Techiedog-blog

Wednesday 16th July, 10am at the Media Centre Huddersfield. http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/839039/

So, since I first got involved in OpenCoffee events when Imran kicked off the Leeds group early last year, I've made best efforts to attend any I could get to, mainly in Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester. For the last 18 months or so, my main office has been in Huddersfield which has something of a digital hub going on and in fact, I've met many a fellow Huddersfield based tech entrepreneur over in one of Imran's meets. Its perhaps a little past due that we organized something more local and so I've been working with Ann Storey at the Media Centre to bring OpenCoffee to Huddersfield. The inaugural Huddersfield event will be in mid July - we are just conflict checking our proposed dates - and you can keep track of things via the Huddersfield OpenCoffee upcoming group . Come join us.

Long time, no post! Yep, I've been v busy, though the more widely read may have found me posting elsewhere. Any hoo - to work. I'm now the CTO for ensembli and I need to build up my engineering team. I'm looking for self starter, software engineers with a range of experience but no one language or technology is requisite. In fact it you are an expert in one way of doing things then you probably aren't for us. We'll be basing our offices in Sheffield and have junior and senior posts available. The job advert can be found here

So, I'm sure this is spreading rampantly and most of you have seen it already - but for those that haven't, here is possible the best encapsulation of current web experience I've seen through humorous anthropomorphism. I especially like the annoying Facebook!

I spotted this while Christmas shopping: Lost, the board game. I didn't look too closely at the rules but I'm assuming that you go round and round the board with each turn seeming like you are getting somewhere but ultimately realize its the same every time. This goes on ad nauseum until one by one the players get bored and wander off only to get excited about ' Heroes the board' game for a while. Eventually however they all end up pining for the great days of ' Firefly the board game' and ' Carnivale the board game' which are far more fun, its just a shame they stopped manufacturing them.

On Tuesday I presented a talk at Huddersfield University to the Enterprise Network . I took as my theme the importance to SME's of keeping an eye on coming innovations and the tweaking of the variables in the status quo can lead to upsets. Large corporations have the cash to get actively involved in industry wide innovations where as all to often the SME see's paradigm shifting innovation as ssomething that is forced upon them. Any hoo - I promise I'd publish links to the topics I covered so here they are (this post is a work in progress and I'll keep updating over the next few days). Introduction/Mental Sorbet Futurama - New York Worlds fair 1939 Wired article WiKipedia entry Film archive Film clips on YouTube part I , part II MIT City Car project Boston Globe article Guardian article 10 things to keep an eye on 1. The Internet Or more specifically the move from IPv4 to IPv6 Wikipedia has a pretty exhaustive entry 2. Desk top Fabbing (links to follow) 3. Phone-a-ma-ji...

So, there is a lot of weird and wonderful stuff out there on the Web and plenty capable of raising a chuckle, but my first laugh-out-load moment in some time came courtesy of Binoculars Soccer . Maybe I've been coding too hard over the last couple of weeks but this really amuses me. Thanks to the ever reliable GromBlog and their fingers, which are fixed as ever firmly on the pulse of any Web Meme for bringing this to my attention.