kickstart a bit of this with the lanyards but it’s something we will look into .

Blackhat vs Whitehat techniques – noted and we will try and put a session on next time.

Can you not schedule it next to mothers day –  blame the salsa conference that double booked us with us.

Technical level of talks – we will be giving each talk a technical rating next time.

Eyetracking should have been better publicised –  yep, as one of the little extras for attendees the eyetracking was displayed, however because it clashed with three decent sessions, a lot of people didn’t see it.

Make it a two day conference and charge more – Okay!, no just kidding, we do have something planned for September which will hopefully make travelling down on friday worth it but Think Visibility is going to be a one day conference.

The Sessions are too long / The Sessions are too short - we seem to have an even number of these so I think we will keep the session times as they are.

Its not all negative, there are some fantastic comments about the conference, but we will be using them shortly for something else

I will be updating this post over the next few days while more responses come in.

Over the weekend I was invited to take a look at the new A4u website, this isn’t just a revamp, this is a ground up rethink and recode of the whole system (which I believe also included moving everything but from the forum from PHP to Python/Django). Continue Reading…

On Friday I heard a rumour that there was to be an all hands meeting on Monday morning at Affiliate Window, the last time this happened Affiliate Window was bought out by Zanox so the news had to be big..

Well it was they only bloody bought Buy.at! Continue Reading…