Sick, Playful and Busy

Just a short post to let you all know what I’ve been doing lately. So Halloween has come and gone, and I didn’t get a chance to do all five of my ‘5 Days of Halloween’ blog posts. Last Monday I got sick and was stuck in bed for the following three days, being completely unproductive. No blog posts, no work, just a lot of sleeping and lying around. Ugh. Plus I missed out on a lot of cool London Games Fringe events and I’m really kicking myself for becoming sick just this week. 

Anyhow, even though I wasn’t feeling 100%, I did make it to Playful on Friday. I’ll followup with a real blog post about it soon, but in short: it was a great event with a lot of interesting speakers. There was a cool mix of speakers from different fields and because each talk was only 20 minutes, you got to see and hear a nice variety of perspectives on games. 

Then yesterday I went to check out the new Westfield mall in Shepherd’s Bush. Wow, it’s big. And way too busy. It might be fine after it settles down after these few opening days, but if it remains like this, I can’t say it’s a nice atmosphere to shop in. Too many people, too much congestion. In fact, it was so busy, the mobile network kind of died and I couldn’t get through to anyone (much to my annoyance, cause Cristiano and I split up to go to different stores, and weren’t able to find each other again). I’m hoping it will get better once the ‘newness’ of it has worn off, cause there is a cool selection of different types of shops. 

Next to that, I’ve been busy preparing for my trip to Middlesbrough on Tuesday. I’ll be be holding two talks while I’m there, both on connecting through social networking. I’m pretty nervous about it all, cause I’ve never done something like this before. It should all go fine though; I know more than my fair share about the topic, and through BarCamps I’ve had enough practice with holding presentations. Still: fingers crossed it all goes according to plan.