Lisa Connolly

I'm a massive fan of cooking and I love to bake, and although I don't have masses of cook books I do have a trusted few that I always refer back to. Mostly when I cook I rely on my taste and experimenting with the different types of food I like.

More and more I've been using the internet for recipe ideas, I found this blog (Simply Recipes) some time ago and I love it, even if I don't use the exact recipes I can always find something to inspire my cooking. Simply Recipes have recently expanded the search on their site and given it it's own url foodblogsearch.com, from here you can search over 1800 food blogs.

The thing is I now really want to start my own food blog so that I have my own recipes to look back on, to adapt and change, and hopefully inspire other peoples cooking.

Recently I've been finding it difficult to channel my creative thoughts and get them out of my head and onto paper (or into my Mac). I thought I just needed a break, but I also realise that lately I've been working differently, there have been more distractions around me and I've been caught up in email and tasks that are unimportant and not very urgent either.

I found this post on Digg, Time Management for Creative People is a free ebook released by Mark McGuinness (www.wishfulthinking.co.uk).

It's a really easy read and makes a lot of sense to me, so I'm going to try and get myself back into a routine, and see if I can get what's in my head out and increase my productivity.

Happy reading.

One of my photos that I licensed under a Creative Commons has been short-listed for inclusion in the Schmap Brussels Guide, if my photo is chosen it will be published later this month.

This is the first time anyone has asked to use a photo of mine published on flickr under the CC license.

Creative Commons is obviously working really well as others feel you are already more approachable and will to let your work be used and recognise you as the owner, you get the credit.

I'd booked myself onto a CIPR Ethical Blogging course a few months back and completely forgotten about it until my calendar reminded me. I set out on Wednesday 31st October not looking forward to the trip into Central London. I arrived a few minutes late and missed the introduction, which I think was just people introducing themselves to the rest of the group (who were mostly corporate PR people). Anyway, the talk started, and everything was making good sense, ethics is usually ahead of the law, the internet is an unregulated environment, anonymous comments, codes of conducts etc...

The best part was after the presentation when I got to talk to the speaker, interestingly he lectures at Bournemouth, when I told him I was from Ravensbourne he was really interested in my point of view from an education perspective. I started to explain about the setup we have here and some of my views and takes on blogs (and the web in general). Lets just say he was very interested in what we're doing and very impressed with how 2.0 we already are. It's given me great confidence and strengthened what I already knew - that Ravensbourne is doing fantastic things.

Sunday

I arrived, it was cold and wet, and there was very few people here. After getting my room, and registering I went for a walk, I was really surprised at the size of York's Campus, it is vast, but a really nice location, a mix of buildings, some interesting 1960-70's architecture.

Monday

Things kicked off with breakfast, then a break (cause I'd already registered), then a drop-in wifi workshop (yay, internet at last!), followed by lunch, and then the first plenary sessions. After the days sessions we had some free time before the conference drinks and meal, the food was very good, the band was a fantastic, and the magician was a real treat, yes you read that right, a magician

Tuesday

The second day I thought would be really tiring but surprisingly not, all the speakers were great, with tea and coffee breaks in-between and a really nice lunch. The day was finished off with a with a debate about services like facebook and twitter, compared to some peoples prefered method of communication - none other than our old friend email! Peoples main concern was 'how do you find the time?' my answer is 'how do you not?', these services not only save me time and help me stay in contact with my friends and their lives but they help me understand the community I work in, how else do you understand your user demographic than put yourself in their shoes. Rant over! We didn't really conclude on the subject, but everyone to their own, I'm sure it's still open to debate. All in all it's been great coming here cause I've started to realise all the different levels and types of people there are in the institutional web community. I would come again next year for sure.

Wednesday

Thats today, not much has happened except me re-writting my blog entry when I should be sleeping (it's now 1am). It's not really it's now 9.20am cause I only just got internet access

I haven't used ecto for a while so yesterday when I was busily typing an entry I stupidly just started typing away into a field taking no notice of the interface, after I had posted my entry to my amazement there was only a title, doh!

So for those people that were griped to their computers for my latest (annual) entry here it is again (although a slightly different rendition of the first one).

So I ended up going along to BarCampLondon2 this weekend. I had a great time, it was quite different than what I expected - in a good way - everyone was really friendly and high spirited about the weekend and couldn't wait to get started, so much so that there was a mad rush for the session's board.

I'd like to say the BarCampLondon team (Ian Forrester, Jason Cartwright and Natalie Downe) did a great job and well done to everyone that presented and wasn't a coward (like me!). The venue was great and the tea/coffe and biscuits just kept coming

The whole thing went so quickly and smoothly that I now understand the attraction of BarCamp's everywhere. I will definitely be going to the next one and now that I've seen people present I'm a little less afraid to do a presentation myself - I even have an idea.

Everyone else's photo's from BarCampLondon2.

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