New venue, new hotel, new socks.

Barcamp happened. There’s a corner of my heart which will always be reserved for #BCBlackpool. This year, we moved venue to the Norbreck Castle Hotel to their large ballroom and adjoined rooms. The ballroom is big, really big – you may think it’s a long way to the shops, but that’s just peanuts to the ballroom. This gave plenty of space to spread out: tables at the top end for casuals, space at the bottom for a large talk space and booths around the side for community stands. All pretty cool. Two other smaller rooms gave us a cosy space for smaller talks and our traditional three track format.

This year I ran an introductory GoFence session under the title “Geek Fit – Hit People With Swords!”. It appears to have been well received. For those visiting this page from that session, the best way to find a local club is to look at the British Fencing Club List. Most fencing clubs cater for beginners, simply drop the club secretary [or whoever the contact person is] a line.

3D printers were abound. Well, there were two of them. We were printed a 3D K9 in glow-in-the-dark plastic by iMartyn. How awesome is that?

FreakyClown ran a couple of talks. The first on digital image forensics left you with a feeling that you never, ever want to post an image from your phone to a social network ever again. And CSI felt a little more real than geeks usually give it credit for. The second one, again defying expectations, left us with the feeling that Die Hard 4.0 was probably closer than the money than we would like to believe.

Evening ents were a talk on “Clive Sinclair Ate My Childhood” [something I can definitely relate to] and a live band. A few … dozen of us disappeared to one of the smaller rooms to play the usual rounds of Werewolf. Note: Wearing a werewolf hat with a “I am not a Werewolf” t-shirt may give people conflicting opinions.

Thanks to Lally and Les for organising awesome, and of course to all the sponsors for making awesome happen.