Today Nick and I spent some of the day at the Wired Sussex Media Jobs & Skills fair manning the Madgex stand.  This is a new event for me, having missed previous years, and I have to say I rather enjoyed it.  There was a good presence of local companies, and some good representation of support for freelancers (such as the Farm, the Werks and the Skiff), and of course Wired Sussex were out in force.

Madgex are currently only recruiting for a Global Sales Director and so we weren't really present from a recruitment perspective, more from the position of reminding the local community that we are still around and active, and to share our experiences of working in the media sector, and what the various job roles we have actually involve on a day-to-day basis.  Weekly, internally to Madgex (although hopefully coming soon to the lab site), I produce a newsletter listing all of the community events I've tracked down from around Brighton, Sussex and London which seem to be relevant to the team.  Today we produced a special list of these for the next 7 days to distribute to anyone interested, which allowed us to introduce people to some of the more active, and frequent local events like Flash Brighton, UX Brighton etc

I spoke to a wide variety of different people today, from sixth form college students, to people finishing their MAs in Digital Media, to java developers, to freelance designers, to Adam from Garage Studios (who taught my flash course), to one of the ladies from City College who oversees the NVQ I'm doing, to a business coach, to creative writers and film-makers.  I enjoyed talking to them all, suggesting events, or people that they could or should talk to, and I even managed to get a few plugs in for my Brighton Bloggers site, so am hopeful I'll see a flurry of new add requests soon.

All in all it felt like a good event, enabling me to practice my networking skills with a more diverse group of people than I usually meet.  Of particular benefit to me was the opportunity to talk to Sixth Form students, and BA/MA students and get feedback from them on how they see the world of media evolving and understand more about what their various courses actually involve.  Thanks Wired Sussex, I hope to be back next year.

Whenever I get a new camera, or a new lens, I almost always end up taking photos of the West Pier [1][2]. Since moving to Brighton in 2001 I have watched the slow decline of the pier, and taken my own fair share of photographs.

I thought it would be useful to record what I hope to gain from attending the course, so that I can see how well it does and I do, so:

• how to actually use my flash in anything other than the automatic mode
• understand how to balance flash light against natural or alternative light sources to get the right exposure rather than having to correct in Lightroom
• how to make use of reflectors
• what difference is made by taking the flash off the camera

The event is described as

Join us for a lively and interactive seminar where solicitor Scott Gair will addressing the issues and challenges faced by creative professionals in their industries.
In the seminar we will be discussing:-

• Where does copyright exist
• Who owns copyright in certain works
• How do you assign/licence copyright
• How do you protect your copyright

Spaces at this event are limited, so to secure your place please contact Scott Gair on sgair@mayowynnebaxter.co.uk or call 01273 223258.

Unforunately I can't attend it, but hopefully someone else can and will be able to share their learnings as it sounds like it'll be useful stuff

I went to my 3rd photo group meetup a couple of weeks ago. The theme, brought forward from January's cancelled meetup, was photos in the style of Sally Mann or Henri Cartier-Bresson, and general Christmas photos.

I failed in the Sally Mann and Henri Cartier-Bresson theme, but did bring along some Christmas themed photos - mainly Lego Santa related but I also put together a triptych of photos (a continuing theme from the November meetup) from the recent snow which seemed to be liked by the group.

Next months theme is, well, there is no theme. Just a chance to bring along 10 or so favourite photos which will be good to us new members to get an idea of what the others are all about

On Tuesday I attended the Skillswap goes portable talk. It featured two of my fellow Madgexians, Glenn and Bruce, and was split into two parts.

Bruce was up first talking about

All in all, another excellent evening from the Skillswap guys.

Part 1 - How to write crap code in C# - Anti-Patterns for Performance

The annotated slides are available at Ben's website as a PDF

Ben's talk was all about performance and things to think about it to affect it.  One of his key phrases was "Don't try this at home" as he deliberately throttled various bits of his demo application - a windows application to analyse the complete works of Shakespeare to find out what the most used words are (the most used word is Should should you be interested)

One of the key points I took away is the need to start with some expectations - what sort of performance time is acceptable?  Without this it is impossilble to work out whether you're succeeding or not.

Part 2 - "Things I heard at PDC"

Ben was at PDC in October and so presented us the things he'd heard about that he thought we might be interested in.  A quick look at the website shows me that there are videos of some of the sessions which may prove useful.

This was a really useful session, providing a great overview of some of the blog posts, and twitter comments I read whilst the conference was going on.

So, in summary, another great VBUG Brighton evening, with a good number of people.

On Saturday, I met up with one of the ladies I met on the Creative Digital Photography course and after a little bit of plotting we headed off to visit some of the galleries in the Brighton Photo Fringe.

Our first destination was the Brighton Media Centre and the Bystander exhibition. There was a good collection of photos displayed, and my personal favourites were those by Claire Pepper and Laura Pannack which I found really arresting. Next up was the Rimini-Beach exhibition, still in the Media Centre, by Beatrice Haverich. These had some amazing colours.

We left the Media Centre and headed down to the seafront to see the Petrusco exhibition in the Fortune of War. These photos, whilst not exactly to my tastes, have obviously had a large amount of planning to result in some eye-catching images.

Next up was the Human Endeavour exhibition at the Bellis Gallery. This was probably my favourite exhibition and covered a theme which covered the societal impact of consumerism and waste, geological scars on the landscape, globalisation etc. I left this exhibition clutching a map styled collection of photographs entitled Textures of Time: landscape architecture produced by Richard Chivers. This document is a really different way to display images, which is probably why I felt compelled to buy it. My favourite diptych photo is that of a quarry, mainly because if you just saw the left hand photo on its own you wouldn't really see anything remarkable about it, but when it is displayed next to its partner the full story becomes apparent.

All in all, a great wander and some wonderful inspirational images. I'd recommend a wander around if you get an opportunity.

The event started with a keynote from Linde Wolters of TheNextWomen which touched on the percentages of women in various areas of the media industry. She also identified some reasons as to why these percentages weren't higher, touching on geek culture and tribalism and competition. All in all a pretty good keynote with areas to think about - where are the guiding lights? where are the female role models?

The next talk was a panel discussion about Women on the Web. This was chaired by Jenni Lloyd of Nixon McInnes and consisted of Denise Wilton from moo.com, Sophie Major from Yahoo! Developer Network and Rosie Freshwater from Leapfrogg. The panel all had a 5 minute or so slot each to explain who they were, and what they did before answering questions from the floor. One of the things that was common across all these ladies, or is it women, I can never quite work that one out, is passion. These were all inspirational people, with inspirational messages. They have followed different paths, none of them having started out in the direction in which they ended up, and all of them seemed to have taken different opportunities as they have arisen (which is a great relief to me as that is effectively what I've done too). Ok, so I know that I love the web, its what I changed my focus to in about 1999 so am bound to be inspired here, but I genuinely believe that it would have been hard to leave that session without being inspired.

I didn't get on with the next panel discussion, about Women In Games, as well at all. Maybe it's because I don't understand the unique pressures of the games industry, maybe it's because I don't see myself as a victim, but I found the panel discussion somewhat irrelevant and a complete contrast to the previous session - I don't even have any notes on this which is really, really unusual for me - I make notes about everything...

There was then a break for lunch, and after having had a see-saw morning, I decided not to go back in the afternoon. Overall, I left still not being sure who the conference was aimed at, but still feeling inspired by what the Women on the Web had to say. Would I attend this conference again? Possibly with the intention of learning from the people in my area, the people who I have something in common, but I probably wouldn't hang around for the other talks.