There were a bunch of kite-surfers, and the chap above saw me taking photos and started buzzing the shore in front of us. Unfortunately, shooting with a long manual focus lens with a broken focusing ring meant that the potentially fantastic close-up shots of him hanging upside down from his kite about 10ft in the air are merely of an indistinguishable blob in front of a very crisp distant ship. It was a very nice ship though.

In a situation that I hope does not become a YAPC tradition for me, I awoke this morning with a colossal hangover and not a lot of actual sleep and have spent the day quietly contemplating the Corporate Perl strand of the programming, while occasionally breaking away from the conference rooms to eat custard tarts, of which there were many.

Plans for this evening seem to involve eating lots of tasty food and not getting hammered on Sagres. I suspect this will be an easy task, and not only because the restaurant we are considering only serves Super Bock…

I’ve had my shiny iPhone for a week (almost to the minute) and it’s lovely. The camera even works alright.

I seem to be knackered. After a simple day yesterday of watching the rather excellent Stingray Sam, eating noodles and then watching the also excellent Timecrimes I went to sleep.

This morning I woke up stupidly early, eventually ignored the thunder, lightning and rain, and then wandered down to Canterbury to spend the day shooting my brother’s band, Black Sun Down. Hopefully they’ll be able to use some of them when they get their website in better shape, but until then you can make them feel special by looking at their MySpace and Facebook pages. They’re quite good.

I first saw Ben Kweller when he was heading up Radish at V97 – my second ever music festival. I was there to see Ash (in their first gig with Charlotte Hatherley), Kula Shaker (in one of their last big gigs) and Stereophonics (who may have had a The in those days), and popped along to see what the minor fuss about this “new Kurt Cobain” was. I thought they were excellent – poppy alt stuff fronted by a tiny child (although he does only have three years on me, he has aged remarkably better). I grabbed the album and heard they’d split, which was annoying. Anyways, I picked up his first solo album, liked it a lot and have been on his mailing list keeping an eye out for a gig in London ever since. Annoyingly he always seems to appear when I’m out in the US, especially annoying as he plays a lot around New York, the place that I’m normally visiting, so I grabbed a ticket for last weeks show early and have been sitting waiting patiently ever since.

So, Union Chapel – fantastic venue. Sticking a gig in a nice church adds to the atmosphere and if it’s one quite as nice as the Union Chapel, complete with candles around the rotunda (I’m not even sure if that’s the right word, but I’ve been wanting to use it for ages, so I’m going to pretend that it is) then it works rather well.

First up was Carrick, Ben’s tour buddy and singer/song writer/guitarist for Everybody Else. Despite the not particularly favourable reaction from the rather partisan crowd, and his annoying hat (my hat fascism is unpredictable and well known), he’s got a voice on him and I grabbed his band’s debut album, which isn’t bad at all.

Having randomly bumped into a couple of my step-brothers friends (who I’d met at my dad’s wedding where I tried to make up for their rather lowly employment as waiters all day by filling them with rather fine whisky, as I slowly slipped under the table into unconsciousness) I moved down to a closer pew for BK.

Rather than the more full band that’s on the albums, this was a solo acoustic tour, with Kweller supported by Ben Kitterman, aka Kitt, on dobro. I barely remember the names of songs that I like from albums, let alone setlists at gigs, but they played stuff from all over the place with a Neil Young cover, songs from friends, songs that Ben doesn’t normally play but Kitt likes and a fill-in on the piano as Kitt went to fix a broken string. There was setlist negotiation between songs, an apology to the soundman as Ben did “that thing that made the microphone pop in soundcheck” again and random power downs of the stage lights as small animals zapped themselves on the daisy chain of wires (I assume). The atmosphere can be fairly well summed up by a moment early in the gig where Ben stopped mid-song, grinned wildly and apologised for losing his place, as Kitt had pulled off a rather excellent lick on his guitar and put him off. To be fair to them both it was a rather excellent lick. They closed out with Penny on the Train Track and I found that all the buses outside of the church took me somewhere useful, even though each went somewhere different.

It was one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to – excellent atmosphere, great music, great venue and random gig partners. I tried to take some pictures with my little camera and as normal none of them really came out (although the venue didn’t seem to care about cameras and there were a couple of useful SLRs out in the audience). However, this morning I got a mail from Kitt thanking me for putting up my favourite picture from the night, telling me my caption for it was great (’Yes I know it’s crap quality, but it’s not every day you get such an image showing the love of a boy for his dobro playing buddy…’) and letting me know that Ben is using it as his myspace picture. And that, my friends, is pretty awesome.

Anyways, you heathens get a second chance – he’s got a new album coming out at the beginning of next year (it’s sounding a little bit country at the moment, but bear with it) and as is normal will be doing a tour to support it – he’ll be playing at Koko on May 15th, if you want to be sensible and buy a ticket. I’ve not seen them on sale yet, but soon you will have your chance to show that you do actually have musical taste.

For years I’ve been interested in the way that people interact online, from chatting via the terminal at college, through blogging LiveJournal, to the constant barrage of Twitter and it’s new ilk. These days these are all rolled up under the rather inclusive banner of “Social Media” a term that I feel has little meaning. Last week saw one of the largest social media gatherings in London so far, Amplified08. Largest, at least, in terms of an event to talk about social media as a concept, rather than meeting through social media (and normally trying to drink a sponsor’s bar tab).

I won’t talk much about the talk that me, Annie Mole and Chris Meade presented, as Nicole over at the London Geek Girl Dinners has already done it much better than I on their blog and the slides are up on SlideShare. However, the big thing I took away from the talk was what Chris said – books aren’t about the paper, they’re about the words and the experience they inspire inside your head. When we get over the hurdle that the constant interconnectedness of the medium and the content of a book the ebook will take off, but until that time it’ll be slow going.

The conference itself was great, although the overriding feeling I left with was one of mild confusion – what was it meant to be? It was billed as the meeting of the “Network of Networks”, getting the groups within social media together under one roof to talk. However, the sessions themselves seemed to be a bit short (as we discovered when we thought we had an hour, only to find that we only had 40 minutes) and the fray of people outside of the main conference room was not an environment entirely conducive to conversation. I had a really good time, talking about books, the parallels between improv theatre and interaction in social networks and the future of online video. However, the most useful conversations I had were sitting in rooms waiting for sessions to start, or carrying on conversations after they ended, as well as a short time in the overflow pub, talking with Rachel Clarke and Steve Lamb. Part of the stated aim for amp08 was to set up amp09 to lead to amp10 as a big social media event, but this really felt like the ground work, basically a scaled up version of Tuttle and the other groups that meet regularly.

It was organised where it needed to be, it was disorganised where it needed to be, but overall it didn’t have much direction, which I think was probably a good thing. The purpose will crystallise over time and I don’t envy the organisers the task of collating these opinions and trying to drag out the ideas that will form the basis of amplified09. However, I’ll help where I can and I suspect that anyone else who likes talking will do the same.

Overall I think my take home from the day can be summed up quite neatly. I bumped into Christian Payne shortly after turning up and he told me that he was interviewing as many people as he could, asking them one question – “What do you think the future of social media is?”. I ran away before he could get his camera out as I can’t answer the question other than with another question – “What do you think social media is? I’ve not got a clue…”

I wandered away from the post London Perl Workshop drinkathon while there was still free beer left in the pub and then spent a while getting back to the station because of the view above. Somehow I’ve not actually taken many (if any) pictures of the BT Tower before, so it was nice to finally give in to the cliché.

This is the sort of photograph you take when you’ve been playing Dead Space for too long. It’s a dangerous thing seeing every scene as an over the shoulder moment before a necromorph tries to chop you up in an artistically pleasing fashion.

Another from Brentford. I took this because of the colours, shapes and lines – I didn’t even notice the sign until my dad pointed it out on flickr…