... there's nothing for a few weeks, and then all of a sudden there's a ton of them at once.
Which is a bit of a sore point with me really because it was London buses - or the lack of them - that got my little mini-conference season (which happened two weeks ago now) off to the worst possible start. I won't bore you with the details as it all turned out fine in the end, but there was a lot of stress, urgent phone calls and help from friends (strangers initially, but people I now consider friends) in between times!
So why haven't I posted my usual post-conference review of i-Design 08 and Remix 08? Let's just say video editing, rendering and web publishing has the ability to suck every spare minute out of every free weekend and evening you have! Especially when you keep going round the loop of 'Can we change this?', 'Maybe it would look better if we did this...', 'Is there a better font we could use for that?' at the end of a long render, compress, upload, transcode process cycle that involves endlessly manipulating HD footage that typically can't be divided down into anything that runs for less than an hour at a time.
I should add that the afore-mentioned 'we' in this case is actually 'me' so I have nobody to blame but myself!
On the plus side, at least the whole 'shooting at a Microsoft event' thing at Remix08 followed the same pattern it did at the Las Vegas Remix event in February and the UK Product Launch event in March which meant (a) I didn't have to lug my gear down to Brighton (b) I could actually socialise a bit and (c) I didn't have to fret and worry about when all this stuff was going to be ready to publish and whether it would be up to the quality required. Wins all round!
So, rather than post my usual critique of the conferences I'll just summarise with a couple of lines: I enjoyed both i-Design 08 and Remix08. I'm glad I went. I'd go again. Not to say there's not a lot of room for improvement but I risk sounding like a broken record if I start 'whinging' again about what was wrong but could so easily have been got right. Bottom line is both provided a lot of food for thought and in the case of Remix UK, despite the silly-and-easy-to-correct weaknesses, it was good value-for-money and, I thought, an improvement on last year's event.
