Another fortnight with no blog posts.
Health
Getting used to paying close attention to what I’m eating and how much I’m exercising. And for the first week of this fortnight that was starting to work and I shifted a few pounds. This week I’ve been staying in a hotel in Edinburgh and all of my good work has been undone. Just need to start again I suppose.
Last time I mentioned how my had suggested that I bought a Fitbit as it would encourage me to take more notice of what my body was doing. Turns out that this is a really good idea. And it also turns out that’s it’s a bit of a growing movement. O’Reilly have just published a book called Fitness for Geeks which looks at this whole area in some detail. I have a copy which I’m looking forward to reading. Once I’ve finished it, I’ll write a review.
Training and Speaking
As I mentioned above, I’ve been in Edinburgh all this week. I ran five days of Perl training for staff at Edinburgh University. Everyone seemed happy with the way it went and there’s a chance I’ll be invited back again at some point in the future.
But in the previous week I arranged another training course. It all happened rather quickly and, to be honest, took me a bit by surprise. It was a case of a few things all coming together at the right time.
Five years ago, the London Perl Mongers, with lots of help from the BBC, ran what we called a “Perl Teach-In”. It was a one-day, free Perl training course. It was a great success. The fifty places on the course were all booked in a couple of days and everyone who came on the day agreed that it was a great idea.
For a few months now, as we approached the fifth anniversary of the Teach-In, I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to do it all over again. I spoke to a few people to get a few ideas, but nothing really came together. A couple of months ago, I heard about Google’s new Campus venue in London and I contacted them to find out what they would charge to hold a training event there. For several weeks I got no reply.
Then, about ten days ago, Google got back to me asking what date I wanted to hold my event. I asked them what it would cost and they told me it would be free. So we set a date of 4th August for the second free Perl Teach-In. This time all the places were booked in just under 24 hours. Which seems pretty successful.
If this works, then there’s a good chance that I’d like to make it a more frequent event. But (obviously) I’d like to find some way to make a bit of money out of it. Perhaps I need to look for sponsorship.
Where did you run the course in ed.ac.uk?
It was run by the Informatics department (although they publicised it throughout the university so there were people there from many different departments).
It was actually held in the Informatics Forum. Which has, I think, been built since you were there.