For all you gravy lovers

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Le Web

I was lucky enough to finally make it to Le Web this year. It was in parts tedious, entertaining and inspiring.

Tedious

Sponsors' speaking slots are inevitably best avoided. Microsoft and BT were both guilty of not having anything useful to say and should have kept out of the keynote room.

The platform discussion was equally dull. LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter all represented and none of them with anything particularly ground breaking or indeed enlightening to say.

What made it even more tedious was the underlying baiting of the man from MySpace for his tiny developer community. School playground stuff.

Entertaining

Hadn't seen Gary Vaynerchuk speak before and he certainly is a force. He took a while to get going but there was no stopping him at the end.

Paul Carr is an incorrigible smart-arse which was absolutely perfect for taming a panel of the 'best' of Europe. Some of his put-downs where first-rate. 'I've seen first-hand that Europeans can give birth to people' was a classic.

Inspiring

The start-up competition was probably the most interesting thing on day 1 and was some real insight into what the new breed of companies are working on. Especially relevant given some of the concepts and projects I'm forming at the moment.

I really liked Shutl as they seem to solve a problem, though not sure how well it will scale out of major metropolitan areas. Partly though I have a thing about the Internet being used to control and improve real things so this may have made me a little pre-disposed to liking it.

CloudSplit again solved a real problem in an elegant way though really represent a feature for the Amazon Web Services offering at the moment. Will be interesting to see how they expand out to help you manage other cloud providers.

RunKeeper I think has big potential but I'm not quite sure they quite see it yet.

Back in the keynote room Tony Hseih was truly thought provoking. The culture he created at Zappos.com is truly a phenomenon.

We've just been working through defining our Vision, Mission and Values at Esendex and I felt we were not quite finished. After Tony's talk I think there is a lot further to go.

Also in the keynote room it was great to see France's Internet Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet demonstrating that the French, and indeed Spanish, governments are putting real money and infrastructure investment into supporting the development of a technology industry in Europe. Please take note UK government.

It was a great Le Web. Very professionally put together, great speakers, fantastic WiFi and great food.

If there is one recommendation I'd make it is that you make more of the Deep Dive, Startup Competition room content. There was some real value to be had in there and it worked well against the big keynote format.

When I look at my notes from the last couple of days, they're all about things I want to do, ideas to explore and books to read. So it can't have been too bad.

Hope to be back next year.

Riding the Boards of Champions

I put this video together from our Beeston Cycling Club trip to the Manchester Velodrome.

It was an absolute blast. Can't wait to go again. The banking is very steep, 42 degrees, but really not that scary once you get on to it.

It was also great value. We had dedicated use of the track with a coach for 2 hours. For 16 of us this came to £23.50 each including bike hire.

I just hope the indoor velodrome in Leicester gets the go ahead. Beeston CC may end up with a track team yet.

Riding the Boards of Champions from Adam Bird on Vimeo.

Sake-fuelled cultural insensitivity

Mrs B and I were lucky enough to go to the Eat Japan Sushi Awards over the weekend.

We had a great time, ate some amazing, truly world-class, food and made good use of the complimentary sake and beer.

There were seven chefs from seven different countries, all with a very different approach to the challenge.

The Czech entrant made a 'cute sexy hedgehog for pregnant ladies'. The US entrant had infused his with soil and the Italian entrant had used only Italian ingredients, even the rice.

The event was ultimately won by Tomoyuki Abe of Japan. This wasn't the foregone conclusion it may sound like. All entries where truly amazing but his salmon nigri was utterly sublime and he was a thoroughly deserving winner.

The great thing about the event was that we, the attendees, got to vote for the winner, which meant we had to taste all of their dishes. I actually plumped for the British entry as I felt his entry really worked well together but Mrs B, being Mrs B, voted for the eventual winner.

I guess I have to concede she has impeccable taste in many things ;)

Part of the evening involved a maki (sushi roll) making demonstration and then competition open to a couple of members of the audience.

I was one of those members and emerged victorious, though I had an awful lot of help from my appointed sushi-master. Video below.

Unfortunately, in my sake-fuelled joy I ended up hugging him, I then remembered the Japanese aren't big on the whole body contact thing.

Guess that career with the UN is on hold for a while.

Eat Japan Sushi Awards 2009 from Adam Bird on Vimeo.

Ride like you feel, just occasionaly

Currently in the midst of base-training which for cycling means lot's of long rides at a pace within yourself to lay the platform for the real improvements later on.

On these rides you're constantly monitoring your heart rate, power output or pace to make sure that you're operating at the correct level.

The problem is it can get rather dull.

I had a couple of hours this afternoon that started out as another Zone 2 'endurance' but I pushed it a little more into Zone 3 'tempo' as I was short of the normal 3-5 hours we normally cycle at this time of year.

By the end I'd ditched watching what I should have been doing and just rode as I felt.

It felt brilliant.

Still not up to the pace I was before my crash but it did show me that the base training is having an effect.

I'll return to it on the next ride with renewed motivation.

When you're wrapped up in training plans, it's easy to forget that the reason you ride in the first place is because you enjoy it.

Autumn Epic 09

Finally got round to getting this up on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKfaNX4e8tk). Unfortunately I ended up with the obvious use of ELO, Mr Blue Sky as Super Furry Animals, Hello Sunshine wasn't allowed because its WMG copyright.

Vimeo doesn't have that kind of restriction so here is the original Director's Cut.

Autumn Epic 09 from Adam Bird on Vimeo.

HOWTO: Source Control for VMWare Hosted Visual Studio on OSX

I've been wrestling with how to get some notion of backed-up source control for my Visual Studio projects that don't warrant going into the Esendex Team Foundation Server.

Didn't want them to be open source so code.google.com, codeplex.com, etc were all out and I didn't want to pay any money for a secure service.

Here's what I came up with.

Firstly I discovered that OSX ships with and SVN server, very handy. I followed this link to set it up: http://www.martellventures.com/blog/files/544f828ced9567b46fc92006af524d16-24.php.

With SVN running locally on the Mac, I could then rely Time Machine to make sure my source code was backed up.

Then downloaded the Ankh SVN plugin for Visual Studio so I could use and SVN repository.

So far so good, but then how to access the SVN repository. My virtual machine connects to the network independently so I had no consistent way of knowing the IP or hostname that I would need to browse to.

The answer: Bonjour for Windows. Installed that on the Windows Virtual Machine and bingo I can use the advertised machine name of my mac with the .local suffix to access the SVN, no matter what network I'm on.