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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the things that I do in my free time and why I do them. Over the last year, the course I have been studying has taken up a lot of evenings and weekends, as well as nibbling away at a few days of annual leave. Despite this I’ve kept up my work on the Ubuntu Podcast and contributed to the organisation of two OggCamp events. However, other activities have been less lucky: I’ve hardly seen some good friends and my two godchildren recently and there were a few months when I hadn’t picked up my camera at all.

One of the problems I’ve been mulling over is that of originality. Our Ubuntu Podcast is a successful show by most metrics, but we’re not the only Ubuntu/Linux/FLOSS podcast, not by a long stretch. Some are very different, stylistically, from our own. Others are more similar and I have found myself wondering if there’s any point in having several shows that share similarities. If podcasting really is radio that anyone can do, then what is the point of you doing it? If you’re not doing anything original, anything different, if other people can do it, why continue? Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

The same thing applies to photography. I’m not a professional photographer, but I’ve enjoyed developing my skills over the last few years. I went on my first photo walk at the weekend, and couldn’t help feeling that twenty photographers walking them same route would come out with pretty much the same photos. Similarly, taking photos of well-known views or places seems pointless when you can find high quality images of the same thing on Flickr. There seems little point or challenge in taking photos which others can easily take too. If there are people making better photos of the same subject than you, why carry on making them?

Is this just trying to avoid being judged and found a failure? To compare your photographic efforts with those of someone who had access to the same scene and come out second best can’t be a nice feeling. If someone starts an Ubuntu or Linux-related podcast, rather than seeing them as a kindred spirit, I can’t help but feel it is a threat or increased competition; that they might do what we do better than us, that our listeners prefer the newcomer.

All this leads me towards the question of motivation. Why do I continue to work on the podcast and spend my time trying to take better photographs? If one can’t make something original, why make anything at all? A lot of my interest in learning how to do something new. The idea of doing a live podcast appeals because it’s a new experience. I’d like to photograph more and varied subjects; to feel I have acquired some new skills. If one finds the process rewarding or fun, or it serves a bigger, grander purpose then that on its own should be enough. Like anything worth doing, it’s difficult to be good at it. If you happen to strike on an original idea on the way, you’re very lucky.

What do you think? Please leave your comments below.

Geoff Sayers was the Head of Drama at St. Bede’s, the school I attended in the 1990s. Last week I found out that he had passed away, which was both a great shock and a great sadness. Geoff was one of those teachers whose individuality and commitment to their subject meant that every lesson was a memory. He helped me learn about lighting and sound, which became my job for a while and the skills from which I still use on the podcast and in my photography. Not without eccentricities, he achieved superb results on GCSE and A-Level courses. The chief examiner of the exam board often attended assessment performances personally to ensure they were fairly marked. Geoff directed many plays over the years, a few of which I had the privilege to be involved in, which were noted for some excellent individual performances and were often spectacular budget-busting ensemble pieces. Working in his drama classes also helped create friendships which are still strong today.

I posted a short message on my Facebook status when I found out he had died and soon a collection of comments amassed from ex-classmates, each of whom had their own memory of Geoff to share. Although there is a memorial service is being held at the school in September, getting together for an evening of memorial drinks felt like a fitting tribute for the man who treated his students like his cast, who was always a teacher but felt like a friend. So on Saturday 7th August we’ll be getting together in Reigate for some drinks and, I’m sure, a fair bit of reminiscing. There is a Facebook event page, but it would be great to see anyone who remembers Geoff with affection come along. Please pass the details on to those others who knew Geoff too.

Laura and I have just got back from seeing Richard Herring perform his stand-up show “Hitler Moustache” at the Ashcroft Arts Centre in Fareham. I’ve been following Richard on twitter for a while and enjoyed the AIOTM shows and have recently been getting into the Collings and Herrin podcast a bit more too.

It’s the first proper comedy gig I’ve been to in a long time (apart from Eddie Izzard at the Wembley Arena – a great gig but more akin to watching a DVD on a giant screen). That I was there is a testament to the ability of twitter to engage very directly with a (potential) audience, as the Scotsman noted. Plenty of people were tweeting during the interval. Would I have been there had it not been for twitter or AIOTM? Probably not.

The venue was pretty much what I was expecting; small and warm. It seated about 120 people in unreserved seating. We ended up in the second row. That can be foolish at a comedy gig; you’re in the firing line for being picked on. However, I thought that it wouldn’t be that kind of show, and by and large it wasn’t.

My first thought was, rather predictably, that Richard was shorter than I expected. I wonder if performers go around thinking that “normal people” are all taller than they expect. Wearing a crumpled suit and sporting a masscara-darkened toothbrush moustache, he launched into a show which was funny and thought provoking, inventive and full of invective.

The venue was so small, it would have been hard to have felt more involved without being on the stage. You could notice tiny nuances which would otherwise be lost; his almost obsessive kicking of the microphone lead, the occasional subconscious check that his flies were done up and the mostly suppressed smile when he amused himself. Like all good performers he was making eye contact with the audience, particularly those in the first few rows. At first this rather put me off: I felt under pressure to look like I was enjoying myself, to laugh louder because I was being talked to. But it wore off and even added to my enjoyment.

The only downside to the gig was the hideously drunk woman sat two rows behind and across the aisle. She was clearly plastered before she came in and got worse as she tipped more drink down her throat. Her accompanying male friend seemed similarly inebriated. He didn’t display the same overly loud laugh that she unleashed at any opportunity, although he did manage to match her efforts at talking throughout most of the first half. It was as if they thought they were watching a DVD and were oblivious to the presence of the rest of the audience, who where tutting and glaring at them.

Richard used a range of put-downs to try and get the couple to shut up, but to no avail. Although she shouted out a few things, she wasn’t trying to be a “proper” heckler, she was just pissed and either didn’t realise or didn’t care that she was spoiling the show for others and disrupting the pace of the performance. So the heckler put-downs didn’t really work. In the second half he made clever use of a comic character to be incredibly rude to her. If I had been the target, I would have been mortified and left. However she was almost oblivious, despite the round of applause that the tirade received. It was only when, during the start of the climax of the show, Richard stopped and very quietly told her she was spoling the show for everyone else that she quietened down, almost until the end. He couldn’t have done anything else by that point: To have gone on a typical comedian’s rant at her would have spoiled the build-up to the end of the show.

If it had been a gig consisting of 90 minutes of assorted knob gags and swearing, I wouldn’t have minded a few heckles distracting the comedian and the heckler receiving some abuse as recompense. But this show wasn’t like that. It had a clear objective and serious topics to laugh about. The drunken women almost de-railed the denouement. It was a great show with a real structure but that structure was undermined by the simple, thoughtless act of someone blithering away a couple of rows behind.

At the end, Richard stayed around afterwards to sign programmes and flog a few DVDs. We were at the end of the queue and witnessed the hideously drunk woman having the gall to ask him for a hug. He declined. He was out packing his car by the time we reached ours and left the venue as we did.

I can thoroughly recommend the show – go and see it. Just hope there aren’t drunken, thoughtless idiots in the audience.

Laura, Richard Herring and me.

Richard also blogged about the gig. Pleasingly we agree about the impact of the drunken woman on the flow of the show.

A while ago Jono posted an article in which he praises Laura for all her hard work in the FLOSS community:

By day she is a technical writer, user experience advocate, and geek, but by night she joins the other reprobates on the rather excellent ubuntu-uk Podcast and she was heavily involved in the planning of the hugely successful OggCamp. Laura is not only accomplished in both her work and Open Source activities, but she always brings an incredibly warming atmosphere to the projects she is involved in, including many LugRadio Live events both in the UK and the USA.

Sometimes people assume that Laura has been dragged along to some geeky event or other, suffering quietly while I run around having fun. But she says that she would have ended up in the FLOSS community even if we hadn’t met. Laura is genuinely enthusiastic about FLOSS and the community around it. When things don’t Just Work she perseveres, raising bugs and trying workarounds, rather than reaching for the Windows CD. We have spent many long car journeys talking techie – usability, engineering, networking and more. Laura has also been incredibly supportive of my FLOSS antics, for which I am very grateful.

As I type she is playing with her Arduino, looking very pleased that she has made an LED flash. Yup, she’s definitely a geek. And I like that.

The British Journal of Photography has reported a protest being arranged on twitter outside Tate Modern today over the rights of professional and amateur photographers. Photographers are being stopped from taking photographs in public places, typically but not exclusively in London, on the grounds that they could be carrying out reconnaissance for terrorist operations. The officers involved in these incidents are rarely aware of the current ACPO rules on what they can and can’t ask a photographer to do. Sometimes there are arrests, sometimes people are forced to delete their photos (regardless of the fact they could be undeleted), sometimes people just get moved on.

It is preposterous, of course, that someone trying to carry out covert surveillance would choose to use a big camera, tripod, and a variety of lenses to do so. But it seems that if you have an SLR with you, you are more likely to get stopped than shooting with a compact camera in the same place.

Find out more at http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=871683 and http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/news/bbc_photographer_terror_stop_former_officer_blasts_met_news_292330.html

I went on a photo trip around London a couple of weekends ago with a friend and honestly expected at some point to be stopped and asked what we were doing, even though we were taking photographs in public spaces. It is a sad indictment of the misuse of anti-terror laws when people doing nothing wrong are made to feel as if they are acting like criminals.

This Friday is my last day as IT & Registry Manager at Taunton’s College. On Tuesday (after what I’m hoping will be a great bank holiday weekend) I start as IT Manager at Fareham College. I’ve been at Taunton’s for just over three years and in that time we have addressed many of the issues facing the college – including old desktop stock, an aging server stack and an unmanaged switching infrastructure. (There’s still plenty for my successor to do though!) I’ve enjoyed my time at Taunton’s and had some great colleagues.

But I am looking forward to starting at Fareham, not least because there are new bits of technology for me to learn and a new team to get to know.

Free Software advocate Richard Rothwell died last week. I knew Richard through his work in the Free Software community. Richard was one of those people who I seemed to see at every conference I went to. AFFSAC, FLOSSIE, FOSDEM, you name it, he was there. It is ironic that I heard of his death at the Open Source Schools conference on Monday, an event at which I would normally expect to meet up with him. I got to know Richard a little more through SchoolForge-UK and always found him an intelligent and passionate conversant.

More recently I have enjoyed reading his tweets and blog posts as he continued to ridicule and rail against everything he found hypocritical, invasive or offensive in the UK.

Richard is in the centre of the above photo, in the red tie. There are more tributes to Richard at http://tributestorichardrothwell.net/

Yesterday I went to see the second of two performances of “Teechers” by John Godber at the Oasthouse Theatre in Rainham. The play was being performed to raise money for Jenny’s trip to Ecuador. She assures me that this isn’t just a holiday, but that she’s going to help teach young children. More importantly, it was an opportunity to see three very good friends of mine acting. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Chris performing, I’ve never seen Jenny in as big a big part and I’ve never seen Heidi perform in a play at all! It was all very enjoyable and hopefully raised some cash to help swell the charitable coffers. Particularly impressive was that the cast of three brought to life about twenty different characters, which was an excuse for some particularly tongue-in-cheek performances which I’m sure would be recognisable by anyone who has worked in education. Not, I should add, just characterisations of students, either. It was certainly fun to see some classic silly voices be wheeled out for some of the smaller characters.

The Teechers cast

The programme for the play was also special, as I had taken the cast photos for it. It was, pretty much, my first commission, albeit not a paid one! The session, which was a couple of months ago now, was fast and fun, but I learnt the same lessons as Graham “codedragon” Binns did recently shooting outside in strong direct sunlight. Although I did have a reflector, there wasn’t time to use it as effectively as it could have been. This was because I was rushing. (To be fair, there wasn’t much time, we all had other appointments to make.) I shot lots and hoped they would be OK, rather than taking a bit longer to ensure the shots were set up properly. So I learnt some important lessons and am looking forward to the next time a similar opportunity arises.

I gave a CD with the JPEG versions of all the image to the cast with a list of of images I recommended, although I was doing so without knowing the context of the play. It was therefore quite interesting to see the ones that they selected for use; on the programme covers, a centre-page scrapbook montage and for each character (not cast) biography. (The image above is the one they picked for the poster.) It was surprisingly gratifiying to see photos I had taken all over the programme.

I also won a bottle of wine in the raffle. Having previously scoffed at the auction of cakes and comestibles at other AmDram productions, I am now convinced by this activity and will petition the National Theatre to follow suit. I want to see Trevor Nunn giving away Blue Nun forthwith!

Despite my best intentions, it’s been a while since I posted here. Last time it was to shamelessly shill the latest editions the Ubuntu podcast from the UK LoCo team. This post may not be significantly different as it seems most of the trivia of my day is increasingly dissected and distributed on twitter and identi.ca. Not that I ever intended this blog to be a log of thoughts of the calibre frequently shared via twitter and the like, but it seems I don’t feel the need to write long missives any more. (Although there may well be one about ISPs on the way. Watch this, erm, site.)

Episode 7 of Season 2 of our little podcast has hit the (community donated) mirrors this evening and is already sneaking its way onto all manner of computers and portable media playing devices around the world.This episode features an interview with the executive director of the Open Rights Group, an organisation of which I am a supporter, Jim Killock. Unfortunately the output from the phone interface was very low during the interview, which I didn’t really notice at the time. (We use a digital output from the desk into the laptop which records the show, so I should have just brought everyone else down to the same level then boosted the whole lot in the mix.) But despite a shed-load of compression, I wasn’t able to iron out the difference satisfatorily. At least for me. Technicalities aside it was good to catch up with all the latest campaigns that ORG is working on.

It is always exciting when we release an episode to see the first few hundred downloads hit the logs in a couple of hours. It feels to me that we’re hitting our stride with the new series and format now. We regularly record over an hour of material in two hours. The secret is in the preparation. It’s also in the concentration; our biggest slips have happened when someone has drifted off for a bit. The downside of hitting some kind of stride is that is feels like we’ve been doing it for a while. I feel like we’re half way through the season already, when realistically we’re only one third of the way in. Podcasting is a marathon, not a sprint, maintaining pace without burning out is the key. That’s one of the good things about doing a fornightly show; you get almost an entire week off between episodes. (We keep and eye on the website and news stories betweentimes of course.) At the moment we’re using that “time off” to tweak some of the systems behind the scenes. This has involved upgrading WordPress and various plugins, patching podcoder and so on.

So, please download the show and listen. A lot of work goes into it. If you like it, or dislike it, please send us feedback through the various routes given on the website.

A couple of weeks ago I went up to the Black Cotton Club night at Volupte to celebrate Kate’s birthday. Kate is an old school friend, another one of those who I haven’t seen for over ten years. I also met up with Mark and Dave that evening, for whom it has been a similar interval. It was great to meet up with lovely people after so many years (as well as nice new people like Kate’s husband), although it was a shame that some others had ducked out at the last minute.

Walking round a strangely deserted Holborn, past pubs shut on a Saturday night and darkened corporate headquarters, gave me the feeling I was about to turn the corner and face a pack of 28-days-later-style ravening zombies. London was presumably happening somewhere else that night.

But waiting on a side street off a side street was the club, two sets of doors, half a dozen chairs and some very friendly door staff. Upstairs is a small but relatively modern bar, with colour-changing LEDs set in the ceiling and a decidedly modern range of drinks. It was, however, packed with 20-, 30- and 40-somethings mostly attired in genuine and reproduction 1920s, 30s and 40s dress. It was amazing, everyone looked so confident. The hats, the stockings, the hair, the lipstick! The girls, not me. (I hope I looked rather dashing in my suit, but I was definitely not period!)

Downstairs is a small, almost tiny, room. Three or four large round tables, a few smaller tables and chairs and a dance floor. No flashing lasers, just a few static coloured lights yet they still created an atmosphere of excitement. The DJ equipment was decidedly modern, although the old tracks benefited from more bass than the equipment of that era could have provided. But the two DJs played out tunes from the first half of the 20th century from vinyl, but I don’t know if they were genuine 78s. Right from the start people were jiving and throwing each other around the dance floor with gusto and, fortunately, accuracy. Unfortunately I had to leave before the live band started.

The night really evoked the era it set out to recall. The deserted streets, the subterranean venue, people talking, smiling and dancing with strangers. Even the Coke I had to drink was served in bottles rather than from a postmix machine. I found myself thinking about my grandparents and whether they ever went to places like this. I’m sure they did, although the major difference, aside from the odd mobile phone and digital camera, would have been the absence of a smoke ceiling and the accompanying smell. By the time I left, the sweat of so many stuffed in such a small space swinging and jitterbugging almost compensated for that missing scent.

It was a bizarre, fun and thought-provoking evening and I was glad to have been invited along.