Tag: design

Tis The Season For BarCamps

Tis the season for BarCamps, surely. Tomorrow I’m off to BizCamp in Dublin where I’ll join in the region of 200 other entrepreneurs, freelancers and free thinkers in the first business-focused BarCamp to be held here (nice to see another “themed” BarCamp running). Registration starts from 9am tomorrow and with the early train leaving Kilkenny pre-7am I’ll be hoping to make breakfast in Dublin. Talks are scheduled for between 10am and 5:30pm ish and there’s a draft schedule here.

BizCamp Limerick follows on March 21st for those who can’t make Dublin tomorrow (it being “sold out”) or are looking for another helping of talks from more business people. The Limerick session is being held in UL and at time of writing there are currently 71 attendees and 19 speakers registered.

Two events that I’m going to miss (will be out of the country) are the ACE (Awakening Creative Entrepreneurship) in Derry running March 25th – 27th and OSS BarCamp in Dublin on March 28th which runs in DIT’s Kevin Street Campus. While all the speaker slots have been filled, if you’re interested in going to OSS BarCamp, leave a comment on the attendees list.

Finally, in April we’ve got BarCamp Belfast coming up. I haven’t been to Belfast since August 2006, catching Steel Pulse in the Andersontowns Leisure Centre (what a gig!) and it will be good to get across the border and meet some more web heads for the weekend. It’s going to be held in The Black Box on Saturday April 25th and already there’s over 110 signups, the makings of another great day.

The best thing about all of these events is that they are free.

If you’re looking to get out and meet some likeminded people – business types, designers, web heads, geeks, startups, entrepreneurs and more – then get yourself to one of these events because that’s where you’ll find them hanging out.

March 6, 2009
A Facelift for PlaylistMix.com

Anyone following the Playlist Mix on Twitter over the weekend (or myself for that matter) would have spotted some talk of design work going in the run up to the 45th show. That design work got pushed live last night. It’s possible it will be a bit rough around the edges on IE users – I say possible because I haven’t had the chance to check and correct anything Internet Explore-wise but I’m happy with the new layout.

The podcast itself returned to normal service a week ago following a winter break and has also moved to Sunday nights for 2009 (a lot more accessible to me the way things work around here).

You can grab the 45th show here (show link – direct mp3 link) or listen to last week’s show here.

Of course, if you’re in tyre-kicking mood I’ll be getting back to things around 3pm today so feel free to let me know what you think. In terms of planning, the Christmas break did wonders for me as I’ve been able to get a nice plan in place for additional podcast elements in terms of interviews, video and more content between tracks. Plus, the new schedule is a big plus.

Check out PlaylistMix.com and let me know what you think, or grab a listen to the latest podcast below.

Playlist Mix Podcast show #45
[audio:http://playlistmix.com/podpress_trac/web/122/0/podcast045.mp3]

February 9, 2009
Backup. Backup. Backup.

photo credit: âˆšoÑ…ÎÆ’xâ„¢

Save yourself the trouble in the future – back it up. Whatever is you’re working on at the moment, back it up. Keep one copy. Keep a second copy. Keep a copy far away. However small you might think the job you’re doing is at the moment (speaking from a design perspective here), it will come back to you at some stage.

A one off design I did only a few months ago came back to bite me this afternoon. Loads of JPGs knocking around but do you think I had a PSD or AI file to go along with the design, which it turns it isn’t exactly as one-off as I thought it might be? Nope. The result? Redo the design from scratch, based on the JPG.

Like my reading habits, my backup habits have changed of late as well. When I made the investment before Christmas in getting a new iMac into the office, I needed to pick up an external drive to store a lot of the good stuff (and junk) that had built up on my work laptop and the server here in the office. A few weeks on and it’s paying off – save a copy locally, sync it back to the server, sync it back to the hard drive. If (like the desktop bandit I am) I start clearing house on the laptop or desktop and accidentally blitz something, I know I’ve got a spare copy to hand.

Many moons ago I used to do this with floppy disks. The office I’m in at the moment has a desk full of 3.5″ disks with CAD drawings for various projects I tackled in my early teens. Once college hit it was onward towards CDs, USB keys and then towards my mp3 player, iPod, emailing to myself, copies on my phone… wherever you have the chance to back something up (look at PutPlace.com or Dropbox as online solutions), do just that – back it up.

If anything, it’ll save you tearing your hair out or punching your desk in the future.

Update – PutPlace.com Offer: Adding this as Joe‘s left a comment with a bonus code you can use for PutPlace.com. Sign up for a 30 day free trial, use the promo code ‘joe’ and you’ll have your trial extended for three months instead of thirty days – nice one Joe.

January 21, 2009
A New Look For September…

I’ve spent more time in recent weeks blogging around the web than here on my own blog. Music, theatre, tutorials… a whole lot of things semi-related to technology but not hardcare about technology.

Perhaps it’s a shift in my blogging habits. Perhaps it’s my lack of time to sit down in the evening and gorge on mountains of tech-related RSS feeds as I used to do; arming myself with an abundance of tech news (once for a segment I was doing on KCLR 96FM), getting the brain thinking about blog topics for the week ahead.

I’ve been so wrapped up in the world of theatre and music this summer that I haven’t gotten around to a whole lot of sharing of the same. Now, I’m not saying that I’m going to turn kenmc.com into a theatre and music blog, I’ve got other outlets for that. But it got me thinking – I live a creative live. One surrounded by all kinds of technological wonders, but one steeped in creativity and boosted by certain realms of the tech world, online and offline.

So maybe it’s time to bring in some of that creativity.

That or I’ve just been fed up of the way the blog was looking (subsequently putting me off posting) and I figure a new look will get me on track.

What have I done? In comparison to the old theme, I’ve narrowed the main content column, added my live Qik channel (in an effort to get me Qikking), returned my Flickr photo stream (in an effort to get me uploading photos again), added gravatars, hacked a few themes together and away I go.

Until October… then we’ll see about turning pink all over again.

September 14, 2008