- Glastonbury, from the ground up -

In the meantime…

If gadgets are your thing – take a look at this post that I wrote for Mobile Industry Review last Wednesday, (in the car, en route to the festival to be precise), outlining just a few of the technological wonders that I was packing in my rucksack…

spoken through SpinVox

So, here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve seen so far:

• Vampire Weekend
• The Tings Tings
• Lupe Fiasco
• Fun Lovin’ Criminals
• Xavier Rudd
• Kings of Leon

In that order..

Vampire weekend were fun. First dance of the day that was. The Ting Tings took AGES to setup and started half hour late so we only stayed a little while as we wanted to get back for Lupe Fiasco (political as hell but good with it). The Fun Lovin’ Criminals were damn cool, as expected and as for Xavier Rudd?
Well let’s just say I was pleasantly surprised…
And I WILL be buying his album when I get back.

Then, at long last, it was time for Kings of Leon…

They. Were. Amazing.

Similarly to Arcade Fire last year, these guys have completely made my festival..
Rock.

We’ve just been to see the awesome Vampire Weekend (although for some reason I refer to them as The Wombats in the second video below), and They were actually very good!

Then onto dancing at ‘Guilty Pleasures’ – 70s tunes – and later?

Fratellis, Editors and THE KINGS OF LEON!

Yay for Vampire Weekend!

I love Glastonbury

A daily ritutal.
Next, this photo of Glastonbury really doesn’t communicate the overwhelming sprawl of the place.

Cloudy weather, which made a change. Most of the time it was either rain or shine.
Rarely anywhere in-between.
This next one is of me and my bamboo.

And then finally… This very random front-end of a plane.

Which made up a long bar… With 50′s music and dancing.. Lots of fun!
And it’s only Thursday!

spoken through SpinVox

Time for breakfast methinks – then we’re off to explore!

In the meantime, check out these pics

- A fair few tents! -

- Prepare for rain… –

- Soaking up the rays –

Arrived at 11pm. Found our friends at midnight. Tents up by quarter to one..
And now..?

We can relax and start to take it in. Funnily enough though… Right now?
It’s bed time

Night, night Glastonbury – see you in the morning

According to my map, this is going to be a fair old trek…

Bugger.

As you know from my last post, the multitude of tools available to the modern day, festival going Mobile Geek really is quite something… So here, for your pleasure, is a quick rundown of what I am taking with me, starting with the hardware…

Handsets:

I’ve packed my N95, my N95 8GB and my E61i. The E61i is perfect as an emergency, backup handset as the battery on that baby is HUGE and it lasts FOREVER (well, about 5 days). So if it all goes pear-shaped I can resort to using that. The N95s I’m going to tag-team throughout the day/festival. One to carry with me and one to charge. Speaking of chargers…

Power:

When it comes to keeping the batteries fully topped up, I?ve covered all bases with this one. I’ve got a Nokia DC-8 battery charger, bought this today, £25. Steep, but I?m a sucker for the branded stuff (and it’s worked OK so far).

I’ve also got a Free Loader Solar Charger (see below). This thing gets kudos just for the fact that out of all of the chargers, this was the only one that came with one for the Nintendo DS. Which has made my friends very happy indeed; Mario Kart for them while I type this passing Stone Henge, (fact).

Finally, I have this ‘GoHello’ wind-up charger and, as Ben Smith so rightly said in a recent Mobile Industry Review podcast – “…they ain’t called wind-ups for nothing”.

Seriously, I’ve got nothing out of this thing yet. Nothing. Boo.

On top of all that lot, I’ve got four (count ‘em), N95 batteries. All fully charged before departure so let’s see how long they last shall we?!

Software:

Well stuff like Qik, Google Maps, VOX, SpinVox, Moblog etc… I kinda covered this last time round. I want to talk about the new stuff. Since writing that original piece I?’ve acquired two pieces of software; both of which have – so far – impressed me much.
First up is ViewRanger. I downloaded this earlier in the week and my thought was: What a load of rubbish!
However…
THEN I downloaded the Glastonbury specific maps – aka Worthy Farm etc, and WOW! Impressed!
Check out this screenshot:

You can see that they’ve pre-loaded the app with the relative points of interest. Which is so awesome; things like cash machines, toilets, stages etc… And on top of that if I hit ‘Lock to GPS’ it’ll tell me where I am.
Rock on. I cannot wait to use this properly

The other piece of software is from Orange. It’s called GlastoNav and at first I really couldn’t get this to work..

Eek!

A few days after this, once they had ironed out the gremlins and suchlike, this little app has turned out to be very handy indeed. Not only can I look at the (much richer interpretation) of the map, but also I can plan my schedule for the event… and THEN I can share that schedule with my fellow festival-goers!

So far (again), this has really impressed me

For actual mobile stuff, that’s all.

But, I have also been given some other cool pieces of gadgetry to use/play with. One of which is the Flip video camera. This is something that I think Ewan has spoken about a fair amount – my only problem with it however is that once my hour of recording is up, I can’t upload it until I get to a USB connection.
Bah! We’ll see how I get on with that one…

The other piece of REALLY COOL stuff I’ve been given is this Loc8tor device which, hand on heart, is the best thing yet (in theory anyway).

I attach the small part to something I might lose – i.e. my friends – and then, if I lose them, I switch the big part on and it beeps to tell me how close I am etc…
I had a play before I left the house and it rocked my socks.

So… again, we’ll see how we get on.

That’s it from me, I’m nearly at Glastonbury and my laptop is about to die. Thanks to Ben Smith for editing this for me and putting the media in etc…

You can keep up with my exploits at http://www.glastonblog.co.uk

See you soon!

J.