Geekup Liverpool

Well i thought it be about time that I gave a quick write up on my first GeekUp Liverpool. This is a long overdue post, I should add I started it Friday morning, but then had to go to two weddings this weekend and now here I am! Any how back to the post. Now Geekup has interested me for a while but I have never justified going to Manchester for one, but now they have appeared in Liverpool. Unfortunately I missed the first few due to other social commitments but this time I had it marked in my diary well in advance. As I work local I decided to stay at work until 6 and then head over. As well as myself Chris Alcock also attended from our office and before heading over we decided to have a quick game of FaceBall with Derek. Sadly Derek whoopped both our asses :( We got to Parr Street just after 6 but found out that the room hadn't been booked and we couldn't get in until 8.30, This however wasn't such a bad thing, it allowed for a good hour or two of socialising with fellow geeks and getting to know each other. This for me was the best part. Thom Shannon was there and Chris, Thom and I got chatting to John McKerrell, he works for Multi Map and seems to play a big part in the OpenStreetMap project. We talked about OpenStreetMap as well as other things and Im know seriously considering get a GPS device so i can get involved, North Liverpool especially needs mapping. It was at GeekUp that I finally decided to start using Twitter, John showed us how he was twittering using his phone and get results back from multi map using it. All very cool. After a free half glass of Bulmers and a few beers later we finally got into our room and Dave Verwer gave a brief talk on Unobtrusive Javascript. I have been using Javascript and in particular YUI alot in the last few months and I did go into the session expecting to know most of what was being said. Dave went for an example driven talk and it was quite good, covered the basics well and there was good participation by all 10 people who turned up. Sadly after the session I had to dash as I Hayley was picking me up and we had to go home and organise what we were wearing for the wedding we were attending the next day. I had hoped to get to know some of the other guys more but such is life, there's always next time. So GeekUp was very good and I will definitely attend again, I managed to take a few pictures these can be found on flickr - http://flickr.com/photos/mjjames/sets/72157600540738499/