Earlier today I hugged Eva goodbye and she set off for London Bridge, thence Gatwick and eventually, one hopes, Tronno. She was in London for many reasons, not just to see me and exchange Tweets while seated in my kitchen, about 12 feet away from where I am now.
I’m staying with Richard, and am currently watching him edit a video of interviews he did on Friday night
Unless you’ve been on holiday/living under a rock you’ll probably have heard of the conference with no name: Science Online London (see last year’s account and debrief). This event, which seems to be irrevocably associated in people’s mind with the Borg another ‘Science Online’ conference in the US, took place last Saturday. And you can read all about that in various places, to which I’m not going to link because I can’t be arsed. Well, you could check out the twitter hashtag or Friendfeed (sorry, Eva) room, I guess. Actually, Brian Kelly has an interesting take on preserving all the backchat from the conference and Dave ‘Passport, what passport?’ Munger talks about Second Life.
Where was I? Oh yes.
But the major reason for Eva flying to London was, I like to think, for something that was numerically smaller far more significant in terms of impact, fun, catering, sociability, alcohol consumed and general all-round awesomeness than the official event.
I refer of course to the Fringe Frivolous Unconference, an event so wild, anarchic and hard-hitting that we haven’t been able to standardize the punctuation of the title (which is one reason why Matt’s anagram, ‘Live Roof Surfing’, was so eagerly adopted. By me at least).
Fringe-Frivolous was Jenny‘s brainchild and she was ably assisted by Matt. Food and copious amounts of alcohol (and indeed, the entire venue) were provided by Mendeley—a big shout out to Victor and Cindy for sorting it all.
Jenny has summarized the evening; and Steffi and Eva have also stuck their collective oars in.
However, I’m not going to blog about it. Instead, you may remember me stalking the rooftops with a Flip camera (kindly loaned by Alom Shaha). I’ve edited the clips into a short film that I think captures the essence of the evening perfectly.
Enjoy!
(Cross-posted at LabLiteral. You are reading that, aren’t you?)
“and exchange Tweets while seated in my kitchen”
Well, that was the main reason, of course.
(P.S. I’m home and alive)
Your Tronno link seems to go to London – is that symbolic of something or other?
Eva, yay. Cath, thanks–let me fix that…
Anar-chic: the dress-sense of non-conformists.
Great video! Thanks for doing that.
Great video Richard (as I mentioned on Twitter) – very zestily spliced together and gives a great flavour of the event. Certainly pushed all my narcissistic buttons!
I showed my kids but all I got was “God Dad, you’re such a nerd!”
Hahahaha! Brilliant.
After a post on Brian Kelly’s blog, I’ve attempted to add some closed captions to the original video. Feel free to chime in (requires Google login).
Thanks for doing that, Richard! Now I can show my geeky friends to all my non-geeky friends 🙂
Richard, A) Great video, who’s the twit in the brown jacket? B) Clicked though to the captions thing (never comes across that before, very cool) and got a “page not found” error? Is the URL correct/permissions set right?
Hum. I suggest you sign in at http://captiontube.appspot.com/ and then make captions for http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T2wIpCq0RE. I think then it’ll ask me to approve and upload them?
Nice one, Richard. Will watch again later. Out of interest, what software did you use to edit this?
iMovie.
Open source? Pah, I’ve drunk the Kool Aid.
Thanks for the video!… it’s really nice!
And I completely agree with what Steffi said:
Now I can show my geeky friends to all my non-geeky friends… Hahaha!
It was great to meet you guys!
Nicely done sir. I guess Eva signed her release eventually?
Damn I’m feeling even more disappointed I missed it. 🙁
Quote of the video: “Everyone seems reasonably… drunk.”
Thanks for responding to my suggestion about crowd-sourcing captioning of the view, Richard. I’ve added a summary of my contribution to the video.
Great video Richard, but goodness me, I didn’t realise that I had still got such a strong Irish accent. (I was worried I was loosing it, so YAY! accents FTW!)
Flee little accent! Be free!
Brilliant! Too many excellent quotes, and I loved you cutting back to Ian (?) constantly trying to be the one grown-up at the party (“the world is full of real things. And there’s a lot of them…”).
Excellent and well done to all who worked so hard to make this happen. hopefully, next year, State Dept. willing, I’ll actually be in the UK for some of these sorts of events…
Oh, and Matt, you don’t have a Northern accent. You sound like you’re from Devon…
It was great fun really seeing many familiar faces from last year – the Second Life video quality was not up to the same standard, and remained resolutely centered on speakers who were small and far… Looks like you all had fun. Good editing.
Lovely! Absolutely lovely. It is so fun to hear people and to see them at the same time 🙂 I would so much liked to be there. Maybe next time…. a girl can dream and look for “grants to go and meet great scientist in a relaxing setting”.
The only thing I would’ve like is a voice over, and maybe a shot with the camera of the one BEHIND the camera…. but alas, it is one of those things maybe? The ones behind the camera don’t like to be in front of them??? 😉
Mebbe. There are plenty of still photographs of me on Flickr.
Great work Richard. I should point out that I really had very little to do with the organisation…all I did was convince Jenny that it would be worth doing.
Oh, and Matt, you don’t have a Northern accent. You sound like you’re from Devon…
Ha. You should hear me trying to pronounce ‘duck’, ‘bear’ and ‘the Lancet’. No one understands me when I try to say any of those.
Thanks Matt. And your accent is quite unlike any Devon accent I’ve heard.
Mebbe. There are plenty of still photographs
of meon Flickr. Absolutely.Selected 100 from the Flickr stream yesterday and added some music. Did my best to put these in a reasonably accurate sequence of events. Click here.