Soton BarCamp

I awoke at 6am, and after some delays, jumped aboard the train for Southampton, and stared out of the window at the icy, yet magical world outside. I wrote some of my NaNoWriMo novel and listened to songs about Southampton:
Back in Southampton by Gutta Percha & The Balladeers. "It's great to be back in Southampton, seeing old faces again."
The Woolston Ferry by Gutta Percha & The Balladeers. "The Woolston ferry doesn't travel very fast"
Southampton Clock Tower by Grant. "Southampton Clock Tower oversaw our lives / pulled us closer as we walked / we stayed up all night to talk / were we only sleep deprived?"

I eventually got to Southampton just after 10am and the weather was not quite as tropical as I had hoped, but it was at least 1 degree warmer than Oxford and no snow/frost covered pavements were to be seen. There were even palm trees.

I arrived at Soton BarCamp unable to see, as my glasses had misted up, but eventually found my name on a bit of card and tied it to my wrist with a piece of brown string. Then had some coffee and went to a talk in the "sofas" section of the Shooting Star (a pub I once knew as Legends, and then Kolebka).

The first talk I went to was on Home Camp by MikeTheBee. I always go to talks like this and think, "I should do more! I could connect up my Arduino to.. something! I could monitor things! I could save the world!" Although I am on the Home Camp mailing list, I have never got around to listening to any of Mike's podcasts, so should at least do that. I also went to Laura Cowen's talk on her Arduino Christmas project, which was on a similar sort of topic - monitoring energy use by making Christmas tree lights flash.

The best bit about Soton BarCamp for me was the people. It was great to catch up with old friends I hadn't seen in years and find out what they are up to these days, and also to meet new people.

I went to a lot of lightning talks, which I enjoyed, because it meant I got to hear about all kinds of things in a short time.. Town twinning, augmented reality, Southampton buses, chip and pin using spatial awareness, semantic web, perverse ubergeek news from a student household, and other interesting subjects, which I will have to look on Lanyrd to help me remember.

elseware and cminion did a great job of organising. Although when I first heard about the BarCamp being held in two pubs (The Shooting Star and The Hobbit), I was a bit dubious of how well it would work, but I think that actually helped to create the great atmosphere of the BarCamp.

Soton

Although I was quite exhausted, I decided it was necessary to take Marios on a tour of Southampton, and probably bored him by pointing out the sights that were relevant to my life once. "I used to live here in the flooded basement amongst the stairs to nowhere!", "I used to rent foreign films from here, when it was Videotheque!", "This used to be the Lizard Lounge!", etc. The night before we had ended up at the Dungeon, which featured in my life a lot when I was a student in Southampton. On the Sunday, we wandered around the Avenue, and then Bedford Place (Marios was interested in the strange looking courthouse, and we walked through Little Mongers), and then through the parks, and around the town centre. To stop ourselves getting too cold, we popped into the various shopping centres (Marlands, West Quay, Bargate and East Street). The Bargate had some art in a shop which we went to look at, with t-shirts such as "If you cannot be a poet, be the poem", but the Titanic exhibition was closed. We wandered through the Bargate itself and then onto East Street. The East Street shopping centre is surprisingly still open, when I had imagined it would be closed down by now, as most of the shops are long since gone. We took advantage of the special feature in the shopping centre though - the bit of pipe in the middle. I climbed through it, as if it were part of an adventure playground. An elderly man spoke to us on our way out of the shopping centre, and commented on the emptiness. "Was there a plague here?" he asked.

The town centre currently has a German Christmas market on, so we had a look at that, and then after a while, concluded we were too tired and too cold, so unfortunately didn't make it for lunch with Nick & co, and instead just headed home. We walked through the little bit of park next to the station and stared at the new Ikea in the distance, and the bits of crumbling walls in that park, and also at the glorious brutalist Wyndham Court.

I actually forgot about Southampton for a few years, but visiting it again at the weekend made me realise that these days it feels more like home than most other places I have lived in. I suppose because I lived there for 9 years. It is not the prettiest city I have ever lived in, but there are excellent people there, and interesting little features of the town if you look hard enough, and well, I realise now that I miss it.

I want to read Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley, since he talks about Southampton, including one place I lived for a year:
"The place in question was a 'cottage estate'; one of those built on the outskirts of the cities by councils in the 30s in woolly, vaguely vernacular fashion, with real homes featuring gardens and pitched roofs. Every road was named after a different flower, from carnations to lobelias, in true garden-suburb style. This didn't stop it from being one of the more impoverished, violent and desolate places in Southampton, feared most of all by the students of the nearby University."