Tag: manchester

Speaking at the Manchester Free Software Meeting

I’m speaking next Tuesday (15th April 2008) at the Manchester Free Software about my geeky web comic, Everybody Loves Eric Raymond. Apparently people are still interested in it even though it hasn’t been updated since December! Hooray!

It’ll be a bit of a mix of the two talks I’ve done before on ELER, so some stuff about the history of the comic and how I make it, plus some ranting about free software, free markets and leaders.

I was asked by the then organiser (and my friend) Matt Lee who was then extraordinarily renditioned to North America with his new wife, leaving the new organisers to pick up the pieces. Luckily most of the pieces were found and it’s all go, though I do now appear to be talking about my new Rails hosting company too and my name is spelt differently. If there is time, I’ll talk about some of the stuff we’re doing at Brightbox with Free Software.

Talk starts at 7pm at the Manchester DDA. More details on the Manchester Free Software website.

8/4/2008 Add Comment

North West Ruby User Group Talk: Building Brightbox

Oh, btw, I’m doing a talk tomorrow at the North West Ruby User Group in Manchester about how we do the Ruby on Rails hosting at Brightbox.

I’ll be talking about SANs, Centos, Ubuntu, Xen, Apache, Lighty, NGINX, MySQL and other goodies. Heck, I might even mention Ruby, which would be nice considering it’s a Ruby user group.

My business partner Jeremy will be nattering about the business side and various other things.

Update: A couple of photos here and here.

28/1/2008 Add Comment

Labour Party Conference Protest, Manchester

Just back from the Labour Party conference protest in Manchester. I’ve uploaded a few of the best photos but not had time for any fancy post-production. Consider these released into the public domain.

23/9/2006 Add Comment

Leeds film festival tertiary bit

Steamboy coverTwo anime films back to back. First of all, Katsuhiro �tomo’s Steamboy. Truly impressive artwork, amazing sound engineering, utterly poop story. I enjoyed the film but a second or third viewing would only be to check out the visuals. Set in Manchester and London in the steam powered 19th century, young Ray Steam has to help his father and grandfather do some crazy shit protecting their high pressure steamball invention. It’s insanely surreal to see an army of steam powered soldier-robots and flying steam powered attack kites fighting against a Japanese-speaking British army led by Robert Stephenson in the centre of 19th century London. Really, it is, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

What this film lacks in plot, is almost perfectly balanced with lovely things to look at. Almost. Apparently I’m one of very few people outside of Japan to see this film. Don’t I feel so goddam elite.


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8/11/2004 Add Comment