good morning! - 08:19am here and i'm still at the house waiting till 9 ish to head over to the dentist to get myself all booked in and checked out.

while i have thirty minutes of deadtime i thought it might be useful to pull together a little checklist of how i get into conference mode with the ammobox -- the box of kit that i take with me to every event i go too.

we are heading over via euro tunnel which is a first for me and i'm really looking forward to that, i think we have to change at brussels onwards to ghent where we will head from the station directly to the event.

in that space we usually reccy a number of things including the wifi, wired connection and making sure we have an av feed from the sound desk for the laptop.

europe conferences are often a different beast than stateside ones and depending where your going it's probably advised to get a mifi unit (i love xcomglobal myself) and share that with all your other devices.

the most crucial element for me when 'ontheground' is power backups, the less time i have charging kit equals more time i can interview people so making sure everything is ready to go is crucial.

we do have a boingo account to use in airports and wherever we can find an open spot with boingo support so it's not all bad and we can use a bunch of offline media making tools and push later (or until we get to the conference itself and their wifi) so it's not all mission critical.

as both myself and cj are going we have two roles why at the audience europe event. one is event streaming with a line out from the sound desk for the audio and social management of the online twitter conversation.

for myself mingling with people in and around the crowd findings out why they are there and what they are working on. collecting the stories.

normally i would take a set of pre made cards with me to ask more people while on the ground but this event is spread over the week so we should be fine to get a bunch of audio, video and blogs about our findings over the course of the time we are there.

it's also enough time to get to know the people who are there and to create mini tweetups each evening after what will be really engaging sessions with some fantastic speakers lined up.

i'll be putting up some kit packup videos as part of my december #watchdottv advocacy and you can see them slow released daily over on http://watchdottv.fibrecamp.tv - daily slow released onto itunes too!

• New international school in Ghent by September (expatica.com)
• Ghent to receive international primary school for expat children (expatica.com)
• Ghent World Cup (betweentheolympics.wordpress.com)

quicklinks | [tweetup] [web] [newsletter]

phew.

hectic week.  below is the audio content from last weeks refresh friday gather at antenna on beck street between 8am/10am - remember it's on every week and open to all plus you get 20% discount on the existing breakfast prices.  thanks to pcmcreative for recording last week while i was at lincuplive.

a big shout out to james random for this wonderful design/poster for the new refresh friday website that we are working on.  a super simple design hosted on posterous where all the content and shoutouts for local business will be so if you miss an event you can catch up online.  we will even look about doing a live video stream over the coming months.

enjoy! - don't forget the tweetvite for tomorrow.

the zoom h1 arrived today.

it's a little bit more flimsy than i expect but tbh i really wanted it as a line-in device from a decent rode ntg2 microphone in rather than use with the x/y pattern.  it's a good backup device thou and will be perfect for refreshfriday style events 'ontheground' for getting interviews of a higher quality than the ones on my ipod touch 4th generation.

i recorded a video earlier on skype with hans from bambuser for his 24 hr streaming event on friday which he will be documenting on his tumblr blog.

anyway, for some reason the audio on the encoded skype interview is all echo sounding whenever i try and playback on quicktime player.  it's perfect in vlc which suggests it's some kind of encoding that quicktime does not like playback off. i tried to rip the audio using a bunch of standard methods and kept failing so i've gone about it a different way - i've used hijack this pro.

i've been using hijack this for a bunch of years now and it's my last to go to application to grabbing 'anything' i'm playing.  i really should use it more for a backup when we are doing shows and i'm going to get into a routine of capturing audio from the mixing desk into the app once we have that in place so we always have the audio from our sessions in case we do ever have issues with the video capture in the studio.

as far as this bug all i did was set the application recording for vlc played back, hijacked the audio stream and recorded then pulled the encoded .mp3 file straight into imovie and matched up the audio in time with the video.  i've been looking at final cut pro x which all the old skool final cut editors hate but looks more like imovie to me - the feature of audio mixing an external source to sync with video looks perfect for my needs.  it's £200 for the software but it's on the list! :)

loving the h4n and the rails setup underneath.  that's some hot video capture gear.

really great to see people using lighter setups in southby southwest this year for recording.  you can get some great video on the canon 5d/7d with a sweet 50mm/35mm (remember full frame sensor) for that depth of field action going on.  the kit that is out there for getting decent audio into the camera is truly staggering and apart from the initial investment in the camera body for something like the 5d or 7d (and it comes down to the glass you buy after) the effects are truly fantastic of getting a duel purpose awesome camera and HD video in one camera.

i'm on a mission to own a 5d/7d over the coming year.  i think it's the only way to really do the ark, jackets and fibrecamp justice.  now if i could just work out how i'm gonna add that to the list of things to get.  you can often stop your creative process because you do not have the tools to do a perfect job to get the acknoledgement you think you need. 

personally i think an iterative approach to media making so people can see you talent, skill and consistency is just as important as the end result.  that's why i like telling stories with social media so much - it has the power to give people the back story to what it is you do and why you are so passionate about doing it.  if your working with designers and creatives that do not want to tell you the story then is it simply that your a cash cow to their business?

for me, working in the digital realms now is about making solid working digital relationships passed the sale of services, we have moved into a new era i believe of hyper connected relationships based on resources, discussion and open ended sharing of lessons learnt in this realm - where the good, bad and fugly have value.  success is not just a printed glossy booklet.

whoa, tangent.  music does that to me. ;)

still want that 5d. ;)