I didn’t bring my laptop on the Friday, partly due to the monumental drinking session lined up for after Diggnation, and partly as there was a lack of wifi rendering it pretty useless (damn, ok, that was the last time).

To make up for it though, you can find the slides from the talks here:

http://www.slideshare.net/carsonified/slideshows

There are some brilliant talks up there - I’d highly recommend looking through them.

You can also find some of the vids and highlights from the talks here:

http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/content

Congrats on the Carsonified team on getting these up so quickly - awesome job.

No photos from my camera, from the last day (again, due to the high likelyness I’d lose my camera in a drunken moment), but I’ll be going through the masses of flickr accounts and pulling the decent ones in.

It’s been a great start to the day with talks from Kevin Rose, Blaine Cook, Joe Stump and Edwin Aoki all giving great insight into the inner workings of the webapp kings. (Photos to come)

Less good has been the talk by Alvin Woon, Stefen Fountain (after the initial sales patter, I wandered off to find some internet), and of course, the Wifi.  Or rather, lack thereof.  Thankfully Sun Microsystems are onhand with a set of boxes ready for internet use.

*update* ok, the internet at FoWA suffered from epic fail all day long.  My updates because of this were limited, to the point where I decided not to bring my laptop for day 2.  Probably a good thing considering how many free beers were on offer, but that’s a moot point.

My favourite talk of the day goes to the awesome Ben Huh of icanhazcheezburger.com fame - unfortunately, there’s no video up yet from FoWA, but I found this from another conference:

Enjoy.

For those of you that didn’t make it to last years, here’s the run up to the live filming of Diggnation London!

Pre-show Diggnation London from Pierre B on Vimeo.

See ya’ll there!

After a day of getting numerous short clips (whilst doing my day job) and even more strange looks, I sat down to edit it…

Numerous cups of tea, 3 crashes, a small amount of tears, and a lot of berating from my flatmates, this vid finally popped out of my mac.  The soundtrack is “Phantom II” by the awesome “Justice”.

Play it with sound - preferably LOUD!

A day in the life of… from Nathan Bentley on Vimeo.

Enjoy.

Nath.

The Golden Ticket for those of you that don’t know, is a Willy Wonka style offering from Ryan Carson over at the ever awesome Carsonified - write a blog post about why you want to win the Golden Ticket, get 25  or more comments and enter the prize draw.

Anyway, being that I’ve left it so long, I’ll cut straight to the point… Why I’m craving the Golden Ticket.

I’ve worked in the t’interweb business for 10 years now, and have managed to keep it a passion (if anything, it’s become more of a passion - I guess I’m lucky that I’ve got a job I enjoy so much). However, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been surrounded by people who, despite working in this awesome industry, just seem to lack the passion for it. When I dashed over to FOWA London last year, I felt at home in a sea of people passionate about what they do - and better still, what the possiblities that lay ahead are.

To be fair, in my time I’ve been lucky enough to work with some wonderful passionate people - but those individuals are few and far between. Maybe, just maybe, with the chance to get amongst others who feel the same way as I do, the smile on my face that I bring back at the end of the day (not to mention the photos, videos and mountains of goodies), may inspire some of the other I work with to consider this wonderful web as more than just a 9 til 5. (*ahem* 9 til 6 if you’re a Londoner like myself).

There’s a small and slightly personal note to this post - my intentions aren’t completely selfless… For the past few months I’ve been working on a side project that will hopefully one day soon blossom into a fully fledged webapp. Work has been flagging with the torrent of stuff that has taken my time up over the past 4 weeks, but I’m hoping that with a bit of inspiration, some serious networking, and of course, a few friendly faces to bounce ideas of, it may just come to fruition.

Spare a second to comment if you can. I’ll be eternally grateful!

Nath.

Of course, something has had to have given in the midst of this - and the two biggest victims of this have been my blog and my 365 photo gallery - both of which are looking decidedly neglected.  Spurred on by a recent twitter by Mel Kirk I’ve decided to try an rectify this…  Hopefully over the next few weeks you’ll see a marked increase in my t’interweb related output.

Like a New Years resolution, I feel this might be a bit of a pipe dream, however, I’m determined to give it a go… wish me luck!

After 10 years of working in the web-industry, I’ve come to realise that a lot of factors can contribute to stress levels.  From personal experience, I’ve worked the 80 - 120 hours a week to get projects live, sat in offices that are almost arctic (once in a datacentre where the manager would turn the air con to polar settings, and once for a company that worked in a warehouse with no real heating), and have even experienced stress being caused by not having enough work to do (boredom can be a surprising stress inducer).

I thought long and hard about how I could distill the above down to a concise point…  Thankfully, it turns out I didn’t have to.  About 3 months ago, during a conversation with Paul Lomax about the stresses and strains of daily life, he came out with a line that struck a perfect chord.

“Stress for me is caused by the inability for one to change their environment.”

I’m paraphrasing the above by the way.  My poor stress addled brain wasn’t up to much on that day (hence the conversation), but you get the gist.  The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.  If I was cold, I’d turn the heating on - problem solved.  Of course, if I couldn’t, then my concerns about one day being excavated out of a block of ice would have added to my daily stress.

The theory works well in almost any situation.  Today for instance, I spent hours trying to get a DNS change sorted - something that I once would have done myself in minutes, now has to be handled by another part of the company, emails sent, red tape ploughed through, taking time, effort and having a knock on effect to my working day.  By lunchtime, I was ready to stab someone with a fork.

Stress affects us all in different ways - I’ve seen numerous people (including myself) have stress manifest itself in rashes, IBS, heart palpitations, all the way through to full blown rage attacks and nervous breakdowns.  It’s not a pretty sight - and is a situation that could so easily be prevented.

Empower your staff to change the environment they work in - whether it be something little like decorating the office so they feel comfortable, or something major, like letting them have a say in how the business is run.  After all, few people actively want to make life harder for themselves - you may find that the recommendation someone makes about how to make their life easier makes your life easier too - it might even make you more profitable.

In the course of writing this post, I was interrupted a stack of times by the ringing of my phone, and numerous times by people asking me “a quick question”.  Tomorrow, I’ll be turning off my phone for lunch, and enjoying the park, weather permitting.

In reality of course, this just didn’t happen. After losing my ipod (which doubled up as portable storage for a number of my photo albums) over the weekend, and realising that I’d be pretty distraught if I lost my photos, I decided that it’d be a good time to invest in a flickr account.

Once I did this though, I suddenly realised that I’d need to get uploading. It’s taken my roughly 12 hours, but I’ve almost managed to scrape together around 10gb of photos dating back to ‘98 (no easy task considering that they were scattered over 8 harddisks, some of which hadn’t been used in a long time…).

The realisation that I should have a) named my images in a sensible fashion, and b) removed a lot of the badly composed, badly lit, duplicates and frankly just utter shit photos has finally dawned on me. Looks like I’ll be spending another weekend doing just that soon.

Of course, I couldn’t possibly end without plugging the new flickr account, so here it is in all its shiny web 2.0 glory.

First day in, I had the usual overload of names and faces - suddenly I remember how it feels to not know everyones names. Don’t have admin rights to my computer, so can’t even install an FTP client. A project manager yells something about a site being broken at 6pm. I have no clue. Fear and panic sets in.

Day two, I’ve managed to figure out where the coffee machines are, and how to operate them. Still don’t have admin access to my machine, which is starting to make me very touchy. Finally after a bit of banter with the IT support team, I manage to get rights to install stuff. On goes my favorite selection of open source utils. Feel a little better.

Day three, I start digging into work. Have a meeting with a Project manager who sympathizes with my frustrations at having no resource. Install wordpress and start to skin it. Feel much better. Go to pub for someones leaving do. Drink beer and head home, despite broken tubes. Feel much much better.

Day four (Friday!) - Sausage sandwich and other breakfast goodies awaiting me when I arrive. Continue skinning site successfully, finding out that I can still remember HTML and CSS. Bonus. A few more meetings and things click into place. Thing are definitely looking up. Finish work at 5.30, and grab a beer before shooting off. Looking forward to coming back on Monday and seeing where the journey takes me next.

After 2 1/2 long years at Pod1, I’ve decided to move on. Aside from the general craziness caused by my resignation, I also thought it best to make sure that the information about my departure was disseminated in an official capacity before I blurted it out online for all to read. Thankfully, that time has come…

In a little over 3 weeks I’ll be donning a new cap for Publicis Modem (of the world-wide Publicis Groupe). It’s a big move, and I’ll be flexing my technical muscles for one of the biggest agencies in the world - hopefully in a way that will assist their growth in the digital market.

Of course, my decision to leave Pod1 wasn’t an easy one - having spent 2 1/2 years eating, sleeping and breathing Pod1 (I kid you not, the sofa’s are damned comfortable), I was reluctant to leave its comfortable bosom. I’ll also be leaving a great number of friends behind - although thankfully I’m only a 15 minute tube ride away, so will no doubt be back on a Friday night.

At this point, I’ll leave with the email I wrote come the official announcement of my departure - hopefully supplying some insight to my daily workings…

A few things you may not know about me and my time spent at the pod:

• I moved to London to work at Pod1 on the sole merit that Fadi made me a cracking cup of tea (a first… and last?).
• I’ll have been at pod1 for 926 days (79945200 seconds!) when I finally get booted out the door.
• In that time, I’ve written over 100,000 lines of code.
• My longest working week was a whopping 122 hours, my shortest just a measly 4h.
• I’ve managed to go 24 hours without leaving the second floor of the building, and 36 hours without leaving the studios.
• I’ve discovered that the red sofas make awesome beds. Conversely, the old designers couch (which I believe has now left the pod) is way too small for me, and covered in spray mount - not a good sleeping experience.
• By rough calculation, I’ve drunk around 1,400 pints of flat Japanese lager, Guinness and mojitos from the bar downstairs (OK, maybe from the surrounding pubs too).
• By rough calculation, I’ve drunk a ludicrous 4,820 cups of tea. (Milk and two sugars please)
• I’ve “broken” 6 contractors - including the “ginger magician” and “moon-thunder river” (his real name, I kid you not.)
• I’ve helped in the launch of over 25 sites, and had my sticky fingers in dozens more.
• I’ve made many good friends in my time here, and thankfully, not lost any.

Bye for now…