Tag: random

I received "Confessions of a Public Speaker" as a gift this winter (you know who you are, thankyou!), and it's been on my bookshelf waiting for me to have a reason to sit still long enough to read it. A series of long flights presented exactly that opportunity so I brought the book along to read, which was perfect as I was travelling to give a tutorial at the PHP Community Conference in Nashville.

My first observation was that although I thought this would be a pretty serious book, I was laughing! Not just smiling, but actually giggling on a fairly small plane of people doing the short hop over to Amsterdam. I saw a few people trying to read the cover to figure out what this great comedic tome would be :)

You may find that you read a few of these posts today - the title is a play on the fact that today is the Ides of March, and the story goes like this:

I'm seeing increasing numbers of my friends and peers announcing that blogging is coming back into fashion …

I've just realised that today marks 5 years since the very first post on this blog. I'm not sure how 5 years came around, the blog began because I was just leaving a job and every time I did that, I lost my directory of useful scripts that I collected. I also didn't know how to use grep 5 years ago (or linux, or vim ...) and so I couldn't find things in the directory anyway. So I started to blog things, in the hope of finding them again when I wanted them.

Do you have a New Year's Resolution? Is it to blog (or blog more often)? If so, keep reading!

I'm coming up to my 5th anniversary of blogging and looking at my stats, I've written around 150 posts per year for most of that time, although in 2010 I "only" wrote 102 posts, possibly because one or two other things happened in my life. So many people tell me they want to blog, or they have a blog but can't find the time to write, that I thought I'd try to give some pointers for those resolving to blog this New Year.

Recently I was approached by a friend of mine looking to start his own technical blog. I've been blogging here for some years, and he wrote to ask my advice. I replied to him, but thought that the ideas could be useful to others in the same position, so here's that email, published here for anyone else who wants to see it:

Three years ago, I had never spoken in public (I have video of that first attempt and all I can say is that I've come a long, long way!). Since then, I've done rather a lot of it. I've submitted countless conference talks, had the minority of those accepted, and prepared and delivered those that were. Not many talks have been given twice, but some have, and now some are getting rebranded since I am working for myself and can choose my own slide branding these days. All this adds up to a lot of content to keep track of!

I get to a lot of events and the crowds at each one are different and there's a different atmosphere - but at every event there are people who are making the whole thing less enjoyable for everyone else. Probably a lot of those people don't much care what effect their behaviour has on other people, but if you want to avoid being one of those people, these are my tips:

This is the final post in a short series about hosting events, based purely on my own experience and no specific expertise, in the hope that they will be useful to others doing similar things. If you are interested, you can read the first two posts, about preparing for the event and what to do on the day. This post is about some of the additional things about an event; sharing the content afterwards, getting feedback from attendees, and the most important bit - the social event.

This post is the second in a series of three about organising and hosting events. If you're interested, you could also read the first post about event preparation.

As an organiser you should know exactly where you are going on the day and what you need. Namebadges (sticky labels and pen if nothing else) will be needed at registration, if you have tickets and need to tick people off then rope in lots of volunteers (it sounds like a lot but 3-5% of your total attendee count is ideal) and brief them, and spread out across as much space as you have so you can parallelise as much as possible - registration is always chaos because of course everyone shows up at once and causes a backlog!

I've been to a lot of events, mostly technical, software-related ones, and I've also helped organise a few as well. For people organising events for the first time there are definitely some pitfalls that might not be obvious until you actually, well, until you fall into them! I thought I'd capture my experiences into a series of blog posts, in case they can help any future organisers to avoid some of the traps. First up: what to do before your event starts.

Last month, while in Amsterdam to host the Dutch PHP Conference 2010, I was absolutely stunned (as in, completely speechless - that's pretty rare for me) to have my PHPWomen friends pull me aside and present me with something:

The inscription reads:

Lorna Mitchell

In recognition of your extraordinary efforts

PHPWomen …

I'm halfway delighted and halfway cringing to announce that the phpwomen calendar is now on sale. This was a project organised by my friend and colleague Johanna Cherry, who saw an opportunity at php|tek 2009 to photograph the majority of the core PHPWomen members all in one place and …

A very quick entry today to mention a site that I've been using a LOT lately and I know I will be relying on for large quantities of travelling right through November: Accessible UK Train Timetables. It has up-to-the-minute information, including platform numbers, and you can bookmark queries for the …

With increasing numbers of speaking engagements, I've decided that its time to add a dedicated page to this site just to list talks I've given and wil be giving, and link through to slides, blog posts, and perhaps some photos of me speaking (not sure about that last one). So …

I've been thinking a lot lately about burnout, I've had a couple of encounters with it in the last year myself and also a few people close to me have found themselves struggling internally after working too hard. I don't really have any advice to give - the advice I offer …

I play a lot of sport, and wear almost exclusively Asics trainers (sneakers if you like the other kind of English) to do so. In fact I only wear one pair of trainers, to the gym, to classes and for netball - which might be a mistake. One pair of trainers …

In January, Kevin and I went to Peru for a few weeks - to visit our friend Cally, and we did some touring while we were there. Between the two of us, we took almost 3,000 photos. Which is way too many to make granny sit through when we got …

Here goes the final entry about my Peruvian travels. You might also like to read about the time spent in the rainforest, in and around Cusco, at Machu Picchu , en route to Puno on the Andean Explorer and around Puno itself.

We started and ended our trip in Lima, with …

This is an update on part of my trip to Peru. You might also like to read about the time spent in the rainforest, in and around Cusco, at Machu Picchu and en route to Puno on the Andean Explorer. Next we spent a couple of nights in Puno, including …

In my blogging excitement, I somehow managed to write about the rainforest, areas around Cusco and Ollantaytambo and then go straight on to describe our train ride to Puno. In a rather major omission I seem to have missed out a post about visiting Machu Picchu. Since its one of …

I've already written about my time in Peru - in the rainforest and in and around Cusco. From Cusco we travelled to the city of Puno - by amazing train journey on the Andean Explorer. This trip is more expensive than flying I think but it was a fun experience in itself …

I'm on holiday in Peru at the moment, and writing about the various places I've been - first stop was the rainforest and from there we went back to Puerto Maldonado and flew to Cusco. At 3300ish metres above sea level, this was my first experience of anything like this altitude …

I'm currently on holiday in Peru, including ten days organised touring in different parts of the country. I got back and discovered I had almost 900 photos which will take some time to process, so I thought I'd write a series of posts, rather than one monster one. The first …

It doesn't seem like that long since the last time this happened, but apparently its been two years and the "tell us something new about yourself" meme has come around again. I was trying to ignore it but now I've been tagged by Matthew, Davey and Kathy I guess I …

Yesterday I attended my little sister's graduation ceremony - she has a BA in Early Childhood Studies from University College Birmingham and I am so proud of her I can't actually express it! She's worked hard to get to here and the path was not always smooth. I uploaded a selection …

I am a big fan of pretty much anything Nintendo, particularly Zelda and Mario Kart. I loved mario kart doubledash and this was the first driving game I really got into (I still can't do technical driving games, only kiddy ones). So when Mario Kart was launched for Wii, we …

I've been using twitter for quite a while now, around a year. And so far, its not going brilliantly.

The problem really is that I don't "get" twitter. I am not online 24/7 so I often only look at my feeds once per day. The conversation in twitter moves …

Whenever I attend a conference or other geeky gathering (GeekUp for example) I'm often asked for my card ... but I don't have one. I don't have work business cards, because only sales people need those, and I don't have personal ones because I don't freelance (or not usually). I finally …

I'm in Germany for a few days at the IPC and since we had some time spare I've been exploring!

First of all, we took trip into Frankfurt itself yesterday. The queue for the ticket office was wildly long but some people who had a weekend travel pass and had …