Last week, I chaired the “All in hand: Working with handheld devices conference”, which took place at the Royal College of Surgeon in London. It included various presentations from small- to large-scale UK museums discussing their experience with mobile interpretation.

Last week before the Volcano overshadowed any events, Joe Baskerville and I headed over to Denver for Museums and the Web 2010- a major international conference for Museums in the digital space. The conference is a hub of information from the sector with a series of lectures, workshops, conferences, and presentations all exploring the issues of museums online.

A while ago, Joe and I attended Ignite London. Regular readers of this blog will know that we're big fans of the Pecha Kucha talk format, and given that the Ignite evenings consist of dozens of 5-minute talks with 20 slides each, it was right up our street!

I had volunteered to do a talk about some of Britain's lesser-known historical buildings: sea forts (something I debuted at our second internal Pecha Kucha session last December). You can see my talk in full below (or in a larger format from the Ignite channel on Vimeo).

British Sea Forts by Tristan Roddis from hurryonhome on Vimeo.

The results are in folks - the first ever Brighton Munge-off (patent pending) has come and gone and the winners have been announced.

You may want this explained a bit - which is fair enough. We recently took our in-house developed Facemunger application on its first outing to Glug Brighton 2 (a designers' networking event held by Crush and Agency Rush). Here willing gluggers (or glugites? Glugians?) were encouraged to snap photos of themselves with their friends and let the application work its magic to swap their faces. The results were... interesting. The application, created by our Head of New Technology Joe Baskerville, proved to be extremely popular, and with almost 400 images captured that evening alone, going through them to find the ones to share was a tough job (on both the decision-making faculties and, much more prominently, the eyes). But here they are - the best of the best of the Facemunges from Glug Brighton 2.

A year ago, I attended the launch of the Brighton Robotics group, run by Emily Troop, and yesterday I went along to its first birthday party. The group has been pretty active over the past year, with projects to create a host of swam-bots, as well as organising regular talks and hack nights.

The party, organised by Nicola B consisted of around 20 robot enthusiasts turning up at the Skiff coworking space, and constructing drawbots with the aid of excellent kits and instructions created by Steve Pinter.

... that's how I like my coffee. If you do too, then you could do much worse than keep an eye on the calendar of science enthusiasts Café Scientifique.

Last Tuesday, Josh and I headed down to Brighton's Latest Music Bar, which was playing host to a talk hosted by the local branch of said science aficionados. Café Scientifique Brighton are a voluntary group united by nothing more than a love of science and a thirst for knowledge. They meet on the third Tuesday of every month (from now on, the third Thursday of every month) and listen to talks they've arranged from guest speakers on, well, anything and everything scientific. Each talk is given on a different scientific topic by a different guest speaker, and while this happened to be my freshman outing amongst their ranks, I am assured by other regular attendees that the talks are always informative, entertaining, well presented and lively. The small cohort of organisers are joined by a large crowd of attendees (much larger than I - as a Scientifique first timer - was expecting I must admit); anyone and everyone is welcome and you don't even have to buy a ticket.

Recently Andy and I were fortunate enough to attend the Full Frontal JavaScript conference, which was held in a cinema (the Duke of York cinema to be precise). Once the overwhelming sense of déjà vu had passed (See KPG Awards Ceremony), things drifted along smoothly.

Here's a rundown of the highs and lows of the conference (inspired by Colin's Sketcha Kucha I have decided to 'Sketch-a-Speaker', and so I present...)

Christian Heilmann

The conference was kicked off with a trip down JavaScript memory lane by Christian Heilmann, a speaker who is well known on the JavaScript / Accessibility conference circuit. He spoke about the hideous misuses of JavaScript in the past, the slightly less hideous misuses in the present and where JavaScript should be embraced with open arms. 

“And the award for the best Offline: Kiosk, Installation or On-Site Application goes to” …you could cut the tension with a knife… “Cogapp and their interactives for the Great North Museum!” Cue cries of joy, surges of adrenalin, and all round jubilation.

On Thursday 19 November we were proud to take home a British Interactive Media Association Award from the ceremony at Camden’s KOKO. Having started way back in the digital olden days of 1984, the BIMAs are one of the oldest and most renowned awards of their kind - so it goes without saying that our shiny new trophy is standing with pride amidst its brethren in the office. Its also by far the most dangerous trophy we’ve received - made of stainless steel and slightly reminiscent of a Klingon bat'leth.

The dictionary on my trusty Mac tells me that 'glug' can be either a verb meaning to drink liquid with a hollow gurgling sound (e.g. he glugs down half his beer) or a noun meaning an amount of liquid poured from a bottle (e.g. a couple of good glugs of Dubonnet). I tell you this because I feel the two examples listed about the word probably give you a better impression of what the first ever Glug Brighton was like than any amount of material I could write ever would. But I'll try anyway: