A week ago I presented at 300 Seconds, a new series of lightning talks to encourage more women to speak at events. This post is the blog version of that talk.

I’m quite a busy person.

I’m a developer at Unboxed Consulting, I organize events at Geeks of London and (obviously) I write this blog. What this means though is that I end up attending a ton of events. Hackdays, conferences, PR events, conventions and meetups in all different shapes and sizes. Plus there’s the stuff I’ve got a hand in organizing too, like HACKED and BarcampBerkshire.

At most of those events I am Miss Geeky; my blog is my brand, my identity and my event persona. I’m constantly meeting and interacting with a lot of different people; promoting my blog, pitching my events and talking about my work.

So people are often quite surprised when they hear that I consider myself a massive introvert.

But why?

I realized that most people don’t have a good understanding of what introversion and extraversion is. Typically they think that being an introvert means you’re quiet and shy, while being an extrovert is seen as being social and outgoing. And that’s not exactly right.

For me, introversion and extraversion is all about energy: what recharges you and what drains you? Extroverts find energy in interaction: they recharge by being around people, by interacting with what’s outside themselves. Introverts, on the other hand, will get their energy from reflection: they recharge by looking inwards, by being alone. So this does mean that extroverts will be much more likely to be social and outgoing, and that introverts will be much more likely to be quiet and shy. But that’s not always the case. You can have extroverts that are shy. And you can have introverts that are social and outgoing.

My term for this group of social introverts: social caterpillars.

We’re like social butterflies, jumping from one event to the next, being social and outgoing, only: we have to work a whole lot harder for our moments of butterflyery-ness (that word works so much better when said out loud. And no, Autocorrect, I did not mean “butterfly princess”).

So how do you recognize a social caterpillar in the wild? For now, I’ve come up with 4 characteristics, but this is still a work in progress:

Cocoon

Every caterpillar needs a cocoon. At busy events, we will need a moment to retreat back into ourselves. Depending on the social caterpillar, this can manifest in different ways: a breath of fresh air outside, a long toilet break or even intensely staring at your phone pretending you’ve got something urgent to respond to (while you’re just checking Twitter). It’s all about having a moment completely to yourself, even if you find yourself in the midst of a crowd.

Antenna

We enjoy interaction, but this doesn’t necessarily have to happen face-to-face. Thanks to social networks, social caterpillars can move the energy draining activities to the online world. Plus it allows us to digest the interaction asynchronously, making connections before or after an event. We’ll also often be the ones live tweeting, photographing or blogging about the event, which as an extra benefit allows us to hide and retreat behind our gadgets.

Consume

Caterpillars consume their environment. My interpretation: social caterpillars will analyze their surroundings, using all their senses to their advantage. We’ll research the events we’re going to, figure out beforehand who will be there and what they do and who might be potentially interesting to meet. We’ll observe and listen until we figure out the best way to approach a certain situation.

Fly

We will have our moments of being butterflies. We’ll be social and outgoing, meeting and interacting with new people, talking about the things we love, organizing our own events and doing whatever we feel comfortable doing. And pushing ourselves to do things we might not fully feel comfortable with, like giving a presentation at an event and talking for 300 seconds about how you are an introvert…

So, yeah: I’m an introvert. And I’m a social caterpillar.

If you ever see me at an event and I’m running away in the other direction, don’t take it personally. I just need some space and time to become that butterfly.

I’m curious to hear from you now. Would you consider yourself an introvert or extrovert? Or somewhere in between? And all you social caterpillars out there: tell me your stories! What do you do during the events? Let me know on Twitter using the hashtag #SocialCaterpillars or leave a comment below!

Two weekends ago I attended this year’s Playful at Conway Hall. I’ve been attending the Playful events since they started in 2008 and they’ve always been a lot of fun. It’s a one-day conference all about games, play, interaction, behaviour and everything that comes with looking at the world through fun eyes. Each time they bring a cool group of speakers together to talk about games and play from unique perspectives.

I said “I attended” this year, what I actually mean is volunteered. That meant arriving at the venue at 8:30 and helping out with setting various things up. As usual I also headed registration, trying to make it as quick and easy as possible. I’m not really sure why, but I really love doing registration at events. Here we had about 300 people all arriving within the first hour, but I think we dealt with them all quickly and nobody had to queue for too long.

Because I was volunteering though I didn’t get to see all the talks. I ended up seeing 9 out of the 12, only missing 3 talks, which isn’t too bad a ratio. I should have planned it a bit better though, cause looking back two of those talks seemed to be quite interesting to me (Mark Sorrell’s talk on Computer Games (Not Video Games) and Siobhan Reddy from Media Molecule presentation on Learnings from New Ideas). The other 9 talks were great though too; here are the ones that stood out most to me:

Mint Foundry — Toys With Purpose

The Mint Foundry is Mint Digital’s graduate scheme and this year it had tasked four designers to “Make a toy that has a reason to exist”. They came up with Dough Globe: a sourdough game controller. It’s a hollow ball in which you can “grow” your sourdough and then uses an accelerometer and ethanol level to control a custom built game. The game features Doug, the little guy that lives in your Dough Globe and by playing the games with Doug you can unlock recipes for your sourdough.

Holly Gramazio — Clapping Games

I used to love clapping games as a kid; there were so many different ones that I sort of remember playing. Holly Gramazio from Hide & Seek talked about clapping games, their origin and how we should be playing clapping games more. “They’re Guitar Hero without the technology”. At the end of the presentation she explained the rules of the Danish Clapping game, which I now really want to try out.

Bennett Foddy — Confusion & Frustration in game design

Bennett Foddy is an Oxford University professor and the creator of iOS games QWOP and GIRP. Foddy talked about how games need a certain amount of suffering in them to fully enjoy them. He gave an example of a friend buying an iPhone game and being disappointed in it when he finished it in one go. It’s the suffering in the game that makes failure matter and makes you want to play on and master the game. Games need different dimensions of suffering to be fulfilling: pain, frustration, confusion, humiliation.

I really enjoyed Playful this year and definitely look forward to next year’s one! Did you go to Playful? What was your favourite talk?

Get your tickets now! For one week only from September 21st the BFI IMAX and several other cinemas will be showing Indiana Jones and The Raiders of The Lost Ark, to celebrate the upcoming Blu-ray release of all Indy movies. It’s been completely digitally remastered, so I’m kind of curious to see how it turns out on the big IMAX screen. The BFI IMAX recently got a digital projector installed to be able to show IMAX DMR movies too, but I haven’t seen any films with that myself yet.

Now I can’t get the theme song out of my head! Will you be going to see it at the IMAX? Tickets for the BFI IMAX are now available on their new Odeon ticketing system.

Two weeks ago I got to visit Berlin for a couple of days. I have quite fond memories of Berlin; I previously went in 2007 for a BarCamp and a conference and had a great time then (and met loads of awesome people).

This time around I was there for Campus Party Europe, a large unique tech event. Campus Party started originally in South America and from all accounts I’ve heard the original events are really good. It’s a bit of a mish mash of an event; it’s a weird mix of conference, hackday, LAN party, with thousands of attendees.

This was the first time it was held in Germany and they had managed to get an awesome venue: Berlin Tempelhof, a huge old airport in central Berlin. The event took place in most of the terminal building, which is shaped as a huge crescent spanning 1.2 km. In the middle section most of the hacking/presentations took place, while in the outer arms tons of tents were set up for attendees to camp in (luckily I got to stay in a hotel, camping is really not my thing).

I was there specifically to help out with the Think Big workshop. For 2 days, groups of 18-25 year olds worked on defining and designing their own mobile app ideas. I was there as one of the mentors helping out and explaining stuff to the groups. It was a lot of fun, and the ideas the participants came up with were great.

Because I was helping out with the workshop though, I didn’t get to experience much of everything else that was going on at Campus Party. I didn’t really have time to go to presentations or to work on a hack. It seems like it could be a great event, but I didn’t really get that feeling I most of the time get at great hack days, like Over The Air or Mashed. At those, you always get inspired to start working on something, just by the pure vibe of everything thats going on around you. I didn’t get that with Campus Party. I’m guessing that might have to do with just how large and vast the venue was, but you just didn’t get that feeling of “cool stuff is being created here”.

I did have a great time though, and it was awesome to be back in Berlin again. Keep an eye out for another post one of these days with my photos of sightseeing in Berlin!

I can’t believe the London 2012 Olympics are over (well, the first bit at least: we still have the Paralympics coming up too). I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it all quite this much, but it’s been an amazing two weeks. Up until the week before the opening ceremony my response to the Olympics pretty much was: “ugh, public transport is going to be so screwed, I’m going to be a hermit for 2 weeks”. But then London transformed… the weather became awesome, the atmosphere around London became electrifying and everybody was suddenly so friendly. The Olympics were so much more fun than I ever imagined they could be and I’m truly happy that I got to witness London like this firsthand.

There were quite a couple of highlights for me, so I thought I’d do one post rounding all of those up. What were your Olympic highlights? Let me know below in the comments!

The Opening Ceremony

I think most of us were expecting a very cheesy opening ceremony, but Danny Boyle really delivered here. The Opening Ceremony was awesome to watch, even though I wonder how much it made sense for foreigners. I knew the 007 and the Queen bit was going to happen (and it was as great as I was hoping it would be), but I was surprised (and laughed out loud the moment I saw him) that they brought on Rowan Atkinson. I also loved the concept of the Olympic Flame Cauldron, having each country be represented as a part of the whole. Seeing that all come together was beautiful.

Opening Ceremony by Sum_of_Marc on Flickr

Women’s 4×100 Freestyle Swimming Relay

This was the first event I watched where I was screaming at the TV, rooting for my favourites to win. It was such a close race with Australia winning gold and Netherlands winning silver (but only by overtaking USA and China in the last laps). You can watch it here on the BBC (from chapter 18 on).

Watching SPORT! with friends

It was a lot of fun hanging out with friends (well, it’s always fun to hang out with friends) and to watch sport with them. I had friends over for dinner one of the days and we kept switching between three different sports, not being able to settle on just one. Then I also went with friends to Hyde Park Live and Victoria Live, which were a bit underwhelming the days that we went (although I got to go on a zipline, which was fun and terrifying at the same time). And of course going to see the Gymnastics and Volleyball with friends.

Playing Reserve-The-Ticket-Roulette and Winning

I thought ticket sniping for Barcamps and other geek events had prepared me well, but wow I was wrong. After seeing all those empty seats the first days, I of course was one of the thousands of people that attempted to get tickets. The ticketing website really sucks though; the flow of interactions and the bad copy makes users have the wrong expectations about the state of “their” tickets. It was frustrating as hell attempting to get tickets, but in the end I managed to get some! Gymnastics AND Volleyball!

Jessica Ennis’s 800m, Mo Farah’s 10000m

These were both amazing events to watch. Even though I’m not British, it made me proud of my adopted country. Seeing Ennis give it her all to end up first over the finish line, even though it wasn’t actually needed to win her the gold… it was really amazing. And then to see Mo finish the 10000m. The slow motion capture of that is just brilliant.

Olympic Stadium by interbeat on Flickr

Holland Heineken House at Alexandra Palace

This was a lot of fun, watching the Olympics with a hall full of Dutchies. See my blog post to see more pics of that evening.

Going to the Gymnastics and seeing Zonderland win gold

I still can’t quite believe that I got see a Dutch guy win gold! Zonderland’s routine was so spectacular to watch, and it was awesome just being in the crowd for that. I won’t rehash the entire day here again, I already wrote an entire blog post about my trip to the Gymnastics here.

Watching Volleyball

I still need to process all the photos I took that evening, but I think I got some great action shots. We got to see two Women’s Quarterfinals: USA vs Dominican Republic and Italy vs Korea. The first match was a bit boring; USA won 3-0 from Dominican Republic. The second game the teams were much more evenly matched; it was pretty exciting to watch!

Friendly London

Everywhere I went in London the past two weeks everyone was just super friendly. The awesome volunteers at both Olympic venues I went to were super friendly and helpful. The security at both venues was painless, quick and again super friendly. And almost everywhere you went someone had a smile on their face. I want Friendly London all the time!

Schwarzenegger tweeting about Boris Bikes

Feeling motivated to sport more

After watching all those sports on TV and in real life, I now really feel motivated to go out and sport more. I went running again yesterday for the first time in ages and it felt great. This time though instead of sticking to a schedule and looking at my watch every couple of seconds, I just ran as I wanted: balancing on small walls, jumping over steps, it was just so much more fun. I realized that what I really want to do is maybe some basic parkours; nothing too fancy, but I think it would be fun to learn the basics. Besides that I also want to see if with some friends we can hire a sportshall every (other) week and do a different sport each time. I like volleyball and basketball, but not enough to join a club for only that specific sport. Doing something different each week though? That could work.

So those were my Olympic highlights! What about your’s? What made the Olympics special for you?

I never expected to be this psyched for the Olympics; the past week has just been amazing! I’ve had friends over for dinner to watch sport. I’ve been with friends to Hyde Park to watch sport. I’ve visited the Holland Heineken House… to watch sport. And then two days I actually went to the O2 and Earls Court to watch real life actual sport. And it was awesome.

I managed to get tickets to the Gymnastics last week, after enjoying the men’s team finals on TV. Four finals: men’s parallel bars, men’s horizontal/high bar, women’s beam and women’s floor. Great! What I didn’t realize at the time though was that a Dutch gymnast (Epke Zonderland) had made it through to High Bar finals and that he was likely to win… Oh, and his nickname is the Flying Dutchman (obviously).

So on Tuesday I made my way to the O2 the North Greenwich Arena. I often go to the O2 the North Greenwich Arena, cause our closest Cineworld is there, but I’ve never actually been there before for an event (I have gotten stuck there accidentally during events though, visiting the cinema and getting stuck between Glee fans trying to getting home). I have to say everything was well arranged: the security check, picking up the tickets, getting into the arena, everything was painless.

The seats I got were the cheapest ones they had (at £50 per person), so we weren’t exactly sitting up close, but it was still great to be able to see it all live. Before the actual finals started they had a cool mini performance about gymnastics and how it needed agility, strength, grace and balance. They apparently showed this before each gymnastics event; I found a video if you want to watch the entire thing.

Then the finals started! First up was the men’s parallel bars, which was awesome to watch. None of my photos turned out great though; I was too mesmerized watching it all!

Second was the women’s beam finals, which had a fair bit of drama. So much balance, precision and strength is needed to pull off these routines; it’s a tough sport. A lot of the gymnasts messed up, loosing their balance, falling from the beam and getting points deducted. The gold and silver was pretty obvious, both going to China (Linlin Deng and Lu Sui). The bronze though initially was going to go to Catalina Ponor who had 15.066 points. In 4th place though was Alexandra Raisman from the US with 14.966 points, who contested that score. The judges re-evaluated it and gave her 0.1 extra, putting her on the same score as Ponor! Raisman had a higher difficulty score though (the overall score is an average of the difficulty score plus the execution score) and she ended up with the bronze!

Kseniia Afanaseva (ended up 5th):

Gabrielle Douglas (ended up 7th):

After that it was time for the high bar! I think it’s my favourite apparatus; it’s just so awesome to watch. There were 4 gymnasts before Epke Zonderland and each of them was amazing. But then it was Zonderland’s turn. WOW! His routine was absolutely stunning! If you haven’t seen his routine, check it out here on the BBC page. The crowd was also going completely mental during it; with every jump he made, the crowd cheered, each cheer louder than the previous one. The three jumps at the start are one of the hardest release combinations, a Cassina to Kovacs to Kolman, and Zonderland pulled it off. It was just so awesome to watch.

With such an awesome routine he of course got GOLD! Whohooo! I can now say I saw a fellow countryman get GOLD at the Olympics! He’s the first Dutch male gymnast to win a gold medal in gymnastics ever, and it’s the Netherlands’ first Olympic gymnastics gold medal since the Dutch women’s team win in Amsterdam in 1928.

Last up was the women’s floor finals. Again this was pretty great to watch live; the jumps and flips these girls can make are so impressive. This time Alexandra Raisman got gold (who ended up getting bronze on the beam), Catalina Ponor got silver (who ended up 4th on beam, edged out by Raisman) and Aliya Mustafina got bronze.

So that was my first Olympics event ever! It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I’m so glad I managed to get tickets for it. I had to make a mad dash across London after that though to go to my second Olympic event: Volleyball at Earls Court. More about that tomorrow!

The past week has been so awesome; I hadn’t expected to do that many Olympics related stuff, but my entire week has revolved around it. And it’s been great.

Last Sunday we visited the Holland Heineken House at Alexandra Palace, the official house of the Netherlands and its sporters during the Olympics. There are big screens to watch all the events on (with commentary in Dutch), Dutch fast food to eat, and a huge party with special guests once all the sporting events are over. Also each time an athlete wins a medal they eventually show up at the House and get their own special ceremony! Sadly the evening we went nobody won anything.

It was awesome to be there though. After watching the men’s 100m finals on the big screen, the entire place turned into a huge party. First 3JS performed on stage and after that DJ Sander van Doorn performed. To be honest, I had no idea who they were; I haven’t been following Dutch music since I left.

Here are the photos of that evening:

Upcoming Events:

• July Sandpit – Movement and Spectacle (Sunday 15th July): Come along to Holland Park (in the Orangery, between Kensington High Street and Notting Hill) from 2:00-5:30pm on Sunday 15 July, for a free afternoon of games around the themes of movement and spectacle. I love the Sandpit events, I’m hoping it will be good weather!
• Geeks of London Movie Club (Monday 16th July): We’re organizing the first GoL Movie club meetup! The idea is to meetup at Wagamama’s near the O2 for some dinner first and then to see The Amazing Spiderman at the Cineworld’s Skyscreen.
• London Web – Sidestep and Twist: Interesting looking meetup with James Gardner, author of the book Sidestep and Twist. I met James a few years ago when he spoke about innovation at Lloyds (where he worked at the time) at a GeekDinner I had helped organize.
• The Genius of Hitchcock (August – September): The BFI Southbank are showing all Hitchcock’s movies. Now I’ve only seen Psycho and Rear Window… *waits for people to get outraged*… Calmed down again? Which movies would you suggest I have to see?

Links:

• Summer School for Geeks – 11 New Sci-fi and Fantasy Books: Great list of books coming out this summer. I’ve already finished one of those and two are on my wish list, but I’ll have to check out the other ones.
• Video Games, I’ve Let You Down: Interesting post on explaining games to non-gamers.
• How Movie Theatres Should Be Laid Out: Harsh, but a part of me wishes that this was true.
• Interview with Text From Dog: I love Text From Dog! Some of his texts are brilliantly hilarious, and this interview with him gives us a better understanding of his psyche.

• Reddit Unlocks the Secret of Cryptic Subway Code: A homeless looking man hands a cryptic looking note and a $50 bill to a Reddit user, who then tries to figure out what the hell the code means.
• My #1 Cause of Back Problems: As usual, Cat vs Human is so spot on!
• Cosmo’s 44 Most Ridiculous Sex Tips: Made me laugh.
• Martin’s BarCamp Berkshire Photos: Martin always takes great photos and we asked him if he could take photos of all the crew during the weekend. The photos turned out great!

• Moneyball 2.0: How Missile Tracking Cameras Are Remaking the NBA: Great read on how analytics are changing basketball. Data mining FTW!
• Science Museum’s Codebreaker Challenge: Cute code breaking game to promote the exhibition about Alan Turing at the Science Museum.
• Paper Birds and Wildlife: Pretty birds and other animals made from only paper.
• A Geek Venn Diagram: I wasn’t expecting that:

I love attending Knomo’s sample sale; I always find up ending some awesomely discounted product. Over the years I’ve ended up with quite some stuff: 7 laptop bags, 3 laptop sleeves and 2 iPod covers. To be fair, I have been going to them for the past 3 years and with them being twice year that averages to 2 products per sale… plus I haven’t kept all of those for myself, they make great presents for family and friends.

With that intro it won’t surprise you that I am hereby informing you about the next Knomo sample sale:

Date: Thursday 28th June and Friday 29th June
Time: 11am – 7pm
Address: 83 Great Portland Street, London, W1W 7LS

As with the past sample sales, they should be selling an interesting collection of sample products, ranging from laptop bags to iPad covers. While Knomo is mainly known for their women’s range of products, they also have a pretty good selection for guys (and most of the iPod/iPad products are quite neutral already).

I’ve ended up with some awesome one-of-a-kind pieces, and I’m really curious to see what they’ll have this time around! I could do with a new MacBook Air sleeve…

Last year’s Regent Tweet was a lot of fun, so of course when I got the invite for this year’s one I had to sign up! It’s an interesting event to highlight the different stores and restaurants on Regent Street, with lots of cool goodies and discounts for those who attend.

Regent Tweet takes place on the 23rd of June on Regent Street (of course). I’m not sure if there are still spaces available, but if you’re interested you can register at RegentTweet.com. There are some awesome companies involved this time, and I can’t wait to see how the day will turn out!