Kian Ryan (.NET, Android, Geekery)

Fawlty Towers from Wikipedia

I travel quite a bit. Mostly around the UK, I end up visiting clients all over the place. A travel and stay cheaply, I require very little. I ask for a clean room, half decent shower, and pleasant staff. That’s about it. I have stayed in some dodgy guest houses, scary hotels and borderline B&Bs. But on no occasion have I been a place quite like this. I was so impressed by their attempts to thwart my enjoyment of my stay I decided it deserved a blog post.

This is a long post with pictures. More below the cut.

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Photo by Cat Ashton

We like Geek Girl Dinners. Pleasant company, good food, good conversations. Cat Ashton and I attended the fourth geek girl dinner in Manchester, this time being hosted at, Sweet Mandarin (who also host regular tweetups). This time, we had the company of Dom “The Hodge” Hodgson talking on http://www.geekery.in/ and community events, and Liv Wild from Thoughtworks, discussing productivity and happiness.

Good food. Good company. Awesome.

Also an awesome announcement that BAE Systems would be putting a large amount of cash behind the entire GGD movement. There’s also some mumblings of organising Girl Geek Teas, as a more frequent meet up with the same ideas of Geek Girl Dinners.

Here’s a few videos from the event. Apologies for the orientation – you would have thought that Youtube would give you an option to rotate them once they’re uploaded. Audio quality is a bit pants as well, taken on the phone. As is the video quality. In general, they’re a bit pants – but you can at least get a feel for how the evening went.