Neil Hopcroft

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I never did write up my trip to Venturefest in Oxford, did I?

A final fling for Powermagic, well, for the moment at least. I booked into a travel lodge at the bottom of the hill by the Cowley works junction of the ring road….this isn’t going to be a fun way to wake up on Monday morning, is it? In the event it wasn’t that unpleasant – I wonder howcome theres always so much traffic when I’m trying to drive that section of the road?

The first thing I noticed about the conference itself was the selection of cars, with two distinct types, the ten year old bangers and the new-model Mercs and Beamers. Everyone is either desperately in need of money or has more than they sensibly know what to do with.

There were two marquees in the car park of Unipart, the parts arm of the Cowley plant, and some presentations being made in their conference facilities. The exhibition in the tents was made of two halves, some ‘permanent’ stands, those there for the whole two days, and some constantly changing minor exhibits. The majority of stands were trying to bribe people to stay nearby by offering sweets or nicer coffee than the caterers (which wasn’t much of a challenge).

A lot of the stands were peopled by the bright young things from their respective offices, bringing cute young girls along to a fair largely populated with old rich guys and aspiring entrepeneurs seems somehow cynical but probably does the job. Grandi was in his element.

There were a series of presentation tracks, too. We went along to a number of talks by hopeful companies seeking finance. It was interesting to see the different presentation styles, and different reactions to their unrealistic financial forecasts. Some had much stronger stories than others, all were crazy ideas in their own ways, but highlights of idiocy included floating petal houses and flirtomatic.

My general feel from the two days was that there is plenty of finance looking for opportunities and a scarcity of appropriate investments for a lot of people. It has also made me believe more strongly that the way to succeed in this world is to have a self funded business expanding from profit – venture and angel finance is useful for a certain subset of businesses for which the window of opportunity is near enough that a for-profit approach won’t allow them to move quick enough (many tech companies fall into this subset) but it is so expensive.

Typing ‘Brazil’ and ‘Pi’ into Liveplasma pretty much draws a picture of my favorite films. Thats pretty impressive for a search engine.

Diamond fiction

Pixelroller – another kind of decorator (eye-safe)

Armchair handstands, among others

“This thing allows you to record your own clever message that plays when someone pulls the toilet paper.”

“Wanted: 30 chinamen and a zeppelin for elaborate practical joke”

And one for sushidog – These are the guys I was talking about the other day.

It used to be that whenever I started a new job one of my grandparents died. That was quite depressing. But recently fate has been getting more ambitious – I started my last permanent job in August 2001 and I’ve only been at my latest job for a few weeks. I’m just hoping they put the bins back on the stations now that they’ve developed bombs that don’t need to be planted in bins.

I was pleased by the concern shown by some of my friends in Japan, but it struck me as slightly odd, too…they regularly have earthquakes there, if part of a city is brought to a halt by a quake a good chunk of the citizens in the local area /will/ be directly affected by it. It would cause a much more pervasive destruction, within which it is reasonable to make sure those you know are OK. And, without wishing to trivialise the situation, yesterdays events weren’t a great deal more than another day of tube timetabling problems for most of the people affected.

Any London based people who feel they would like to get away for a few days in the country, let me know.

Theres a helluva good lightning storm going on outside at the moment….oddly just a constant rumble of thunder accompanying it, no rain, few loud cracks, its just like someone turned up the A14 a bit. And put the sun on ‘strobe’. The rain’ll be here soon.

In the meantime, here’s some zombie dogs.

Todays car boot fair trip yielded a brief chat with lark_ascending, two board games and more fruit than I can realistically process before the mould sets in.

One of the boardgames is so unusual the internet has never heard of it – The Bay City Rollers On Tour, the game. The closest I could find is KISS on tour, which looks like a later game based around the same kind of idea. I /think/ this was a good find, but I’m not sure yet. Gameplay-wise it looks pretty crude, but how could I resist?

Anyone about tomorrow night for an impromtu fruit salad and Bay City Rollers gig?

Rover get the decorators in.
(watch your eyes – this is what would happen if Masa-sans friends were let loose with a 200-series)

identify brontosaurus crockery shabby taunt

MasaManiA gets the decorators in… “The good thing about these pictures are all the ppl in the background who are not dressed as those in the foreground are. The bad thing about these pictures is that for the first time in my life I thought someone wearing hot pink sneakers was quite normally dressed. :)”
(Image-heavy, dial-up beware)