Bagel Belly Blog

Cambridge

I'm in Cambridge for the OSS Watch Advisory Committee meeting. A Cambridge venue (CARET, to be precise) is a distinct bonus for me as it's just an hour down the road from Norwich, meaning I can travel at a humane time of day.

It's been a while since I've been to Cambridge, so I took some time to walk about a bit. It feels like the whole city has turned into a building site: the work to replace John Lewis with an arcade seems to have consumed a big chunk of the centre.

The Advisory Committee meeting was very interesting (a fair bit in a "gossip I can't repeat here" kind of way). It's always refreshing to be in a room full of people that are clued up on the whole Open Source thing, and good to know that OSS Watch are doing well at spreading the word and providing common-sense neutral advice about FLOSS. I was quite wary of them at the start of their tenure, but they really seem to have hit their stride.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me today was Brian Kelly bringing up the subject of podcasting. I'm used to him being ahead of the curve when it comes to all things web (he was going to W3C conferences when I was just starting out as a webmaster). I've only really become a podcast fan in the last four months, and I consider myself an avid RSS consumer. So hearing it brought up in a meeting of information technology aficionados was ... well, cool.

Brian cited an Auricle podcast he'd participated in the other day, using Skype. His idea was that a series of short podcasts about FLOSS and general web manager stuff could be done. I'd not really thought about how podcasts could be used this way, but it makes sense. What better way to get up to speed on the tech issues of the day than wired through your headphones on the daily commute?

There was also quite a lot of discussion about Skype, which seems to be the bad boy of VOIP due to the way it utilises the network. Apparently several academic institutions are banning it. I'm happy with sacrificing the network to do away with firewall issues and to have audio conferencing with more than one other party, but I'm not a network administrator. I just hope UEA isn't one of the institutions banning it, since our office connection piggybacks off them.

Several other topics came up, which I'll write about when I've digested them and when I've got a fast link to do a bit of research.

On that note ... I wish all meeting venues provided WiFi by default. I know there's a trade-off: with WiFi there's a temptation to be virtually absent from the meeting you're physically in, and it can turn into a collection of people sitting in a room staring at their laptops. But the benefits ... being able to check your facts before speaking, being able to email meeting members as you think of stuff... I just can't carry things around in my brain any more, and there's a limit to how much offline content I can keep on the laptop.

I know I grumbled a bit about the state of "building site Cambridge", but there is one positive change to report: the train station now has a decent waiting room coffee shop. It's warm, it serves a passable cup of tea and good blueberry muffins, and it's clean. WiFi would be nice, and a monitor showing train departure information, but this is a good start. It's certainly a leap ahead of Ely (Worst Coffee Shop Ever) and Peterborough (Most Boring Waiting Room Ever). It seems to be leased and run by AMT Coffee (Fair Trade too!), so let's hope they spread to a few more stations that I pass through.