Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog

I’m attending BarCamp Leeds and I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t prepared a talk or anything… really embarrassed.
It’s been a funny chase-your-tail week, earning very little money, in which I’ve…

• been doing some educational research looking at “best practice” and getting all excited about Design Pattern Languages all over again
• helping creating a project plan (and other works of fiction)
• I’ve done some design sketches for two sites (even though I have never considered myself a designer)
• A friend helped my with some perl hacking (yes perl!.. argh! .. it’s the only thing I could find that programatically generates ukulele chords)..
• I’ve created a site that sells an ebook for someone.
• I’ve done a little consultancy on the branding and copy of another site. I liked the one with the balloons best.
• I’ve struggled to make a CSS file that makes a Plone site not look like a Plone site (all you Plone-ers know what I mean!) and I’m quite pleased with the results. Although there’s a few glitches it’s almost there… no more thin blue lines and horrible tabs.
• Fixed a bug deep in the bowels of Wordpress by exporting the database, search n replace, and load again… scary mary!

All week I think I’ve been working late, just trying that one more thing that makes one more thing need a tweak. Excuses, excuses… but I haven’t even had a moment to fire up my ukulele or sketchpad. AND THE WIKI KEEPS LOCKING ME OUT!…

I guess I could do a talk on Django development, but it’s not something I feel particularly strong on… and not something I do every day.. I’m not even sure if my dev environment is robust enough for a demo. I’m not sure why a Ruby fan would want to hear either really.
I can’t do a demo of any hush-hush projects quite yet. They’re the ones I’m excited about but they seem to be taking forever to engage the gears… The lovely word treacle comes to mind right now.

But I guess the main thing that is preventing me from having prepared any slides, is not everyday life getting in the way but it’s a bigger issue… the one that goes… what the hell do I know anyway?

If there’s anybody out there, you could answer that question and send me a title for a slide to +44(0)7720 288 285 I’d be very, very grateful.