nathan bentley's personal playground...

The Future Of Web Apps London Expo starts tomorrow!

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!

I’ve left this one kinda late to be honest… If I hadn’t been so darned busy with other, less fun stuff, like work, the gym and lugging bags up and down stairs for my flatmate (we live 4 flights up - no lift - Peter owes me big time for helping him move), I’d have gotten my act together and probably have had a better chance at getting 25 comments to allow me to enter the Carsonified Golden Ticket competition.

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.

Today I finally signed up for a pro Flickr account. Why hadn’t I done this sooner? Well, up until now, I’ve managed to convince myself that, because I own my own servers, I should probably just use of of them. Of course, as a developer, it shouldn’t be too hard to write some kind of flickr like gallery system, and I’d be up and running in no time.

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.