Tag Archives: 2009

BCS Birmingham Branch Committee Summer Barbecue

Last Sunday I hosted a barbecue for the Committee of the BCS Birmingham Branch and thought I’d share a few of the photo’s that we took with you.

After the Branch Committee’s request for new Committee member applicants I’m very pleased to say we had five people come along and take up new positions on the Committee. We’re fortunate to be joined by Martin Froggatt, Rob Gilliam, Steve Harris, Dawn Peers and Hugo Russell, and most welcome they are too!

This bring the size of the Committee back up to a healthy twelve members, which is excellent, however we on the Committee thought that it would be good idea to hold a small event to help everyone get to know each other, and hopefully build a sense of camaraderie, outside of the usual Committee meetings and BCS Birmingham Branch events (one of which is on Tuesday the 15th evening). I was happy to host and for my part I wanted to say ‘thank you’ to the long serving members of the Committee for all of their dedication (as well as a couple of long serving ex-Committee members too).

We’ve also recently started to reboot the Branches approach to social networking technologies and will be refreshing the BCS Birmingham Branch facebook page, please consider joining if your a BCS member and either associated with or interested in the Birmingham Branch.

And here’s those photos I mentioned, as you can see we all had an excellent time, and as Peter Crouch had to say “Thanks also for posting Donna’s photos on the Web, now everyone can see what the Birmingham Committee does on a Sunday afternoon!”.

www.flickr.com

September 2009 blog catch up

Apologies to all my blog readers I’ve been lax of late and haven’t posted a great deal recently, and I’m afraid that in an attempt to clear down all the draft blog entries I have prior to the transition and acquisition (of Sun by Oracle, of course) I’ll be posting a number of blog entries in quick succession, some of which I expect may need expanding upon in the future.

Topics I have to complete include part three of my provisioning article series, a number of posts on Google and the Google architecture, a number of posts on UK Government messaging systems, specifically DIS, a number of posts on the continuing issues with the economy and innovation and science spending in the UK, as well as a few others.

On the economy side, I was hoping to follow up my articles “DBERR’s views on the future growth of the UK economy ‘New Industry, New Jobs’” and “Industry contributions to the UK economy and investment in R&D; by industry” with pieces which might include looking at:

  1. ‘innovation’ investment in the UK versus the UK’s place in the World Wide league tables
  2. UK versus US stimulation packages
  3. Services Sciences and Web Sciences
  4. the state of UK Manufacturing and “Robot”isation in the UK
  5. a review of the recent ‘Digital Britain’ report
  6. possibly a comparison of R&D; spending and focus in the UK versus other nations (European comparison might be the most pointed)

But for now I’ll see how I get on!

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

There it is in the title, have a great Saint Patrick’s Day!

Here’s the wonderful Ronnie Drew (sadly missed) and Shane McGowen (thankfully still with us), of the Dubliners and the Pogues respectively, on the Late Late Show with Gay Byrne, to help kick start the day…


Frankly, you don’t get much more Irish than that.

Links for this article:

links for 2009-03-05

Who’s responsible for all the concrete carbuncles?~ | Magazine | BBC NEWS | Le Corbusier is thought of by many in the world of architecture as the leading mind of the 20th Century, whose work preceded and defined the wholesale use of concrete in architecture, but as a new. …..

links for 2009-02-21

“Whose data is it anyway?” Facebook in row over who owns *your* data | Technology | BBC NEWS | With Facebook still yet to find a genuine revenue generating business model, there are plenty of people who are uncomfortable not knowing what Facebook might do to achieve profitability.…..