All in all, I think today's coworking crawl was a big success. After the last post, which I wrote in Jibbering Records in Moseley (nice coffee), we took the number 50 bus up into Digbeth and set up camp in Rooty Frooty (£1 pastries and lightening fast internet) at the Custard Factory. Despite the initial confusion about which electric sockets worked and which didn't, it was actually a pretty good place to work, with plenty of space and comfortable seating. We all settled down to some decent work at Rooty's, and stayed there for the rest of the day. Despite allegations of "coslacking" in the comments on my previous post, work did in fact take place; I managed to get a decent chunk of coding done.

Five of us took part over the day; Simon Hammond and Pete Ashton had already met up by the time I arrived in the morning, and stuck around all day. Mike Voong joined us for an hour or so at Jibbering Records, then we later met up with Stef Lewandowski, who was already at Rooty's when we arrived.

There's already talk of more events such as today, and some discussions took place about more semi-permanent homes for future coworking sessions. Keep tracking the #brumcoworking tag on Twitter and keep your eye on the Birmingham coworking wiki for future occasions. All welcome!

Following the idea being mooted at the recent Birmingham bloggers meet-ups, today is the first decent attempt at coworking in Birmingham. I haven't blogged about the bloggers meet-ups myself, mainly since everyone else seems to have done a pretty good job themselves. I've only been to two out of the four meets so far, but they've been a nice informal gatherings of bloggers, social media people, journalists, techies and artists.

The basic idea of co-working is that people who often work alone from their laptops, from home or an office, get out, go somewhere else together and work in proximity to each other. Instigated with Simon Hammond, today we're having a co-working crawl of various cafes and other places offering free wireless internet around the city. We began over a hearty breakfast at the Kitchen Garden Cafe in King's Heath, and are currently enjoying tea, coffee, chilled Afro music and free wifi at Jibbering Records in Moseley (who incidentially have computers running Ubuntu). Rooty Frooty at the Custard Factory is next...

If you want to track us, or come and join in, then follow the #brumcoworking tag on Twitter and take a look at the Birmingham coworking wiki. I'll also be streaming the occasional live video on my newly created Bambuser channel.

For those people involved in working with free software, the FSF has launched a new jobs directory. The announcement is here and the site itself is here.

At first, I wasn't sure if it was going to be particularly North American focused, but it seems that there are jobs from around the world present already, plus some which are more "location independent".

So today I'm working not from my office in Birmingham, but from the University of York, where my girlfriend, Marla, is doing a Master's degree. Here I am sitting in the library, and I fire up my laptop. Immediately, I see Kubuntu's network manager icon whirring away, and within just a few seconds, I have two bars of wi-fi signal, connecting me to the Eduroam network, a service which currently allows me to log on to wireless networks at universities all across Europe and Australia, using my home university's credentials. Well, until today, that was the theory, but I'd had so much trouble just connecting to the wireless network at my home institution that I never expected it to be this easy. I wasn't even looking to get online today (in fact, I was looking forward to the lack of distraction), but here we are, and I thought it worth a mention.

This is IT done right.

I'm a couple of days late with this post, but voting has now closed for Brummie of the Year 2007, and the winner is John Tighe, of the Spotted Dog in Digbeth! Congratulations John!

For those not familiar with John, his pub was served with a noise abatement order after over 20 years of being a lively and popular venue in Digbeth, prompted by complaints from residents of newly constructed city-living apartments. The campaign to keep Digbeth vibrant is ongoing. Keep up the good work folks!

Just beaten into second place, was serial blogger and key figure in Birmingham's creative scene, Pete Ashton. Well done mate! Somehow though, I don't think he'll mind coming second to John...

Full details of the poll is on the organiser's website: Birmingham, It's Not Shit.

Stephen Fry - recently self-outed techie - has posted a rather excellent bit of text on world-wide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee this weekend. Erm, I think this used to be called his "Guardian column" or something like that ;-) But anyway, whether you read it in the Guardian or on his blog, it's well worth reading if you're not familiar with this rather inspirational pioneer.

I did find it rather funny though that Fry points out that the omnipresent acronym for World Wide Web, WWW, is significantly (3 times) more syllables than its expansion. Perhaps this is one of the first acronyms designed purely for ease of use on computers (especially since it's the same key three times), rather than to save time in speech...

Like many, I've recently become quite a frequent player of Facebook's scrabble game, Scrabulous. However, I have discovered something rather odd with its dictionary. Specifically, it told me that:

English IS a valid word.
Welsh IS a valid word.
Scottish IS NOT a valid word.

Hmm.... okay. Perhaps it's to do with the fact that English and Welsh are also languages. Let's try some more.

French IS a valid word.
Belgian IS NOT a valid word.
German IS a valid word.
Italian IS NOT a valid word.

Okay, not the language thing.

What about words, which apart from being nationalities, are also part of a noun, like "French letter", "Welsh cake"? So what about "Spanish omelette", "Swiss cheese", "Danish bacon", "Irish stew"? I've no idea how many of these are actually in the dictionary (whichever dictionary).

Here's what Scrabulous says:

Spanish IS NOT a valid word.
Swiss IS a valid word.
Danish IS a valid word.
Irish IS NOT a valid word.

Here are some more:

Greek IS a valid word.
Egyptian IS a valid word.
Indian IS NOT a valid word.
Mexican IS NOT a valid word.
Australian IS NOT a valid word.
Afghan IS a valid word.
British IS NOT a valid word.

Hang on... "Afghan Hounds" but no "British Bulldog"?

I don't have a full copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to hand, but can anyone shed any light on this?