Accessify ROCKS Manchester

Back from Manchester after a pretty good weekend all in all.

It didn’t start particularly well. Very briefly I was late getting to the station. Missed train. Waited an hour and the next train was delayed half an hour. Missed meeting everyone at the station and had no clue where the place was. After a trip (in the opposite direction to the pub) to the tourist information centre I finally got there and things picked up markedly.

Present where Patrick Lauke, Vigo, Andy Saxton, Jack Pickard, Pixeldiva, Robert Wellock, Dan Champion and myself.

We started out in a small deserted bar where Patrick had booked a table (including a reserved sign with bad fonts). Considering that we accounted for the vast majority of people in their throughout the afternoon this was mildy amusing.

I missed most of the introductions but not to fear. Conversation jumped around – people who made it to d.Construct filled everyone else in with the highlights and the behind the scenes gossip. Tales of massages and ladies mainly. We had a wireless laptop connection and browsed around a little. Bad examples of error messages (I’ll dig out the links later on), brand new public sector sites that simply consist of sliced up images (including links with blue underlines and ovely image maps) and goings on at the BBC. But we cant speak about the later. Some talk as well on privacy issues tied in with the whole open API goings on and an idea we intent to sell to google – stalking.google.com – which is fairly self explanatory but we got into a worrying level of detail!

After a brief break to stop off at the hotel, and for some of the group to depart, we got some Indian food on the way to a pub recommended by Patrick, who was going to meet the rest of us there. It was a ROCK pub. Rage on the jukebox, lots of proper beers, people wearing black, etc. All of a sudden we found something else we had in common – musical tastes. More discussions going backwards and forwards between the music (what’s that tune?) and the state of the industry. All good fun.

Overall, another enjoyable meetup. Thumbs up to everyone turning up and I’ll look forward to the next one. I’ll post links and the obligatory flick details once everyone else has their say.