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)

the studio is getting a short back and sides!

cutting away the initial wood sides is making a massive change to the space we have in the studio allow us to look at the space with wider eyes and plan where equipment needs to go.  ripping out the wood from behind me takes away the feeling of being enclosed and allows for us to visualize a bigger longer working space that originally i had planned for the centre of the room.  i know this now to be the wrong approach.

along the wall to my side will be a long wrap around desk into the corner where all the major recording equipment will be built in and locked out of sight with just monitors along the top.  we could probably get around four/five people in comfortably at a co-working position and it would be perfect for doing hands on training in a coworking environement and allow nomad groups that want to work on a short term project room to work, blog and if they wanted to record video.  it's coming together.

i can see it much clearer now.

morning!

been a busy week this week but i have to tell you that it has been a good one on many levels.  a big chunk of work done on the themes for nomads, ark, philcampbell and my new me.dm refresh which tbh i've been wanting to do for ages.  it was gonna be all whizzbang and clever with lots of things getting pulled in but i've gone for a more subtle build it up approach that is light weight and means i can rapidly prototype ideas - like the nomad one.  that's gonna be a videoblogging style nomad tech video show for different areas of being a social digital nomad that it leads into me making an ebook about it perfectly.

right, i'm heading out for coffee and to blog and be inspired.  i wrote a bunch of titles in my notes application on the ipod last night and i'm chomping at the bit to get in there and start writing some drafts out.  in the meantime, why don't you catch up on my bambuser live stream.  hit the streams button on the left side and have a walk through of the streaming we did for the 100milestories.com project recently and think about how awesome that is going to be amplified for this trip stateside in june.

i have plans people.  watch this space.

quicklink | http://workatjelly.com

so audio will be off for a short while.. .. but i'll be interviewing people throughout the next four hours so the stream will stop and start over that time as i get setup for interviews and such like with some of the clients.