Dark Liquid

Well, my first barcamp has come and gone. Hats off to the BambooJuice, Yahoo Developer Network, Clipper teas, Twitfaves and TwitterJobSearch for funding it and Mark Ng and Adam Mills for making it happen.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I’m glad I went, it was awesome. Basically, it was just a massive 2 day geek fest. We hung out, played games, ran and went to talks on all sorts of interesting topics. Some of the talks I went to including one about The Skiff, a cool coworking/hackerspace down in Brighton, one about how to get into freelancing, one by ORG (the Open Rights Group) on protecting your bits and a few more. I even kind of ran one with Dan and Diccon, where we basically set up a couple of games of Polarity, which got a pretty good response. I got in a few good games but alas, I didn’t lose once, which was a shame.

The main thing about barcamp though was the awesome community spirit there. Everyone pitched in to make it a really fun weekend and it turned out marvellously. I met some awesome people and had a great time. My twitter following and followers lists are expanded thanks to that little event.

One of the best things though was when I became Pseudo-Mark for the new sport set to sweep the nation (probably not) – Tea-Stacking! Clipper Teas had given the barcamp a metric fuck-ton of tea, Yahoo Developer Network had provided frisbees. Combined, with geeks and prizes, a new sport was born. Basically, the competition was a tournament to stack boxes of tea as high as possible while people with frisbees tried to knock them down by hurling the frisbees at them. Mark Ng disappeared half-way through so I took his place as Pseudo-Mark and nearly got to the finals, but was beaten at the end by what was definitely not favouritism at all Apparently I nearly ate a frisbee, but I don’t recall this (maybe it’s the concussion ).

Tea-stacking and frisbee eating at barcamp bournemouth 2009, courtesy of Andy Trickett on flickr