A little place of calm

BiCon 2010, the 28th annual bisexual conference/convention took place from August 26th – 30th at the University of East London, Docklands campus. It was combined with the 10th International Conference on Bisexuality, and the first international Bisexual Research Conference. About 450 people attended, from 28 countries!

I got up ridiculously early on Thursday 26th August in order to take the coach from Winchester to London leaving at 06:30. The journey was smooth and I was at UEL by 10am, in time to check in and drop off my suitcase in my accommodation.

The research conference was utterly brilliant, full credit to Meg Barker and Christina Richards for running it. Most of the talks were of exceptional quality, and i feel i learnt a lot. I enjoyed hearing about Helen Bowes-Catton's research into how people perceive and visualise bisexual spaces. Kaye McLelland spoke about bisexuality in the works of Shakespeare, and i marvelled at how well my English teachers at school managed to hide it all from us!

I was thoroughly inspired by a keynote talk from Robyn Ochs, a public speaker, writer, and long-standing bisexual activist. Robyn spoke of the importance of the impact that we make when we create space for people to be comfortably bisexual. I was touched by Robyn's description of the reward when somebody tells us that we make a difference for them. I felt so proud at that moment that I helped to found Bi Wessex in Winchester: proud that people come along and gain something from the group, and that some of the members were there at BiCon.

On Friday i bought Robyn's book, Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World and attended the workshop where we heard from ten of the people who contributed to the book. They stood up and told us something about themselves and read an excerpt from the book. It gave such meaning to hear them speak personally, and when i reach their stories in the book, i will remember them. Their contributions will be particularly meaningful for me. I asked several of the contributors to write in my book, which they gladly did.

I enjoyed hearing Heidi Bruins Green and Dr. Nicholas Payne speak about the results of a workplace survey on bisexuality. It was very interesting to hear the results analysed and validated from a mathematical perspective. Their results showed that bisexuality is not a phase on the way to something else, but a valid destination point, as are many other sexual orientations. They had some interesting data to show that happiness at work is directly correlated with LGBT support groups in the workplace, and anti-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation, gender identity and expression.

Saturday's discussion about words and phrases for bisexuality in other languages was intriguing. I shared my Esperanto knowledge about the etymology of the word ambaŭseksema and the positive phrase borrowed from shipping terminology navigi per vaporo aŭ velo (to navigate by steam or sail). We learned phrases, both positive and negative in German, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, Italian, Sri Lankan, Welsh and Hebrew. Everybody contributed something, and the results will be published … somewhere.

I knitted a bi pride bracelet in the amazing craft room, and then on saturday afternoon i took some time out to visit Central London. I went to Covent Garden to visit the new Apple store (the biggest in the world) and enjoyed spending time by myself.

Saturday evening was the BiCon ceilidh which i enjoyed immensely. When it comes to dancing, i really like being told what to do! :) I made a new friend that night, somebody who i feel could become a very good friend. We danced together a lot and had some lovely conversations. Later on the music became too loud but i joined the Corridor Club upstairs where it was quieter and i enjoyed chatting to more people. We were actually the last to leave because we didn't realise when the music had stopped and everyone downstairs had left!

Sunday was the disastrous "Bisexuality in Science-Fiction & The Future" workshop. It was marred by the speaker being late, a church group being in the room we were supposed to use, the laptop being broken, the projector refusing to work, and the speaker's corny sense of humour which did not go down particularly well at 10am. I gave up and left after about ten minutes of technology fail, and went and joined the church, which i actually really enjoyed! Those who stayed said it only got worse, and by half way through several of them had started their own alternative science-fiction workshop out in the atrium!

The highlight of Sunday was "Smutty Storytelling" which was very well attended, and the storytellers did not disappoint! The stories were well written, and delivered with humour and enthusiasm! There were cheers and a standing ovation by the end! I sat with my new-found friend and mentioned that I had "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" on DVD, which we watched later that evening.

Monday morning seemed to go quite slowly. Things were winding down but there were still a few workshops left. I went to one on sensual play, which was well facilitated, and led to discussions of how we might turn the results into an amusing website! Later i went to have my photo taken professionally, so that hopefully i will appear again on the front cover of Bi Community News and maybe in other publications about bisexuality.

Before i knew it, it was closing plenary. Awards and thanks were given, we celebrated the success of this BiCon, and met the team of BiCon 2011 which will be in Leicester from September 1st – 4th. Registration is already open!

The bi community is amazing. So totally inclusive and unquestioning. I am so happy that i went, I am sad that it's over, but writing this is my therapy: recording my happy memories and celebrating the joys of the last few days.

Thanks so very much to the BiCon 2010 organising team – you did an incredible job!

This weekend the world went mad for Tupperware Boxes.

Key output:

Some rather bizarre songs:

My dog's favourite thing is my #tupperwarebox, it's full of treats and nom, she behaves so well when it's around, I think I'll tie it on.

I've got a massive #tupperwarebox it's got a special lid that clicks and locks

Come on and let's rock! Everybody let's rock! Everybody in the whole cell block was dancing to the #tupperwarebox!

How I love my little #tupperwarebox! You can a-store my cheese, you can a-sit on my knees, feels like a picnic right here at home…

A quiz: "Which #tupperwarebox would you be?"

A twitter retweeter bot: @tupperwarebot – the cool thing about this was i learnt how to use Yahoo Pipes and made a pipe that finds relevant tweets and manipulates the stream to become retweets with the hashtag #tupperwarebox

A Justin Bieber in a #tupperwarebox which gained the @tupperwarebot a lot of Justin Bieber fans!

This is actually quite disturbing when i found there is a rumour that Justin Bieber got stuck in a toy box at age 7 and suffers from claustrophobia. But anyway, the fans seem to like it. They appreciate the randomness of it and came up with the hashtag #justininatupperwarebox!

Finally, there is a Facebook group: Tupperware Box! If you are a fan of Tupperware and/or pure random nonsense, please don't hesitate to join! :D

Sometimes it's excellent fun to work with somebody to produce a website in a day. With no requirement for ongoing support, just get it up and running, instant gratification. In a way, it says, "Look what we can do when we set our minds to it!"

winchesterwebscene.co.uk

Yesterday, @sydlawrence phoned me to ask if i'd like to help make a new site for the Winchester Web Scene. Without a second thought, i said, "DEFINITELY!" We got together at 3pm today at the Bridge Patisserie. We drank lots of coffee, went on to the Bishop on the Bridge, then went back to Syd's house and ate pizza. We got the whole site designed, coded, integrating with Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, Gravatar and Campaign Monitor for email subscriptions, with a blog plus comments, events list and RSS feeds … in about 5 hours.

It was nice that two Winchester web companies, Marmalade on Toast and Eden Development were able to combine talent to work on a fun social project together. The two of us had a great time making it!

The site gives a far greater prominence to the Winchester Web Scene than the old Ning site did. Still in its first few hours of existence, the site has already had 71 unique visitors. The future of the Winchester Web Scene is looking very bright!

The next event is a barbeque at the Hyde Tavern on the 6th July from 7pm. If you live near Winchester and are interested in anything to do with the web, you're very welcome to come along! :)

Just a little notice to say that i have enabled Disqus on my blog. It's a pretty clever tool that links up comments on blogs all over the Internet. When you hover over the picture of somebody who has commented on my blog, you also see some of the comments they have left on other blogs. You might also see their Twitter status, or get a link to their Flickr account, their Delicious account, their Facebook.

Here's an example of how it can look:

It's a really neat way of bringing the web closer together. For me it's also a great advantage in that it immediately gave me nested comments and the ability to send email replies to people who have commented. I thought i was going to have to make some fairly hefty changes to my WordPress theme in order to enable nested comments, but it turns out Disqus can just do it all for me!

Oh yes, you also get to rate other people's comments up or down, youtube-stylee! ;)

Disqus is particularly good in that it works across multiple blogging platforms. So i installed the WordPress plugin, but there are also plugins for Blogger, Moveable Type, Tumblr and more. Wouldn't it be great if LiveJournal would take it up? :)

Thank you to ChrisMDP for finding Disqus and telling me about it! :)

Approximately a year ago, you may have wished me a happy 2008. If you did, thank you! I had a pretty awesome year!

Reading back in my blog, it feels like a long year. In fact, i noticed a stark contrast between the two halves of the year, pivoting on the moment i got my new job. I was amazed by how much of a difference it made in my perception: the first half of the year feels much longer than a year ago, but everything since my new job feels very recent. Yet the two halves are separated by just one weekend! I also noticed how many more blog posts i made in the earlier half of the year compared to the latter.

So it's new year's eve again, the time when i get all retrospective and nostalgic. I actually quite like staying in on new year's eve and blogging. Here is a summary of the year.

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Who knew that coding could be such a social activity! I really like GitHub, with its ability to fork people's code base, apply your own changes, offer it up to be merged back in, see the difference logs, comment on the difference logs … ah, now that last one's genius!

Somebody happened upon this quiet little commit from DHH … yes, the DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails. The bright spark goes and posts it to Reddit, prompting the world and its duck to chime in with an opinion! It's quite funny reading through the comments, both on Reddit and on GitHub.

What does the commit do? Not a lot. It's what we call syntactic sugar: aliasing something in code as something else. It means we'll be able to do this:

['a', 'b', 'c', 'd'].third
=> 'c'

Of course, i have an opinion too. I can see why it could be useful, but i don't really think it is worthy of being in the Rails core code. I doubt i will ever use it. I also agree with the person who says it widens the gap between Ruby and Rails. When Array#first is available in Ruby, people will wonder why Array#second is not.

I do wonder, if anyone other than DHH had submitted this 'patch', whether it would have been accepted into core Rails.

After laughing at this thread over lunch today, one of my colleagues sent me an instant message:

Coffee.third?

I replied:

return true

I think it's good that people are looking at the commits, seeing what's going into Rails, and having their say about it. This is community-driven development at its best! Cheers, GitHub! :)

Update: DHH has responded! It now only goes up to fifth … but Array#forty_two has been added in as compensation! DHH calls it accessing "the reddit".

Resumo: Mi tre ĝuis Bifeston hieraŭ. Mi vidis malnovajn amikojn, amikiĝis kun novaj amikoj, kaj faris abundo de trikado.

So i am really glad we went to BiFest yesterday! That was definitely one of the best i have ever been to. Nice points were: it was well spread out with plenty of spaces we could go and not feel cramped up together, they provided a buffet tea for us, we got to watch Doctor Who (yay!!) and the weather was simply amazing for us!

I was able to see and catch up with some old friends and make some new ones. It seemed as if there were several new people there, but there were also many people noticeably missing, which was a shame.

The craft corner was a massive success, building on previous years. I think there were at least ten people doing some sort of knitting or crocheting during the day. I like to joke that bisexuality is synonymous with knitting! In truth, i believe it is all thanks to Ludy! I got a lot done on my blanket yesterday (pictures to come later today!) and i taught somebody how to knit! Yay! :) I also got chatting to somebody else about crochet, who had a totally excellent idea of a group crochet project where multiple people can work on the same thing simultaneously, using multiple threads, joining in or dropping out as they please. This sounds like something for BiCon! :D

Doctor Who was so much fun with a room full of people watching it together! We were all laughing and cheering and shouting at the television! A very interactive television watching experience!

All in all, i had a great time, met some lovely people with whom i'm hoping to keep in touch, and i do hope we'll be able to go to BiCon this year. I am thinking of running an Esperanto workshop at BiCon, to introduce other people to the delights of the language! :)

Last night my dad came round to visit, tonight i had a lovely evening with a friend i used to know from university. That was really very special to see each other again. Tomorrow i am going to stay with nyecamden for the night, and Friday aster13 is coming for the weekend!

This is really very extremely social for me, and i hope Aster doesn't mind that i might be rather worn out by the weekend! I'm sure we'll be able to take it easy and have a nice relaxing weekend together!

The C# course continues to go well. Today i learnt about ArrayLists, HashTables, Queues and Stacks, interfaces, delegates (pointers to functions), events, error handling, and some of the finer points of object-oriented methodology.

Happy Easter to those who celebrate it! It has snowed the last 3 days in Winchester, and is snowing right now. My friend^[0] Jack even managed to catch a photo of some snow settling!

We had a lovely Purim. My partner made Hamentaschen and we read the book of Esther. I love that story! We had Shabbat again yesterday, which was also very nice and we had a friend come to visit for the afternoon.

Contrary to my earlier post, i did actually go out to see part of the Winchester Passion. We arrived just in time to see Jesus coming down the high street. We followed down to the Buttercross where there was some sort of trial i suppose, but we couldn't see because there were too many people. We skipped to the cathedral and hung around to see Jesus get killed, and then it was too cold so we went home again! I think, as a piece of street theatre, it was very well done. It was really well attended too: well over 1000 people turned up, i should say. Jack also got a little photo of some of the crowd.

Today is a day for catching up on chores, and i am working on a few enhancements to MyChores.

[0] 'Friend' as in we are friends on Facebook. We've never actually met in reality, but what does that matter these days, heh!

I feel like a Life Review is in order. But i'll keep it short. [Edit] no i didn't! It's kinda long!

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