Uploaded from South Wales, where I discovered that a simple rip stop nylon poncho packs up smaller than the army issue job, and even fits me!
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Without a doubt my favourite hack (and music for that point) was Team Bob
BBC Dylan – News 24 Revisited (Full Version) from James Adam on Vimeo.
So cool. So clever.
There’s just over 100 people here at Mashed, about evenly split between those awake and doing stuff (mainly werewolf and Rock Band at this moment in time) and those grabbing a few precious moments of sleep.
Stace came up with a good idea early on, a night manager, someone to take over from a sensible time late on Saturday to give the core organisation team a good break. This year I’ve split the main on-site organisation into four roles – the Senior Producer and three Production Assistants – it’s worked really well and meant we’ve kept everything very well in hand – but for some reason the shift pattern for overnight isn’t resulting in as much sleep as I could do with!
Ian Forrester is in his element, this is the middle of the day for him! Next year he can run the night shift I think.
Thoughts on the event so far:
- Having dedicated staff rather than volunteers has made things much easier and smoother.
- I wonder if the smooth running has some-how taken the ‘edge’ off the event a little?
- We have about 100 more people here at most times than we did last year.
- The screen is amazing, we can’t get a smaller one next year.
- I’m very excited about tomorrow’s (today’s) presentations.
- Kingswood Warren guys are awesome, I wish I had more time to give them.
- Hotel in Muswell Hill has been dreadful, the concept of a 10 room block booking seems quite alien to them.
- Very happy to read the virtually totally positive twitter and blog posts coming out.
I’m really on my knee right now, I can’t see how I can see the day out, and there’s still so much to do – I had the horrible two hour stretch in the middle of the night so I’ve not managed to get more than two hours sleep. I need some tips on keeping focused and awake. I think I may find a quiet corner and try some simple meditation.
Well this is it, the last time before mashed when I’ll be able to sit at a desk and type properly – not balancing my eee PC on my knee hoping the wi-fi is still up.
It’s quite scary – 600 people have signed up now – there’s some more tickets available, but I just feel I’ve forgotten something.
The PR has started in earnest – I was on the Guardian Tech weekly podcast, and Pods and Blogs this week – it’s quite fun hearing myself on radio again – reminds me how much I miss it.
Right, bean bags need to be organised, and I need to deal with the hundreds of entries for Monster Mashed (read as ZERO entries to Monster Mashed).
No speaky….
Not a video review this time, unusual for us I know, however I’ve just got hold of a really nice piece of kit that may well prove more valuable than mine and Matt’s (failed) Russian language (Svetlana please forgive us….) course we had planned to do for the trip – I finished having trouble speaking English let alone Russian.
It was a gift ‘to help you on your trip’ said the voice. It was a small pouch with a belt loop – a bit like an ammo pouch. Guns – I hope not? I dread to think where they think we’re going. Anyway looking at the pouch I wondered what it contained fearing the worst but I was pleasantly surprised…
It contained a small book, hinged in one corner. Between the covers were a number of pages of plastic paper featuring lots of little cartoon pictures of everyday and not so everyday things and events. It’s called a Pocket Comms book and the neat little hinge allows the pages to be fanned out to see many pictures at once. It’s been developed by an ex-army intelligence guy who came up with the idea whilst overseas and is based on pictures he used to use when communicating with locals. This developed into the book. Each page is double sided and the book contains hundreds of little cartoon drawings covering any number of situations that you might want to talk to someone about but would find it hard to because you both didn’t speak the same language. All the cartoons are grouped according into categories and each page edge is colour coded so red is used for emergency situations and so on. It’s a really clever idea and at about £8 for the basic book well worth the money. Looking at the website The Police have run a trial using it and there’s even a special Military spec one for the boys and girls overseas.
I’ve spent the morning thinking about things I might want to say and so far I’ve not found anything that I can’t use this book to say for me and I’m not a person of few words so I’m pretty impressed. There are similar things out there that have been more widely used and some of them are free, however in my opinion this really is a gem for the price, size and ease of use – yes you can print a pdf but to make is any good you’ll have to laminate it and all that takes time so why not just get one done for you? Of course the real test is taking it to Russia – although certain aspects of ‘youth culture’ means it may come in handy closer to home. However I think it will serve the 3 of us well on the trip and I’ll report on it’s usefulness upon our return.
This is sooo damn cool – I can’t announce it officially yet because I have to put it in proper BBC legal language – and that takes time… but get this… we’re going to run a competition for Mashed in a couple of weeks to build a BBC Sci-Fi Monster.
Not just any monster mind you, but a full size, fully functional, kick-ass monster.
Basically between now and next Thursday you email me with your ideas, and I select the best two – we’ll then fund you to the tune of up to £500 to build the monster (you’ll get the cash after Mashed not before). Then at Mashed itself you actually build the things over 24 hours and show them off on the Sunday with the other presentations – the audience votes on a winner – we give you some lame gift as a prize (the prize is actually the £500 to build the thing in the first place) and you get to keep the monster… how cool!
Anyway – more news on the official backstage blog when I’ve sorted out the legal stuff… also so AMAZINGLY COOl…. NASA are coming… I so damn excited right now.
Fucking ROCKETS!
As we get nearer to the off more people have been asking us how they can keep up to date with what we’re doing. Obviously the simplest way is to come here or subscribe to the RSS feed – or perhaps even subscribe to the videos – but as we’re out on the road we’ll be taking shed loads of photos – and that’s one of the best ways to see what we’re up to (‘see’ what I did there!?).
You can see our photos as they’re uploaded right on flickr over at http://www.flickr.com/photos/journeytorussia/ – where you can comment on them and leave us little notes of encouragement – like this one. In order to do that you’ll need to sign up to flickr – and if you want our photos to appear on your flickr homepage then you’ll need to add us as a contact.
The easiest way to keep up to date with the photos on the road is to simply add the RSS stream to your feed reader.
We promise to upload all photos and not censor any at all…. well maybe some… we don’t want people having nightmares….
Posting these here – after posting them here – didn’t work because the backstage templates are naff.
Goodness me – I thought this year was going to be easy – I knew all the suppliers – I knew what we needed where – but trying to top last years event is proving tough work.
Top Gear has the cool wall – I have the planning wall. It contains everything we need to know to just make the day happen. There are a couple of blurred spots as I confirm them before announcment, but other than that it’s all coming into place.
We’ve released another 100 tickets this morning via Microsoft developer lists, and I think we’ll be releasing another 100 on Friday. The only other bit of news is that I’m planning on running buses from Newcastle, Manchester and Cardiff – I’ll be down in Cardiff next week at the geek meet to talk about backstage and mashed. Right now the plan is to release special bus tickets on the sign up page next week – http://mashed08.eventbrite.com
We’re using backnetwork again this year – http://mashed08.backnetwork.com – fantastic site – I’ll be processing those who’ve signed up via eventbrite later this week – you should get your invites automatically.
Only other cool thing is the website badges – they went down well last year – and I’m loving this years logo – they should be up on backstage before the weekend… in theory!
What is God calling you to do?
Listen to my Thought for The Week on BBC Hereford on Worcester about vocation and what God may be calling you to be or do