DFEY @2morro09

I went with the rest of the DFEY clan (about 10 of us in total) down to London for the "2morrow festival" for young people aged 16-24. Check their website 2morro.org and have a look at their entirely vague explaination of what the event was supposed to be; next, imagine yourself being at an event which was not only just as vague as the description entails but even more boring than you'd think and full to the brim of nothing but people who seem to be over 20 (and in many cases over 30!) who are involved in what seem to be Government-supported initiatives; next, factor in the overwhelming use of Apple branded technology (apart from the LTSP cluster running in the Plings room of course!) and the heavy presence of Channel 4 cameras and invasive surveys and you have the "2morro festival".

The room which was supposed to be showing off cool technologies from Apple, Facebook and the Guardian was infact as excuse for them to crack out about 10 Macbook Airs and a couple of chunkier macs and invite people to get creative making apps with nothing more than the default OS X toolset; that's right - Python, Ruby (with none of the bindings you'd want!), HTML and Javascript! What a fantastic set of tools! Not much got done there, I can tell you that.

I went to what I assumed would be a bit of a debate on education - "YOUR EDUCATION MANIFESTO FOR EDUCATION, Have your say about the education system with ESSA and even get heard by Channel 4". Riiiiight, what actually happened was a bit different; we had a bit of a skit of a scenario in which a student wanted to do something outside the curriculum but the teacher didn't have time; next we talked about the best moments of our education and then we left, an hour after we had started. Would've been fantastic if I had been looking for a drama workshop but not what I expected at all. Would've been nice too if I wan't the only person <19. After that boring hour long session, I found stemount and had lunch with him. Brocolli salad? Come on guys, think who you just invited! Then we decided it was too boring to stay there for much longer and so sodded off to a park just next to Parliament by the river side for a couple of hours.

After being joined by tdobson, we returned and 10 minutes later I caught the train home; and I was glad to be gone. I heard some people won iPod nanos for 2 minutes of talking about an idea they had.... okay.

Was it worth it? Well, I got free train tickets so it was nice to have a little gander around central London yesterday; but if you're thinking of paying to go to it next year, I'd say think twice! Make sure it'll be reasonable next year guys!

Okay, so the trains in the UK aren't so crap...

Yesterday I went to a DFEY meeting in Manchester and only two people turned up, myself and the organiser Tim Dobson.... what a bust; following an afternoon spent in the park chatting with Tim and Ian Forrester I've decided to start my blog up again. I took the train there and back and had rather comfortable journeys, sure the trains were made in Sweden and the track it was running on had probably been put together by convicts being payed the minimum wage but it was a good journey and from my experience superior to many of the trains in Europe! The trains weren't so stupidly long that I had trouble finding my carriage before the train itself departed, I didn't have to worry that the train was about to rip apart after hearing the compression and worrying expansion of the carriage's plastic interior whenever the train accelerated and I most certainly did not run out of battery power on my laptop! In the European rail network there seems to be a trend of spending all the money on the busy routes that businessmen travel on and then leaving the rest of the networrk with 30 year old rollingstock; sure it brings about cheaper train fares but if you're travelling between any two cities in the UK you don't feel like cattle, you feel comfortable and like a passenger. The seats in the Pendelino are surprisingly more comfrotable than those of the German ICEs and although we don't have a restaurant car on many trains, the quality and variety of food on the British rail network still seems to outstrip anything on the ICEs or, God forbid, the Swiss Inter-Regio trains.

My point: be happy with the British railway system; it may not be the fastest or cheapest in the world but it isn't bad!