Land of the Living

OK boys and girls I’m finally back in the land of the living (well almost). I’ve been at Hack Day London all weekend, finally getting back to Jersey around lunchtime on Monday – but after being awake for nearly 48 hour, I wasn’t capable of much on Monday – especially blogging.

But today I’m managing to catch up on things – like e-mail, uploading photos to flickr and posting my videos to You Tube – oh and not to forget blogging – adding a roundup post from my weekend away.

Lets start with the show and tell – here is a playlist of videos from You Tube taken over the weekend – I didn’t get my video camera out very much so most are from other people.

In the feed above you could see a selection of videos from the pre-party on the day before to one showing the vents in the ceiling opening up to let the rain fall on a massive amount of computer gear.

In the video below by Matt Mcallister (Yahoo) you can see a quick roundup of the whole day and if you look VERY carefully you can just about see me on stage behind Chad Dickerson during the presentation of Hacks.
Of course you can get a much clearer view of the day through photos – and given that this was a geek event with people from Flickr in the building – EVERYONE had a camera – within half a day there were over 2000 photos on Flickr tagged with hackdaylondon.

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.
The selection above are just the photos I’ve taken of the day – you can see many more by searching flickr for hackdaylondon and a few by going to the Hack Day London group.

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.
As well as what’s on Flickr and You Tube there are also videos posted to Vox (I can’t find the embed link and can’t be bothered to go through source code) including one of the roof opening.

You can also view some of the web based prototypes and see what people have to say on the event by going to del.icio.us and looking for the hackdaylondon tag or even doing the same thing on Technorati and Google Blogs.

You’ve read what I thought of the event in previous posts but I’ll just say that I hope it happens again – although I was very busy and had no sleep for two days – I loved the event, I had one of the best times of my life and it’s re-inspired my love of getting down and dirty with code.

I had a couple of ideas for hacks but due to being too tired, not eligible for prizes and too busy I didn’t get a chance to build them – but I did see some cool stuff other people where doing and hear a few VERY good talks on various future techs.

If you’re interested – my ideas involved flickr, twitter and bbc weather. The first was to take BBC Weather data for a specific place and then pull in a photo from Flickr taken at the same time and place to see how accurate the weather forecast was.

The other was to create a timeline of flickr photos taken at Hack Day London then pull in Tweets posted at exactly the same time as the photo was taken – this would need a scrape and processing of the Tweets to check for terms like Hack Day, raining indoors, no wifi and allypally.

I didn’t stay for the band as I was about to fall asleep on my feet – I left about 19:00 but I loved every second of what I saw.