Andrew's diary

Sunday, 14 November 2010

Up, good full Irish breakfast and then went to the ballroom for another "Early Bird Event": an introduction to Qt. This went well, but despite the improvements in Nokia's developer story, it turned out the "Nokia Qt SDK" included enough for Maemo and Symbian development, but not enough for desktop Qt development (on Windows). So, since the wifi was flaky, I did my app running in the Maemo simulator :-)

Tim and I headed over to Aviva at 3pm to help set up - getting past all the security guards for the Shamrock Rovers vs. Sligo Rovers FAI Ford Cup Final by saying "we're going to set up a conference." Main reception were less welcoming, suggesting that we come back at 7pm, when the footy wasn't on.

After too many people turned up to help then, a few of us wandered down from the hotel to a nice little Italian restaurant. After a bottle of wine and some pasta, we headed back to the hotel to put together the week's issue of MWKN; and hoping to take the opportunity to recruit some more contributors and editors.

Shortly after getting the laptops out and starting, one of the conference organisers pointed out they'd just finished setting up the Hacker Lounges: free beer, sandwiches, snacks, chairs, tables, table tennis tables, a Wii, an Xbox, a DVD player and foosball table. Excellent. This became our home for the next three nights...

Saturday, 13 November 2010

Flew Aer Lingus from Birmingham to Dublin for the first day of the MeeGo Conference. Bright sunny skies of the Midlands turned to grey, cold, drizzle in Dublin; but wifi on the "AirCoach" from the airport to the D4 Hotels helped.

Dropped in to Dave Neary's talk on debugging (been there, done that ;-)) but met with Tim - for the first time in a year - and caught up with Andrea and Ronan. So many friends and it was only the first hour: this bode well! The bridge building contest was great fun with our bridge coming third, and managing about 20kg!

In the evening, numerous people planned to rendezvous in Temple Bar, but having got separated (and a taxi); Tim, Andrea and I ended up in the upstairs gastropub restaurant of a pub at the far end of Temple Bar. Good food, a couple of pints of Smithwicks and we headed out into the cold to see who else we could find.

We ended up in a bar called "3 Crowne Alley" with Henri, lbt, Tero, Niels and a few others with the live acoustic guitar guy playing all sorts of genres, from The Pogues, through U2 to Bon Jovi. Once we got back to the hotel, we were up until about 1am, putting the world to rights and catching up.

Tuesday, 09 November 2010

Angry.

Saturday, 06 November 2010

Went to the National Space Centre for its "Movie Mania" event (hooray for annual pass tickets). After some discussion Mel and the kids came as well, although Alex wanted a guarantee that he could "go upstairs" where "they" couldn't get him. To be honest, I'm sad enough that I'd've gone on my own.

We saw:

Star Wars

Stormtroopers, Darth Vader, Imperial Guard, Death Star gunner, Imperial pilot, scout trooper, clonetroopers, Darth Maul, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Aayla Secura

Others

A Cylon (TOS), Henry Jones Sr., Captain Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Colonial Marines from Aliens, a Predator, Batman, Batgirl, a Halo marine, Chronicles of Riddick Necromongers.

The "tour" of the Weyland-Yutani Biological Research Facility, unfortunately cut short by the escape of an LV426 xenomorph and our rescue by colonial marines, was also very cool and very well done.

Thursday, 04 November 2010

Got new work laptop and started the laborious process of ensuring all the content (and reference source) is copied across. Kindle is still doing well, and the daily delivery of the BBC News is fantastic. I now need to investigate ways of making it possible for my friends to sign up to receive it to their Kindle accounts.

Tuesday, 02 November 2010

Interesting announcements at work which should start showing up in the press tomorrow.