Our GeekDinner last Wednesday already showed us how fun the nice people over at Carsonified are, and now they’re holding a great contest, where you can win a Golden Ticket. The winner of this Golden Ticket will receive the following goodies:

1. A free ticket to ALL Carsonified 2009 events. This includes Future of Web Design, Future of Web Apps, Future of Mobile, Fuel and all Carson Workshops.

2. Pick one Carsonified event and we’ll fly you there and put you up in an amazing hotel, for FREE*

3. An all-access backstage pass at all 2009 Carsonified events

4. An invite to the VIP speaker dinner at one Carsonified event of your choice

Cool, right? All you have to do to win this great prize is write a blog post (what I’m doing right now) and drum up 25 comments on that blog post. And that’s where you, dear readers, all come in. Will you help me with reaching the 25 comments?

To make it a tad more interesting than just a list of “boring” comments, check out the schedule for The Future of Web Apps. Tell me, which session looks the most interesting to you and why?

So this was my 6th BarCamp. It doesn’t feel like that. It doesn’t feel like that at all. I still feel like such a newbie at these events, mainly cause I have no idea what to talk about. I’ve held a session at almost every single one of them (except for Berlin, because the schedule was completely full), but never something that seemed useful/professional/barcamp-worthy. I know that I know stuff, but I have no idea if people would be interested in anything I know.

Putting all that aside for a moment though, the third BarCamp Brighton was fantastic. Great venue, great sessions and a lot of interesting people. Like last time, it was held at the Student’s Union of the University of Sussex. It’s a lovely location for this type of event, with a nice selection of different types of rooms and enough space to hang around and chill in.

Saturday

I woke up at 6am that Saturday morning. Cristiano, Dan and I were able to get a ride to Brighton from Emma, but that meant being at her place at 7:30ish, which meant leaving our house at 6:50. Ugh, way too early. We ended up arriving later than we initially expected at 10:15. After a long introduction round, where every single person had to introduce themselves with three tags (my tags were facial expressions, machine learning and werewolf), people started filling up the board with their sessions.

HDR Photos

The first session I went to was Cristiano’s talk about HDR photos. I already knew what they were (High Dynamic Range photos), but not how to make them. The idea of HDR is that you take multiple photos of the same thing, but with different exposures, and then combine them into one image. Some cameras can do the first part of this (taking multiple photos with different exposures) automatically, called exposure autobracketing, but you can also do it by hand, if you place the camera somewhere stable. A handy Mac app that can do the second part is Photomatix Pro. It takes multiple images as input, merges the photos into one and then offers tone mapping to select the right colours, shadows and highlights. 

Ask The BBC Anything

I then went to the Ask The BBC Anything session with Ian Forrester, Rain Ashford and Ant Miller. I didn’t take any notes, so I don’t remember all the details, but some interesting points were raised about how the BBC has to deal with copyright. There was one anecdote about an orchestra concert, which was held at a BBC venue, played by BBC employees, music was in the public domain, but somehow because of the conductor, the BBC still didn’t own the rights to it. 

Rubik’s Cube Solving

One skill I’ve always wanted to have is to be able to solve a Rubik’s Cube. After this workshop with Seb Lee-Delisle, I’m one step closer to that goal. We didn’t have time to complete the tutorial, but I understand more about it then before. The most important thing to realize here is that the six middle points on every side (so square #5 of the 9), all remain on the same location the entire time. I won’t try to explain it further, cause my babbling won’t make it any clearer (there are loads of tutorials available online if you’re interested). 

Powerpoint Karaoke

Who doesn’t know what powerpoint karaoke is? The idea is simple: a victim gets to present a set of powerpoint slides which he has never seen before. The result can be very funny (or if you’re not lucky, very boring). There were hilarious presentations about cannibalism, bacon and genetically engineered trees.

Uncanny AI

This presentation from David Hayward was one of the sessions I enjoyed the most, mainly because part of it was a different perspective to theory I’m reading up on for my own research. The uncanny valley is a hypothesis about the response from humans to robot or CGI characters (anything that’s supposed to look and act human). The theory goes that right before they look and act completely believable, there’s a huge dip of repulsion: they just seem creepy and weird (like The Polar Express and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within). 

Impro 101

I’m not one for quick retorts; my mind just goes completely blank in those moments where I would love to be witty and sharp. I think though that maybe with enough practice I could teach myself how to do that. This session from James Aylett helped already a bit. He took us through a series of games/exercises, aimed to loosen up people and make them less self-conscious, while slowly building up the reflexes of thinking quick on your feet. 

Content, Content and Pop Culture

In this session Relly Annett-Baker presented what happens when companies give free reign to their fans and actually pay attention to what they (the fans) are producing. She gave examples of the Ace Attorney games for the Nintendo DS and the popular Japanese manga Prince of Tennis, which both have a vast assortment of merchandise. The presentation also touched such topics as slash fiction (guy-on-guy fan fiction, Angel and Spike swoon…) and hentai (tentacle sex!).

Werewolf

What would a BarCamp be without Werewolf? 

Game 1

In this game Emma, some newbie and I were the Werewolves. The game started with about 20 players, and us Werewolves went for a kill the non-newbies and non-experts strategy (so those who had played more than once, but not a lot). When there were around 10 people left, I (as a Werewolf) declared myself as the Seer. There wasn’t that much resistance, until one point where I should have accused a newbie of being a Werewolf. Instead I told everyone he was a Villager, which destroyed my brilliant plan. The only option was killing myself that night, after trying to explain to Emma during the night round with a series of weird hand gestures which next steps she should take. She didn’t follow my advice, but the Werewolves still won anyway. 

Game 2

Of course, after the game I previously played, I fully expected no one to believe me. And, of course, I had to pull the Seer card that game. To make things worse, no one died the first night and people straightaway wanted to lynch me. I had no choice but to declare as the Seer myself immediately. To make things even more annoying, some newbie declared himself as the Seer (while he was in fact the Healer!!). The Villagers believed me though and we lynched the newbie. Two rounds later I discovered a Werewolf, but he managed to turn the game around on me. Almost everyone believed him and the Villagers lynched me. The one person that believed me though succeeded in convincing everyone to lynch the Werewolf the next round and he discovered who the other Werewolf was. The Villagers won!  

Game 3

This game was great, but very uneventful. Natalie Downe, Phil Hawksworth and I were the Werewolves and the entire game nobody suspected us. Cristiano was the Seer and apparently had checked me during the same night that we Werewolves killed him. The Villagers kept suspecting and lynching each other; all we had to do was not act too suspicious. We won with no Werewolf casualties! 

There was one more game after that, where I was finally just a Villager. I got quickly killed during the night though, because Cristiano was one of the Werewolves and didn’t want to risk me figuring him out. By then it was already 4.30 am, so it was time to attempt to sleep anyway.

Sunday

After 5 hours of sleep, I woke up half an hour before my own session started. Eek! 

What is the Definition of Geekiness?

I thought I’d do a discussion session following my blog post from last week about how to define geekiness. It went as okay as a session in the early Sunday morning can go. Most people are barely awake (including me) and still flaking out a bit. I did get some people to talk though about the differences between geeks, fans and academics, but most tended to agree with me. Then again most BarCampers do see themselves as geeks, while I think the most contrasting viewpoints come from those that don’t think they’re geeks.

Illustrator for Non-Designers

I’m reasonably proficient in Photoshop, but never took the time to learn a bit about Illustrator. Adam Mills did a quick introduction into the basics of Illustrator, explaining stuff like how the pen tool worked and how the workflow and setup differs from Photoshop. It was really a useful session; I’m thinking I should redesign my blog logo based on what I learnt here. 

Histograms

Cristiano had a second talk explaining photo histograms to newbies and the cool things you can do with them. Most people that showed up though already knew what histograms were (if you don’t, check out his presentation on SlideShare). There were some cool things though, like a image of the New York skyline, of which the histogram was shaped like the New York skyline (some people have too much time on their hands). Next to that, Cristiano created a useful bookmarklet that will generate a histogram for any image within the browser.

Pen and Paper Japanese Puzzles

I love pen and paper puzzles, but I tend to get obsessed with them: once I start one, I have to finish it. This presentation showed 17 newish Japanese puzzles. Most of them I knew already, having played a lot of Brain Buster Puzzle Pak on the Nintendo DS and some puzzle set on the iPhone. There were some new ones in between them though, like Futokoshi and Engima.

Ideas in Typography Related to Experience Design

I met Rebecca Cottrell two weeks ago at the London Girl Geek Dinner anniversary, and she wasn’t looking forward to having to give a BarCamp presentation. Suffice to say, she was surprised when it turned out her session was so popular, we had to move to a larger room. It was an interesting presentation about typography and design, and kicked off some interesting discussions (like typography on mobile). Check out Rebecca’s blog post, it’s worth the read (she’s got her slides on SlideShare and has added her presentation notes).

Geek Yoga

I’m not the healthiest person; I’m not overweight or anything like that, but sitting behind my computer all day, just doesn’t feel too good for my body. But I always thought that yoga would be a bit flaky or spacey, and not something I’d ever do. After this session though I’m completely turned! The instructor Jenny taught us some very basic positions and exercises, focusing on how to breath, move and relax at the same time. I’m definitely going to keep up doing these small things I’ve learnt and (once I’ve got a real job) eventually find a yoga place somewhere here.

Buildering 101

The day ended with an interesting talk from Tantek on buildering. Buildering is the sport of climbing buildings, inside and outside. After a quick presentation (Rule #1: Don’t Die), he proceeded to show some places within the BarCamp venue that were suitable for buildering. That included interrupting another talk, because the walls in that room had gaps in them which worked perfectly as hand and feet grips. I would have loved to try it out myself, but didn’t want to ruin my pretty shoes and dress.

All in all, I had a fantastic two days! I’m looking forward to BarCampLondon5 at Ebay in 3 weeks time. And this time I’m going to present something real!

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a couple of days now, but I’ve been working on a presentation that was planned for this afternoon, which got cancelled last minute. And that’s ‘last minute’ as in I arrived at the uni, ready to present, only to discover I had travelled down for nothing. Grumble, grumble.

Anywho, last week I got invited to a special guided tour of the ITV London News studio. Now I don’t actually watch the news; I don’t hassle with “normal” TV anymore and most news I find out via the web anyway. I almost declined the invitation for that reason. But the chance to go behind the scenes at a news station? Doesn’t come very often I’d think (not for me at least).

So last Friday (after a good Social Media Cafe) I made my way down to the ITV studios on Gray’s Inn Road. Of course, I managed to be 10 minutes late, but it didn’t matter that much; the first half an hour was for drinks and introductions. (Sidenote: I didn’t take any notes at all, I’m doing most of this based on what I remember. Sorry, if I get any names/titles/facts/etc wrong). I met up in the lobby with Jack, one of the writers on the ITV Local London Blog, and also the person who had invited me. After going upstairs, I met the four other bloggers also there for the tour: Ben Locker, Ludovic from Richmond Transits, The Brinkster and Rob from About Mayfair. We got introduced to a bunch of people from ITV Local London branch (Juliette, Casey, Colin and two others who’s names I’ve forgotten, sorry!) and then started with the tour.

We first had a quick look around of the ITV Local offices, where most of the (web) content was taken care of. After that we hopped over to the building next door, the ITN headquarters, where both the ITV national news and the local news is recorded. We first got to see the newsroom, where all the news is collected and edited into editorials. The desks are arranged here as circles within circles, all centering around one active point (called the hub or the pit). Half of the room was for the national news, while the other half was for the local news. I have to mention the monitor set-up here (cuz me wantz!): most desks had 3-4 monitors, some with an extra 3 smaller monitors stacked vertically above each other, all displaying a different news channel. Yes, this was the place where news was made. 

The editor of the London Tonight News, Stuart Thomas, then took some time to explain what he was doing. With the help of some special news software (it was called something like NewsEdit), he was working on one of the editorials for the program that night about surfing dogs. The funny subject matter aside, it looked very similar to Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere, where you can select the parts of film you want and add a separate audio track to it. Besides that, he could see (and edit) the schedule of the program that night, including which news items weren’t finished yet and which were live on location.

We then got a quick look at the London Tonight studio. It look exactly like on TV: comfy couch, grey interior and a big LCD screen with a view of London. The national news studio, on the other hand, is completely green screen. Okay, the desks, chairs and people are real… but everything else? Green screen. The first thing I noticed when entering that studio were the dozens and dozens of target-like plates hanging from the ceiling (I wish I was allowed to take a picture of that). The idea is that every camera uses these targets (by pointing a laser, I presume) to determine it’s location and thereby determining how the virtual news room should be correctly mapped onto the image it’s recording. Pretty nifty, right?

The highlight of my visit though had to be sitting in the gallery, seeing the news being “put together” live. We arrived there before the actual broadcast to see the presenters (Alastair Stewart and Salma Siraj) record some smaller voiceover bits which would be used later on. I’m not sure if they were putting on a show for us bloggers, or if it was because of the last-day-of-the-week syndrome that is Friday, or if they’re always like that, but both Alastair and Salma were cracking jokes and giggling while they were off-air. The moment they started to record though: pure professionals. Brilliance!

Then we got to the actual broadcast. During this, there were 5 people at the control panel: the director, who operates the video switcher and selects/controls/mixes all the elements of the show; the audio technician, who is in charge of the audio (duh), microphones and music; a production assistant, who takes care of the autocue; the editor, who makes sure all there are no problems with the editorials, and a fifth person (not sure anymore what they called her, for now I’ll refer to her as the timer, for lack of a better word) who makes sure the timing within the overall half slot is perfect. This last task is what makes a broadcasting so hectic: they’re given a half an hour time slot and it has to be exactly half an hour. Not a minute longer, not a minute shorter. Exactly half an hour. Throughout the broadcast an estimate of the end time is given with “plus” and “minus” indicating “over” and “under” time. 

You’d think the presenters “only” have to read off the autocue, but they’re doing so much more. During the broadcasting, the director and the timer are both giving directions through their earpiece. I don’t know about you, but could you read out something aloud, while you’re listening to something else? I couldn’t. Then when they’re a minute over, they have to speed up another segment, without it being too obvious to the viewer. And it’s even more difficult, when they’re a minute under; they have to start ad libbing bits. Another cool bit was the live report, where you saw the reporter getting ready on location. What made it even better for me, was that “on-location” was my local bus garage; I was just there that morning! From all the places a live report could have been, it was a place I knew (okay, okay, there was a strike and that’s a pretty big bus garage, but still).  

After our stint in the gallery, some time was reserved to blog about the tour, which would be followed by drinks at the pub. It was a friend’s birthday party though, so I had to leave earlier than all the others. All in all, it was a great day. This experience really has given me much more appreciation of everybody involved in putting the news on our telly. Thanks, ITV Local for inviting me!

You’d think I’d have more interesting pics to show, huh? I’m still messing around with Cristiano’s DSLR and I didn’t realize (well, I did realize there was something not right, but couldn’t figure out what) that the ISO was way too high. So almost all my photos were grainy and yucky. Must. Read. Manual.

Sorry, it’s been a bit quiet here lately! I went on a 5-day trip down to Dorset with a couple of friends, but as we were all geeks (we even called our trip Geeks in The Country), I took my laptop with me and thought I’d have time to blog a bit. Instead I’ve spent a great couple of days sightseeing, enjoying the countryside and eating wonderful loads of food. And I was completely tech free: no blogging, no emails, no Twitter. It felt like a real holiday; I haven’t been on holiday now for 2 years and it was great just to get away from all the busyness. 

I’ll be uploading more photos later this week and write a blog post or two about the wonderful things I’ve seen. For now: what do you think of my new wellies?

The last couple of days my mother and sister were here to visit me and see London, so I’ve been off doing touristy stuff. Yesterday we went to the Tutankhamun exhibition at the O2 and it’s definitely worth seeing.

Some backstory first though (cause I love talking about myself). I’ve got a bit of a history with Egyptian history. I grew up reading and loving everything about ancient history: Romans, Ancient Greeks, Mayans, Incans, Egyptians, Vikings. To be honest, I didn’t like the history part about it. History is focused on the politics and people, while what I was interested in was all the cultural aspects surrounding those different times. Like the art styles, belief systems, clothes, and other stuff like that (I still love reading myths about the various types of gods; there’s a reason all my hardware is named after a god/goddess). The main reason I wanted to go to the Dutch gymnasium (high school type, if you want to know more about the Dutch education system, there’s a good Wikipedia article) is that you then get Latin and Ancient Greek, plus a great 10 day trip to Rome.

Anyhow, my main love was Egypt. During my second year I studied hieroglyphics as an extra self-defined and prepared course (my school thought some “smart” kids needed more mental stimulation besides the normal easy courses and gave us free reign to whatever extra course we wanted to learn), which, although way more difficult than I at the time had expected, fueled my enthusiasm for all things Egypt even more.

Then for my 16th birthday I finally got to actually go to Egypt for 10 days. I visited Cairo, then took a plane to Aswan and spent a couple of days on a cruise boat to Luxor (only to discover I get very very sea river sick). I got to see a lot of museums, a lot of temple and graves, and of course the Pyramids of Gizeh. I even was contemplating studying Egyptology or Archaeology, but it was my dislike for the politics and actual history that stopped me from choosing that path. That, plus I was practical enough to realise my math and logic skills would be way better suited to computer science (which would also offer much better job opportunities). 

So the Tutankhamun exhibition yesterday was a real treat for me; it kind of re-ignited my passion for the ancient times. You should realise though that Tutankhamun’s death mask and any of the coffins aren’t part of the exhibition. I knew about the death mask (it’s not allowed to leave Egypt anymore), but had expected at least one of the coffins. The other artifacts make up for that though, most of them are gorgeous; my favourite being a golden diadem that was found on the head of King Tut’s mummified body. The quality of some of the pieces is amazing; inlaid stones, intricate details, perfect condition, these objects were buried for more than 2000 years!

The exhibition showcases the life of Tutankhamun and that of his family, explaining the world he was born into. It does a great job of telling a story, without assuming any previous knowledge about it. Unlike some other exhibitions, the artifacts aren’t just put into glass cases in one big giant room and you’re wandering from case to case, not really understanding the context of the objects. Here the exhibition manages to give you the full picture; every room is another chapter of the story and you walk through the exhibition each time learning (and comprehending) parts of Tutankhamun’s life. The atmosphere is mesmerizing and mysterious. The exhibition makes clever use of lighting and shadows, highlighting the artifacts in wonderful manner. There’s a perfect moment right at the start, where you’re suddenly transported to the world of Egypt and it’s secrets. 

For me the £17 entrance ticket was completely worth it and it makes me want to visit Egypt again. Who knows? Maybe next year for holiday?

It’s exactly three weeks ago that we held this dinner, but I still wanted to dedicate a short blog post to it. Cause it was the first Geek Dinner I’ve actually partly organized. I’ve helped a bit with previous events, but never anything that required too much work (or stress) on my behalf. This time I arranged the venue and food, and on the day itself kept track of all the attendees and payments. You’d think it wouldn’t be too much work, but with over 70 guests (!) I was kept busy the entire dinner.

Photo by Craig Murphy

After our previous (regular) venue kind of screwed us over, we were forced to find a new location. Now finding a Geek Dinner venue isn’t as easy as it may seem, cause we need quite a lot of flexibility. For starters, we don’t want to pay for the venue, so it has to have free room hire. Then the food can’t be too expensive. Plus, we never are really sure until the day itself (and even then it remains a rough estimate) of the number of people that are coming. Which for a lot of venues is a problem, cause they want to order the food at least a week beforehand. Besides that we really need a separate room, not some balcony or back part of a pub, cause otherwise nobody can hear the speaker. So yeah, pretty specific. (Btw, if anyone knows any other good venues in central London, please let me know. Any suggestions are always appreciated.)

Photo by Craig Murphy

Purely by accident, I stumbled on the Thai Smile restaurant, situated above a pub, close to Holborn. And they did exactly what we wanted. They were even fine with me phoning the numbers through a couple of hours before it started. The food was about 8 pounds per person and almost everybody thought it was delicious (I at least didn’t get any complaints). We’re definitely going to go back there, cause they did exactly everything we needed.

The Moo crew talk was great; they hadn’t prepared a real presentation, they just explained the origins of their company and then accepted questions from all the guests. There were some cool little moments, like Moo was first called ‘PleasureCards’ and, while talking about the Moo.com url: ‘The cows were annoyed’. Ciaran’s got a short video of part of it up on Qik (quality isn’t that super, but it’s better than nothing). Cristiano also made a timelapse of the entire evening:

GeekDinner with Moo Timelapse from Cristiano Betta on Vimeo.

It was a great event and I’m glad it went so well. I was pretty much busy the whole time, but I guess that’s the price you pay for volunteering for these type of events. If we don’t organize it, who will? That being said though, do contact me if you want to help out; the more people that get involved, the more events we can organize!

One last question: what would you think of a GeekDinner hosted Chocolate Party (your “entrance fee” is a box of chocolates)?

I haven’t blogged for the last couple of days, because of a not-so-fantastic combination of being extremely busy and sick. Last Thursday I had the first Geek Dinner I in part had organized (meaning I was “working” for most of the evening) and then last weekend I attended BarCamp London 4. Added to that, I caught some bug at the Geek Dinner, so since then I haven’t been feeling that well, spending Friday, yesterday and today in bed. Despite being sick though, I had a great time at BarCamp London 4!

With all the fuss surrounding the sign-up for this BarCamp, I was going in with my fingers crossed hoping it would turn out to be a good BarCamp. And it was. There were some minor “glitches” which I’ll come back to later, but overall it was a great experience. This time it was held at the GCap offices in Leicester Square and was organized excellently by GCap’s Ross Bruniges. I’ve split this post up in two parts (this doesn’t necessarily mean though Day 1 and Day 2), cause it just got too long.

Breakfast, Registration and Lunch

So last Saturday morning together with Cristiano and some Dutch friends who were specially here for BarCamp (Reinier, Martijn and Joost) I made my way to London’s cinema center. We were there quite early (9ish) to first grab some breakfast at a small cafe near Leicester Square, meeting up with Simon and Kevin. Completely satisfied by a yummy traditional English breakfast, we then headed to the GCap building, where the BarCamp magic (well, the registration at least) was about to start.

After registering, we found much to our delight that the venue had a roof terrace and spent the next hour waiting there till the intro talk began. As always we got a general dos and don’ts speech (”fires are bad”), a thank you to the sponsors and the “every single person in the room introduces themselves”, which takes like forever. After the talk, lunch was served and everybody got to fill in the session boards. Osmosoft sponsored the lunch, a great batch of Pret-A-Manger sandwiches and salads. I decided to do my talk in the very first slot, getting it quickly over and done with. Btw, I won’t write about every single session I went to; just the main ones that stood out for me.

My Talk: Probabilities Explained Through Poker, Werewolf and Deal Or No Deal

I noticed at previous geek gatherings that a lot of people don’t get their probabilities right and thought it might be interesting to do a hands-on session on that topic with some easy and cool examples. Idea was great, execution though… not that great. I hadn’t prepared that much (just some examples) and during my talk I fell silent way too often. Plus I don’t think I actually know/play enough poker to say a lot about it. I might do this talk another time, but I’ll have to polish it up a great deal. Cristiano actually filmed the entire thing (and a lot of the other sessions), so you can watch it here:

The Quest for a Open Source Event Management Solution
I went to this session expecting a demo of an event manager, which for me was interesting with Cristiano having just created his own event manager for the Geek Dinners. Instead though it was about gathering people together who are all interested in helping on an open source event manager. There wasn’t anything implemented yet; it was about how a general “use for every type of event” solution could be created.

Faceball Tournament

If you don’t know what Faceball is, check the official website out. The main idea is to hit the other person in the face with a pink or blue Flickr ball (don’t worry they’re very soft). I wasn’t planning to participate, but after seeing all the previous people play, I wanted to know for myself how difficult it was. Surprisingly though, while I didn’t win (Cristiano beat me in the semi-final), I did get the highest score! I’ve got a bunch of Faceball photos up on my Flickr and the video of it here, only the grand finale is missing. Cristiano won though and got us two Flickr pro accounts.

Beauty in Web Design

This was a great (and pretty) presentation from Cennydd on what beauty is and how we should attempt to create beauty in websites. He showed a couple of great examples of how art is perceived and how beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. My short description doesn’t do it justice and I wished I had recorded this, although sometime this month podcasts should be coming out from all the sessions. For the mean time, check out the slides on SlideShare.

The rest of this blog post will follow tomorrow or sometime later, once the videos become available. To check out the videos we already have, head over the Vimeo BarCampLondon4 Channel. I’ve also got more photos up on Flickr.

I just found out that tomorrow today (I haven’t gone to bed yet, so for me it’s still “tomorrow”) on Saturday May 3rd is Free Comic Book Day. As the name indicates, it’s a day when participating comic books stores give away comics to anyone who comes to their stores. It depends on the store and their policy how many free comics you’re allowed to receive, but every visitor will receive at least one absolutely free comic book.

Free Comic Book Day is an annual event, held on the first Saturday of May. It started 7 years ago as a promotional effort by the North American comic book industry to help attract new readers to independent comic books stores. Typically major comic book book publishers will produce special edition comics aimed to attract non-comic book readers. For instance, past special editions included titles from Archie, Disney and Battlestar Galactica.

This year’s FCBD has 41 titles to giveaway for free, as well as 2 miniature Star Wars and Iron Man figures (again it does depend on the store). If you want to see the full list of comics offered, check out the FCBD site. There are a couple of interesting looking comics, a number of which I could easily see non-comic book readers pick up*.

So people: check if your local comic book store is participating and if so, head on down to it and get your free comic books!

*Disclaimer: I am not a real comic book reader… yet. See my next post.

With Cristiano off to the Netherlands to get his wisdom tooth removed (which I am glad to report went way smoother than mine), I thought I’d be bored out of my mind. The two past days though have just been one constant stream of geek activities. I should address each event in a separate post, but I know if I attempt to do that, I’ll end up only blogging about half the stuff. Instead I’m going to try to summarize all the stuff I’ve done here.

London Girl Geek Coffee 2

I only announced it two days beforehand on the Geek Dinners and the Girl Geek Dinners site, so I kind of knew that not many people would show up. However, I didn’t expect to find myself completely alone at the chosen time. It gave me time to check out the venue (Smiths of Smithfield), but I soon discovered it wasn’t really what we were looking for. Half an hour later, Patricia Hanrahan (Gondul) showed up, with Rachel Clarke following quickly thereafter. We spoke about a whole bunch of things, including Rachel and I explaining to Patricia what we’ve experienced so far in We Tell Stories. Here’s where this event kind of flowed into the next event:

We Tell Stories Meet-up

For the past 4 weeks I’ve been following the We Tell Stories project. As I’ve mentioned before, besides the six public stories, there’s a hidden seventh story in the form of an ARG. I’m not going to explain everything here, but a couple of days ago we (all the ARG players on the forum) found out one of the characters would be in a bar…in real life! Jacques the French bookstore clerk, depressed because his girlfriend Bella dumped him. The idea was to bring him gifts and tips on how to woo Bella back, which somehow would lead to more clues.

I completely forgot to bring something, but during the GGC Rachel convinced me to write down a song and sing it for him. Weirdly enough I agreed to do this and even stranger I chose a Dutch nursery rhyme (I have no recollection whatsoever in what prompted me to choose this particular song). Anyhow, Daisy, one of the other girls on the forum, also came to the GGC, hauling along freshly baked muffins and printed out poems.

Abandoning Trish (who would wait for the other GGCers) we went to the bar where Jacques was and there we met up with 2 others from the forum. At 17:30 we entered the bar and there he was…Jacques, looking depressed as ever and drinking red wine. We all gave our gifts and each of us received an item in return. Some of them were clearly “only” prizes for showing up (a Terry Pratchett book, for instance), but others were actual clues. I got a blue Wedgwood tray with snippets of rules of a card game. If you want to find more, check out the We Tell Stories website and the Unforum.

SEO Party

After the cool weird meet-up with a fictional character, I made my way back to the GGC (now expanded with Emma Persky and Weefz), only to discover that the SoS was packed. There was no way we could talk in there. I suggested to move to the Starbucks down the street where the ARGers had gone to sort out all the clues. Patricia, though, deserted us to meet up with Judith ‘deCabbit’ Lewis at an SEO party, but invited us to join her later. After a short half an hour in the Starbucks, we went in search of the SEO party.

We arrived a bit before 8 and the bar was crowded with SEOers. I was surprised to discover at least one person I had met before: Chris Hambly, whom I had met at MediaCampBucks last year. I had a short talk with him about some upcoming events, including a second MediaCampBucks and a MediaCampLondon.

Despite having no actual experience in search engine optimization, I had some interesting conversations with a couple of the SEOers there and was amazed when I realized I had been there for more than 2 hours. Around the same time, Patricia and the others decided to leave too and I slowly made my way back to home. Of course, even though arriving home at a fairly early time, I managed to only get to bed at about 3.

Social Media Cafe

Naturally, I slept through my alarm and I arrived quite late at the Social Media Cafe. I had met Lloyd Davis (the organizer of SMC) back in October in Berlin and had been meaning to come to a SMC for some time now (wisdom tooth removals and sleeping the cause of missing previous ones). I’m glad I finally made it, cause I got to meet a lot of new people (I’m not even going to try and list everyone). What I found interesting was that (if I’m not mistaken that is) this was a completely different set than the usual Geek Dinners and BarCamp crowd; most people there hadn’t even heard of those two events before!

Just when I wanted to leave, it started pouring outside (even lightning!), so I decided to stay a little longer. I talked some more with LJ Rich and after the rain cleared up, she suggested having lunch at a Vegetarian Thai Buffet close by. Great food and great conversation with both of us geeking out about TV shows, books and other stuff. Having already spent most of the day procrastinating networking, I realized I wouldn’t get any real work done today, so it wouldn’t hurt to go to:

Rickmob

Three words: real life rickrolling. By now there should be enough reports and videos documenting this event.

So those were my two action packed geeky days and all I want to do now is sleep. I’ve announced the next Girl Geek Coffee on both Geek Dinners sites and a new idea for another event (Geek Meet). Let me know if you’re interested in either of them by leaving a comment on one of those blogs.

It’s a bit last minute, but the next Girl Geek Coffee will go on next Thursday. We’re going to try out a new venue and I’m hoping it’s suitable. It’s the Smiths of Smithfield near Farringdon tube (also a potential Geek Dinner venue). I haven’t tried it out yet (so fingers crossed), but I’ve heard a lot of positive things about it.

When: Thursday, April 10, 2008, 3:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Where: Smiths of Smithfield near Farringdon
Cost: attending is free, cost for coffee and food will be on a “buy your own” basis
Upcoming: 465894

If you have trouble finding the place or are running late, you can phone me (07521 294 391) or Twitter me directly (mseckington). Please use the upcoming link or comment below to indicate your interest.