Domino Community

Just a final, quick reminder that a few of us are meeting for a beer at the Market Porter near London Bridge tonight from about 6pm. If you can make it, we’d love to see you.

There are a few of us meeting up for a pre-Christmas party season beer next Wednesday. We’ll be at the Market Porter from 6pm and then probably try and get some dinner later on.

Hope to see you there.

So it’s been a couple of months since UKLUG finished up and before we really get into the Christmas party season I thought it would be a good idea to organise a London LotusBeer event.

At the moment the plan is to meet at the, now traditional, Market Porter for a pint or two and then go on for some dinner at some nearby fine quality curry house to be decided upon based on our state of innebriation.

So pencil Wednesday 3rd December into your diary for about 6pm. All the usual London based suspects will be there, but if you’ve never managed to make it along please do join us to say hello.

Paul, Bruce and Jamie have posted photos of their home offices. I can’t believe how organised they all are. I suspect there may have been some frenzied tidying before they snapped the pictures 😉

Well these are a couple of photos of my desk as it it this morning (no tidying, sorry Mum!)…

I work in my living room (the downside of being in a flat). And like Jamie the majority of the money I have spent on office type things was on the chair. When you’re sat down for 10+ hours a day it’s well worth investing in something comfortable.

Like the opthers, I’ve got two screens, but for me, it’s two laptops. The main Macbook Pro is sat on a Griffin laptop stand, and that’s the work machine. Then the Macbook deals with music, podcasts, Skype and chat clients. It all works rather well to be honest. If I could change anything it would be to get a 23″ screen to plug the MBP into, but that’s for when I win the lottery!

I’ve been pretty much offline for the last three days due to the UKLUG meeting in London. On Wednesday I went along and helped out stuff the bags and set up what we could and then on Thursday and today a few of us just acted as general dogs-bodies. By all accounts it was a really good couple of days with interesting presentations but most importantly good people to talk to during the breaks for coffee, lunch and beer!

So a little wrap-up is in order I guess. In terms of the speakers we had some great people talking with some of the superstars of the Lotus community speaking like Paul Mooney, Bill Buchan, Rob Novak, Gab Davies, Jamie Magee and many more. But two great things about UKLUG which sets it apart from other events are the incredible number of sponsors (there were 23 who filled the sponsors area, gave really interesting sessions and as far as I could tell spoke to a lot of the people who came along to the event) and also the new speakers, whether they were “case studies” like Cardiff University or new community members like my friend Mark Myers.

I know I’m biased, but I had a really good time over the last couple of days, so I hope that means other people did as well.

There was one important thing which we didn’t do during the closing session and that was to thank Warren properly for all of his work. These big user group events normally need one or two people driving them, ILUG has Paul Mooney and Eileen Fitzgerald, and UKLUG has Warren Elsmore. There are a few of us who help with lifting and carrying around the edges, but really it’s hard to imagine the amount of effort that is required from the figureheads of these events, there’s dealing with the venue, sponsors, speakers and the other organisers (much like herding cats for the latter group I can assure you!). It really is a superhuman effort, over a long period of time. So if you bump into Warren make sure you thank him for his work.

Also Warren mentioned that we will be sending out the conference evalutations soon. For those that didn’t make the closing session, basically we’ll be asking you for your feedback and in return we’ll be putting together as many of the session slides as we can, so please make sure you fill in the evaluation when we send the email out.

Now I really, really need some sleep 🙂

Don’t forget that a few of us are meeting up for beers tomorrow evening at the Market Porter in London. I’ll be getting there at about 5.30 and a few of the usual suspects will be there so feel free to join us while we make the most of the British Summer.

Well it’s been a month or so since we did a meetup in London, no Keynote Drinker this time, but at Kerr’s behest, how about a few beers on Thursday 31st July at the usual venue?

If you were at ILUG this year then you’ll probably have met Mark Myers who presented a session with Ben Poole amongst other things. Well Mark’s been writing a blog for a while but has never actually told anyone about it before, so if you’re looking for a mix of Domino dev and admin, Linux and fencing then anewchance.co.uk is the place for you!