I spent the past 2 days at the BIL Conference in Long Beach, this weekend. I was, once again, reminded of the value of conferences in the technology arena.

All too easily, people look at technology as an impersonal enterprise, focussing on software and hardware and overlooking the human element. However, attending a conference reminds you of the power of meeting people face to face and talking to them about their ideas. I actually spent very little time sitting in presentation, but I spent a lot of time meeting new people and talking about what they are doing and what I am doing.

  To travel and be away from home, it’s important to feel that the time was well spent. In order for that to happen, you need to take responsibility for how you’re spending your time. I was lucky to be travelling with whurley and so met a lot of people through him. I was also lucky enough to meet a number of preDevCamp organizers and volunteers and was re-assured that preDevCamp is going to be a great success!

I’m in Long Beach this weekend, attending the BIL Conference. BIL is an open, self-organizing, emergent, arts, science, society and technology conference. Anyone can come; anyone can speak. If you have an idea to spread, start talking. If someone is saying something interesting, stop and listen.

BIL takes place next to TED, which is a high powered annual conference, bringing together luminaries of Technology, Entertainment and Design. The ethos of BIL is that you don’t need to be a luminary to have a great idea.

It remains to be seen quite how effective BIL is. The people I’ve met so far have been a great bunch. I’ll be blogging about this for the next couple of days, so watch this space.

I’ve been playing with technology for nearly 25 years, ever since my parents bought a ZX Spectrum 48K for my siblings and me. My brother and I would faithfully copy program listings from books, play the games that those listings created and then merrily modify them to our own ends. We also had a huge disorganised box of Lego and whiled away many a Saturday building models from plans and imagination (for British readers: many of these models were inspired by ‘Chock-A-Block’).

As time passed, my interest in technology evolved. At school, I was developing an interest in Physics, at home I was writing my own programs on a 286s, 386s and 486s. By the time I got to university, I was majoring in Physics and working for Milford Instruments in my vacations. During that time I learnt all about writing microcode and getting chips to talk to one another.

I now work for IBM. I started in their development laboratory and, although my primary role is more customer facing at the moment, I’m still writing plenty of code.

So, why the name and what’s the aim of this blog? Well, my interest in technology is both parallel and orthogonal to my job in technology. However, I’ll be writing about both and so some of the discussions will be about ‘great’ things like Storage subsystems and Automation frameworks and other broad topics; others will be about ‘small’ things, like rotary encoders and relays and my latest home project. By keeping the lines between my home technology and work technology blurred, I can transfer my experiences from one to the other and both will benefit. I encourage you to do the same.