Blogmet

I arrived slightly late to yesterday's blogmeet, and was approaching Regent's Park when Kevin joined me. We walked into the park and then westwards until we spotted an island (as mentioned in the directions), noticed no one else hanging around aimlessly, and decided to sit down where we were until everyone else arrived. We chatted and tried to spot likely-looking geeks, and whenever we did we waved a FreeBSD book in their general direction to identify ourselves as geeks who were there for a blogmeet. Needless to say, we didn't catch any.

An hour or so and a couple of phone calls later, it transpired that we'd managed to walk obliviously past the first island which everyone else had been able to find quite easily. If you look on the map you'll see that we actually walked quite a long way beyond the clearly-marked meeting point to the second, rather larger, island.

Aquarion came to fetch us and so we packed everything up and moved to find LoneCat, Mark, Dave, Pix, Karen and Pete gathered on the south side of the stream just to the west of York Bridge, around the island. None could doubt the geekiness of the group - I think six out of nine of us were wearing black tops, and two of the three blankets brought were in fact Google blankets. A nice few hours were spent picnicking, Mars bars were provided and eaten as promised, trees were climbed, Dave was offered a banana by a member of the local constabulary and then told that trees were for looking at and not for climbing, there were bad puns aplenty, an impromptu twig-and-beer-can percussion session, and another competitve food event.

Not a recreation of the infamous pie-eating contest (there weren't enough pork pies left), but a 'How many cocktail sausages can Pete fit in his mouth at once?' The competition came from the fact that bets were placed as to the number, and Kevin ended up winning about £5 having guessed correctly that the answer was twelve.

Although I did remember a digital camera this time, I forgot to take many photos with it. Consequently there are only a few (plus a 16-second clip of Pete stuffing cocktail sausages into his mouth... let it not be said that I don't document these things properly) and in a particularly brilliant feat of anti-photographic skills, the one photo that has everyone in it was taken when people were positioned such that you can only actually see two out of eight people in the photo. To make up for that I have a very shaky and relatively unfocused panoramic video which does actually allow you to see everyone (apart from me, but you can't have everything).

At six we decamped to the pub and were joined by Stuart before everyone moved upstairs and I left a while later. Once again I enjoyed myself, and it was good to put some more faces to names (not faeces to names, as I originally typed).

Update: Argh. The Quicktime .mov files that I uploaded don't appear to be working... I'll try and get this sorted :(
Update 2: My slightly limited resources for 'sorting out' have run out. They play fine on my computer, but when I try to open them after having uploaded them (which I have done several times) I get what is presumably a broken file image. Any suggestions?
Update 3: (01:50am... don't say I'm not dedicated) My hosting support guy tells me that he can play them fine once downloaded via FTP and saved to disk, and so can I, so they've gone back up again. Right-click and Save As or equivalent seems to work.