You Don't Live Like I Do

OggCamp is a long-standing Manchester-based geek "unconference". This basically means that you don't know who's going to talk about what until the start of the day, which is why I've never bothered going before. However, given my dead ends trying to get geek spaces to be serious about Covid safety at FOSDEM and EMF, I wondered if it would be worth a go trying to get OggCamp on board with basic ventilation. I have sent them the following email:

I'm interested in attending OggCamp and also volunteering to help. I'd like to help make OggCamp a safer place with the ongoing pandemic. Geeks are knowledge workers and the impact of Long Covid on memory and "brain fog" are truly horrifying.

I am pleased that the website mentions the pandemic at https://www.oggcamp.org/code-of-conduct/#health--safety but the advice there seems a little out of date - particularly around "rules and guidelines" which haven't been imposed since the UK government decided to "let it rip" through the population.

I'd like to volunteer to help with the listed Covid mitigations - handing out FFP2 masks and lateral flow tests. I'd also like to try and work with the venue in the run-up around the ventilation point. Ideally I'd like to see if Pendulum can achieve 5 or 6 "air changes per hour" (ACPH) in each room through their existing ventilation system, which is the standard recommended by WHO and CDC. If not, I'd like to look at air filtration mechanisms such as Corsi-Rosenthal boxes which could make up the difference. I'm happy to work with other volunteers on this, and to try and bring in other volunteers from organisations like Breathe Easy to help with this and other aspects of OggCamp.

Can I suggest that OggCamp considers offering refunds to people who can't attend due to Covid or other contagious illness? I expect most people wouldn't claim the refund, but it might make the difference to a contagious person staying home.

It might not get anywhere but it's worth continuing trying to chip away at pandemic safety in geek spaces. One victory would be a huge difference from the indifference or hostility I've encountered so far.

As per my previous post, the audit went OK and we re-scoped down to two days onsite. There may be a few followup questions on Monday but we're basically done with it. I managed to make it to the office for 8:45 ahead of a 9am start!

The main complication was Storm Goretti, which hit the West Midlands and South-West on Thursday and Friday. I walked back from the office in a torrential downpour after work on Thursday, having been loaned a golf umbrella. The rain racing down the hilly streets and pavements soaked my feet, but it was still preferable to getting a taxi in the stationary central Bristol traffic.

I did think about trying to meet up with any of my Bristol friends but I was exhausted even after a shorter day at work, not least due to the early start. It was also distinctly not sitting outside weather. I crashed out for a couple of hours and decided to eat at the hotel rather than venture further afield. I did manage a brief mooch until my digestive system wanted to have a go at me for the disruption.

We finished early on Friday as well, and my boss and I shared a taxi to Bristol Temple Meads. All the direct services to Manchester were cancelled (as were many others across the country) but I managed to get home via changes in Birmingham and Stafford. I got a seat on each leg of the journey, and at least the stops meant I got brief breaks from masking. The one disruption that significantly impacted me was a vehicle driving into a bridge in Levenshulme, which stopped all trains between Stockport and Manchester Piccadilly - so I jumped out at Stockport and got a taxi home from there. I was very glad to be home, and earlier than planned!

We've so far had one problem identified by the audit - we should have done a risk assessment on our Bristol office, because laptops are stored there overnight. I'd been told that it was only used for meeting space and nothing was stored there, so it's a fair cop. I'll get that sorted tomorrow.

I'm feeling pretty good about the audit - our ISMS is lacking in a lot of ways, not least some overdue document reviews, and I'm glad we didn't get wrapped over the knuckles about that. My boss is happy with me, which is always nice.

I'm in Bristol for work for a couple of days. The work is annoying - it's a poorly-scoped ISO27001 audit, pencilled in for five days but I reckon we can do it in two, so I'm hoping I don't have to go back next week.

I spent the train down being That Wanker with my laptop out, updating another couple of documents ahead of the audit. Turns out with no Internet or other distractions I can actually get a few hours of useful work done... I cut about half of our Disaster Recovery Plan out, reducing verbiage to make it more streamlined and effective.

I was clever enough to get an earlier train into Manchester for my connection; the train I was recommended only gave me ten minutes to change at Piccadilly, and ended up running at least 7 minutes late. I managed to end up with a table seat, which was nice, but several hours wearing a mask is always going to suck. The CO2 meter was giving levels up to 2000ppm, so it was definitely worth doing (for reference: 400ppm is "fresh air"; 800ppm is where the CO2 helps the virus to breed. I try to stay under 800ppm without a mask).

Got into Temple Meads, bought a milkshake for a homeless guy, and hopped in a black cab to my hotel. It's a Premier Inn, rather perfunctory, but it'll do the job. I had dinner and went for a walk, which reminded me how hilly Bristol is!

I also enjoyed hearing some proper Bristol accents, and had to stop myself mimicking them. I'm close enough to where I grew up that my accent's veering to the rural anyway!

I just got back from The Moonwalkers. I didn't know quite what to expect but had a great time. "The Lightbox" is a large dark space which allows a film to be projected onto all 4 walls and the floor. The film was about 45 minutes long, narrated by Tom Hanks.

Factually, I didn't learn that much from it, but again that wasn't the point. It was nice that every Apollo mission that reached the moon was mentioned. Usually people concentrate on 11 (the first landing), 13 (which didn't make it) and maybe 17 (the last one). But this film showed that every mission advanced our knowledge and understanding of the moon with experiments and new equipment, including the Lunar Roving Vehicle used by 15-17 which extended the range at which astronauts could operate away from the lander. cosmolinguist told me afterwards that the Sea of Tranquility was picked for 11 because it was the most boring place they could find to land, and even that was strewn with boulders which Armstrong had to avoid while landing manually.

The sensory experience was interesting - the images were bigger than IMAX but not too bright, and the pitch black of the room meant there was good contrast between the inky black of space and the grey lunar regolith. Annoyingly, where we were sat (in the "reserved seats" for disabled people), we had a projector shining straight into our eyes, and also had to crane our necks to see some of the video on the wall alongside us. We were among the last to enter and didn't get a lot of time to orient ourselves and find seats; the large bank of seating in one corner was a clue to the "correct" place to sit but it was full by the time we got there, largely of wet coats. Still, that was a minor inconvenience. The sound levels were enough to be impressive but not overwhelming. I didn't notice them doing anything particularly clever with the "surround sound" but again maybe we were sat in the wrong place for that.

The overall impression was one of spectacle. The obvious sensory overload was projecting onto four walls (and the floor!) at once. Everywhere you looked there was something to see, usually in the form of collage. Kennedy's speech at Rice University, for example, is shown on the "main" wall while the sides show various footage of the crowd watching the speech. Experiments on the moon are shown through footage, while all the experimental apparatus for each Apollo mission is displayed on the sides. One of the great shots in the film is Armstrong taking the first step on the Moon, shown as a collage of the recorded TV broadcasts from around the world, with captions in different languages stating that the viewers were watching footage direct from the Moon. Obviously you can't take it all in at once, and that's kind of the point - this is a big overwhelming thing.

This is entirely fitting. The Apollo missions were a huge spectacle, and still represent one of the pinnacles of mankind's engineering capabilities. And the narrative recognises this - Hanks talks about how he watched the Apollo missions to the moon as a kid, and couldn't understand why some of his family got bored after a few hours. It features on-mission recordings from the Apollo astronauts, and interviews the astronauts from the upcoming Artemis mission which will see humans reach lunar orbit again this year, for the first time since 1972. During some of amazing wide shots, and soaring music, I felt tears in my eyes. It was a joy to experience.

For 45 minutes I forgot about the world's problems and revisited one of our greatest achievements. Totally worth it.