Staying in the spirit of Halloween, aren’t these tea light holders just the cutest:

They’re available on the Contemporary Home Online Shop for £5.99.

Via Domestic Sluttery

I’m really in a Halloween mood, even though I have to stay in today to catch up on some work. So no dressing up and trick or treating for me this year (to be fair, I’ve never really celebrated Halloween before, so it’s not as if I’m missing out this year, cause normally I wouldn’t do anything anyway). Despite that though, I couldn’t resist thinking of costumes and wondering what I could put together if I had to do something last minute. So here’s my short list of last minute outfits (most of these are somewhat based by clothes I own, and which I could pull off last minute if I wanted to).

1. Lara Croft – Tomb Raider

An obvious place for me to start, especially after I got the remark last summer that I was in full-on Tomb Raider style. All you need is a simple black or brown pair of shorts, plus a black or brown tank top (although white and teal are also possible depending on which game/movie you take). Add a pair of sun glasses, boots and your outfit is complete. For extra effect, add a fake gun, gloves, and a little back pack.

2. Echo – Dollhouse

How simple can you make it? The dolls when in the Dollhouse walk around in what are basically pajamas. Loose fitting pants and a simple tank top… tada! You’re done. Now just walk around with a vacant look on your face.

3. Max – Dark Angel

I’m not even sure most people will get this, but I used to love Dark Angel (until it got cancelled… by Fox… of course). Max had a lot of different type of outfits on Dark Angel, but half of the time it was leather pants (or trousers or whatever you call it here in the UK) plus a neck high zipped jacket. Don’t forget to add the barcode to the back of your neck!

4. Steampunk

You might have seen my tweets yesterday when I realized I could use my bridesmaid dress as the basis for a steampunk costum. This is the dress I got, but anything brown and kind of long and flowy should work for this. There are a lot of ways you can go about putting this look together (there aren’t any real steampunk costume rules, I assume, it just has to be a bit victorian inspired). I’d try adding a leather vest or corset over the dress, or if you can find it a white high collared old fashioned shirt with ruffles. Add extra props like goggles or a parasol.

5. Chuck – Pushing Daisies

Again a tricky one, cause there are so many possibilities. Chuck on Pushing Daisies always had very colourfol combos on, and the main thing you have to bear in mind is to keep it as vibrant as possible. Most of the time she’d layer clothes in the same colour; for example, a bright red dress plus a bright red coat (although any colour would do). Most of the dresses were 50s inspired (although it depended per week). Add sun glasses and a head shawl to complete the outfit.

Bonus: Elle Wood – Legally Blonde

It’s not really a ‘geeky’ outfit, but I thought I add it anyway. To create the Elle Wood look, just take anything pink! Oh, and you have to be blonde (or get a wig). Extra points if you can arrange a chihuahua.

I’ve kind of sort of recovered a bit from BarCamp London 7 last weekend. My legs, arms and back are still aching, my thighs are still completely bruised (I got squashed between the security gates… again. The same thing happened to me at the previous BarCamp at The Guardian offices. Ouch!) and I’ve still quite some stuff to sort out and finish off, even after all the planning from the previous weeks. But in the end: so completely worth it!

As regular readers of my blog might know, I’ve been going to BarCamps (and spin-off Camps) for more than 2 years now and have participated in a fair share of them (12 actual BarCamps in total, plus 7 spinoffs). At the past London one, I helped out on the weekend itself as a volunteer, but thought it was about time to actually contribute a bit more and give back to the BarCamp community. So this time around, I joined the group of organizers to help out with the planning and preparations in the weeks leading up to the event.

Although BarCamp is an “unconference”, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done before the event itself. The non-conferencey bit of it lies mainly in what happens on the day itself: there is no preordained schedule, everyone holds a session or participates in one form or another, and everything (and everyone) is quite informal and relaxed. To get to that point though, everything else needs to be arranged; BarCamp is a free event for all attendees, so this means taking care of food, drinks, venue, and sponsors to cover it all.

Now with BarCamps in other cities this might be a bit more simpler, but in London it’s trickier than most might think. For starters, finding a venue. Yes, London is way bigger and will have more potential places to use, but there is a negative side to that which some people don’t even consider. Because it’s ‘London’ a lot of the potential venues know they can be used for conferences, conventions, etc, and will ask a ridiculous amount of money. Besides that, most venues have delicate insurance policies, that don’t allow overnights to be held in their buildings. Believe me, we’ve had quite a bit of companies contact us interested in hosting a BarCamp, only to hear later on that they don’t own their building and can’t get permission for the overnight. And without an overnight, a BarCamp just wouldn’t be a BarCamp.

We were really lucky in getting IBM as a venue. Basically on the day of our deadline of finding a venue for the date we had planned (six weeks before the actual event), we heard that IBM was willing to host our BarCamp. Yay! And their venue was gorgeous; lots of sessions rooms, lots of space for lounging and just general hanging around, it was exactly the type of venue we were hoping for.

Then, food and drinks. Again not as straightforward as it might seem. First of all, there’s the matter of what the venue will allow: can we bring in our own food and drinks, can we use the internal catering, can we have alcohol? Whatever the answers to those questions are, they all lead to the next issue: how many people are we expecting and how much should we order from everything? I’m sure it’s not a London-only thing, but it’s always difficult estimating how many people will show up to your event. I know from experiences with the Geek Dinners it can be really tricky; one time you’ll have a 50% drop out rate, other times only 10%. How can you get a good estimate of the numbers you’ll get?

So, that leads us to the third issue: ticketing. There are so many people interested in attending BarCamp London, that we can’t give a ticket to everyone who wants one. And yet… there have been London BarCamps in the past where the showup rate wasn’t that good. Such a pity, cause a) tons of other people who wanted to show up and could have showed up, didn’t get the chance to attend, because someone didn’t cancel their ticket, and b) the added problem of too much food being ordered and wasted.

This time around there went quite some time into thinking of ways to prevent a low showup rate, like asking for confirmation, blogging about tips and tricks for newbies, and considering the different ways tickets can be released. And it worked. Although we still have to do a final check of the numbers, I think we had a 95% showup rate! This also meant we were pretty spot on with the meal numbers. We got to use IBM’s inhouse catering, so all we had to do was give through the amounts and the menu, and they arranged everything for us. Plus, the food was good (I loved the chili for Saturday lunch and the curry for dinner, although I suspect there was mango in the curry and I got an allergic reaction).

And finally: sponsors. Not much to explain here, right? You find a company, ask them for money, they give you money, done. Well, no. Not exactly. I was the main person responsible this time around for arranging everything with each sponsor, and there goes much more time and effort into it than I initially believed. Especially with the number of sponsors we had this time (17 in total). First off, it’s finding companies who are willing to sponsor, explaining to them what a BarCamp is, and what’s in it for them (negotiating the terms, basically). Then it’s setting up invoices, contracts, and with the bigger companies going through the process of getting a PO etc. And finally it’s organizing all the extra things for the sponsors: so allocating sponsor tickets, getting info and logos from them for blog posts and banners, arranging schwag to be delivered for the goody bags, etc. It’s not that much when you consider 1 sponsor, but multiply it by 15 and you’ll get an idea of what we had to deal with.

We couldn’t really believe it when Friday finally came to setup stuff at the IBM venue; after weeks of preparation the BarCamp was actually going to happen! I was amazed at the number of crew and volunteers we had that Friday (and Saturday/ Sunday; to name them all: Kevin, Cristiano, Zoe from IBM, Alice, Caz, Leeky, Tom, Dan, Tobes, Mary, Paul, Sharon, Reinier, Joost, Improbulus, Sam, Chris, Dom, Tim, Carolyn, Alistair, Judith… am I forgetting anyone?) and with so many people we got through most of the setup pretty quickly. A couple of people were put on laminating the badges (ah, the smell of burnt plastic), a couple more were put on filling the goody bags with schwag, some were put on re-arranging the furniture and some went to get fizzy drinks, juice, snacks and sweets to stock up the cafe area. Simple menial stuff, most of it, but it had to be done.

Saturday morning started early for Cristiano and me; we met with Kevin at 8:00 at the venue to handle the final arrangements. This included going over security regulations from IBM, and fine-tuning the registration process. We tried to make the registration as smooth as possible, seeing as there was a sort of double registration: we needed attendees to go past IBM security, get their IDs checked and get a visitors badge, but also through our own registration and badge collection. We managed to come up with something that was hopefully tolerable for most of the attendees, and it turned out to work out pretty well. There were practically no queues at all, and registration was quick and painless. The main thing we did right was have attendees print out their confirmation emails which had unique barcodes on them. For a quick registration, all you had to do was hand in that print-out. Later on, when it was quieter, we scanned in all the barcodes to create the final overview of who attended.

Most of my first half of Saturday was spent on registration and keeping track of the number of attendees who turned up. Up until lunch I was a little bit stressed, wondering whether we had enough/too much food. In the end there was no real need to worry: we had ordered food for 200, and we had 195 people (so we invited the nice guys from security to eat along too).

Afternoon was spent on sorting out sponsor stuff. Vodafone had sent a box of schwag tshirts that had gone “missing”, which I had to hunt down (turned out they had ended up in the IBM internal post room) and lastminute.com labs had arranged some special afternoon snacks (cream puffs and weird Japanese sweets) which required some setup. There were tons of other thing I was doing too (can’t remember what though), cause I was busy with stuff until about 17:00. Then it finally all calmed down a bit, and I got to do some normal BarCamp stuff.

So, it was about at that time that I finally got my first chance to even look at the grid. Damn. I should have looked earlier. Tons of interesting sessions that I wanted to go to! The Future of Wayfinding, Recovering from RSI, Stuff You Shouldn’t Tweet That I Have, Hack Yourself A Cheaper Train Ticket, Teaching Journalists to Code and Coders to Write, Filmaster.com, Design in Lost (the TV show). I wanted to go to all of them! I’m still a little bit gutted that I missed these; next time around (and yes there will be a next time) I’m going to force myself to take a look at the grid earlier and choose some sessions to go to. As one of the organizers, you know you can’t make it to all the session slots, but we should have at least each picked out a handful of ones to go to and give ourselves a little break.

I finally made it to my first session which was The Art of Improvisation from Willem van der Horst (hippowill). It was a funny session, even though I realized half way that I had only joined halfway (he had booked a double slot). After dinner, I remained in the realm of improv, with first going to the “An After Dinner Game” session, where groups of 3 had to hold short presentations, each person only saying one word (me and my team failed miserably), and then Powerpoint Karaoke, which always turns out fun.

After the after-dinner sessions, began the party! There were free drinks for everyone, and tons of games and stuff going on. We had a massive round of Urban Terror going on in the cafeteria, plus board games like War On Terror, Muchkin and Carcassonne, and of course, BarCamp’s obvious game of choice: Werewolf. I joined in one game of Werewolf this time, even though I said I’d never play again; there were enough newbies and people who I hadn’t played with that often to still make it fun (my problem with Werewolf lately has been that people don’t trust me anymore. So or they kill me off early in the game, or they keep me around, but won’t listen to anything I’ve got to say, because I’m potentially *dangerous*. Yeah, it’s no fun when you can’t actually say anything!)

I managed to stay awake till 3.30 or so, playing games and catching up with people. I’m still not exactly sure which 3.30 this was. This weekend the clocks went back, so we got an extra hour for this BarCamp (while the last one at The Guardian we lost an hour). So I’m not really sure what time I went to bed (I think 3.30->2.30). With how early I got up that day, I’m still baffled that I lasted that long. When I finally did go to ‘bed’, it didn’t take long for me to fall asleep. And after 6 hours sleep, I was fully refreshed for another day.

Sunday was slightly less hectic for us organizers. We had to do a bit of a registration in the morning, giving back badges to those who had left during the night. But the rest of the day seemed a bit more quiet. Looking back now, I only managed to go to 2 sessions, so it wasn’t actually that much less busier, it only seemed that way (less running around, but still quite some things to setup etc).

The first session I went to that day was about NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. It takes place every November, and everyone who takes part has to attempt to write 50.000 words that month, that’s 1667 words a day! I’ve always wanted to do something like that, but I’d have no idea where to start in writing a novel. I like writing and with every blog post I think it comes more naturally to me, but novel writing? That’s a whole different ball game.

The second session I went to was a discussion about Failure, lead by Ben Reyes. Some good points were made, but it seemed a lot of the discussion was focused on failure at work. How about failure in other aspects of your life, like relationships? Also, it seemed most were talking about ‘how to accept failure and get on with life’, but always treating it still as something negative.

Around lunchtime things got slightly busy again. Kevin and Dom had the brilliant idea to turn the coffee seating area into a ‘picnic’ area with a Duck pond in the middle. So the PayPal blankets we got as schwag were spread out throughout the room with the packed lunches already setup over them.

Also, somewhere during the day one of the toilets began flooding. It didn’t seem much of a major issue at first; IBM got a guy in to solve it and we thought that would be the end of it. Nope. More toilets began flooding and we had to ‘evacuate’ the help desk (well, unplugging all electronics just in case the water reached that far). The IBM staff were all on hand to sort it out, and thanks to them I think most attendees didn’t even experience the whole incident. Later on we found out what caused the blockage: a male g-string. Ehm… right. *giggle*

Before we knew it, the end of the BarCamp was in sight. Cristiano held the closing talk (with Kevin and me adding some bits), thanking all the attendees, sponsors, etc. It ended with a huge round of applause from the attendees thanking everyone involved in the BarCamp. That alone was worth going through the past couple of weeks; the response was staggering!

With the help of all the attendees, the tidy-up went pretty quickly, although there were things only us crew could do (like dismantling our “war” room). Slowly, people started disappearing to the pub, until only a handful of organizers and IBM staff were left. By that point it was all kind of surreal: we had done it, we had organized a BarCamp, we had put so much work into this, and now it was over.

The final thing that had to be done that day was figure out what to do with the stuff we had left. This included leftover food/drinks, schwag, but also crew stuff for the next time (laminators, lego, cables, etc). We quickly figured out best option was bring it to Cristiano and my place: closest to the venue and enough space. We still have to figure out a permanent solution, but for now I’m sharing my living room with a huge pile of stuff.

And that’s it. That was my first real BarCamp experience from the other side. There are still a couple more things that need to be done before I can put BCL7 finally to rest, but the main stuff has been done now. I think this might have been the longest blog post I’ve ever written (and I’m wondering how many of you will even take the time to read my ramblings), but I mainly had to get this all down on ‘paper’ for myself.

One more thing: thank you to everyone who was involved in this BarCamp. Thanks IBM for allowing us in your great venue. Thanks Zoe for being a great contact and force within IBM. Thanks to all the IBM staff and volunteers for helping out on the three days. Thanks to all the sponsors for contributing and providing us with the means to make this all happen. Thanks to the catering and security guys and gals for putting up with this weird bunch of crazy people. Thanks to the rest of the organizers, especially Cristiano and Kevin, for making this a fun (albeit slightly stressful) experience.

And thank you to everyone who attended and participated. Without you guys BarCamps wouldn’t mean anything; it would be yet again another normal conference.

If you’re interested in hosting or sponsoring future BarCamps, you can contact me at melinda@missgeeky.com. Oh, and if anyone is missing a g-string…

Photos courtesy of Flickr users alicebartlett, martin_88, philliecasablanca, and rugbymadgirl

I’m a major addict to the Final Fantasy games, and I’ve been waiting for the latest addition to the series for ages now. The main reason I still haven’t gotten a PS3 is because FF-XIII isn’t out yet, and I think that would be the game I’d primarily play on it (even though there are many more awesome titles out there, I just know I don’t have the time to get addicted to yet another series). So I’ve been waiting, and waiting until FF-XIII comes out to finally give me a reason to buy a PS3.

Anyhow, in Japan it was just announced that Sony is bringing out a limited edition PS3: the Final Fantasy Lightning Edition. Lightning is the main protagonist in the game, and she herself is printed in pink on the chassis of the PS3. Yep, pink…

I like how this looks like, even though I’m not much a fan of pink. I would have loved to see in this other colours, but despite the pink, I have to admit it looks pretty sleek.

It’s got a HDD space of 250 GB and ships with a version of FF-XIII. In Japan it’s priced at 41600 Yen (around the £280), but I wonder how much it’s going to be here (if it even is released here).

Via GirlyBubble

I’ve been meaning to this for some time now: announcing the winners of contests here on my blog. I have randomly picked one winner to receive the pair of tickets to the Saw All-Nighter on Halloween at the BFI IMAX.

And the winner is…

*drum roll, please*

Phil Haslehurst!

With the comment: My perfect Halloween costume would be Nick Griffin of BNP fame. Not only is it easy to get hold of a cheap and nasty grey suit, but he is by far the scariest character of recent years.

Congrats, Phil! And thanks everyone who entered the contest. I hope to do more contests soon, so keep an eye out 😉

Ages ago when the first Saw came out (well, it was actually only 5 years… 6 movies in 5 years?!? Never stopped to realize that) my brother suggested watching it with the entire family. He had seen it already, and for some weird reason (which I still don’t understand how) I understood from him that it was a Japanese film… Yeah, still not sure where I got that idea from, but suffice to say I was a bit startled when the actors all turned out American and were just talking plain English.

I did like that first movie though, even if it left me feeling pretty disturbed afterwards. I never got around to seeing any of the sequels, mainly because I’m way too squeamish for these type of movies. The gore-and-blood level of the Saw sequels just seemed too much for my tastes (I wonder if there is such a thing like a toned-down cut of the movie? I wouldn’t actually mind watching it, if I knew the ickiness factor wasn’t there).

Anyhow, the lovely people from the BFI IMAX have offered me a pair of tickets to their special Saw All-Nighter on Halloween to giveaway here on my blog! They’re screening all six Saw films back to back, including the newly released Saw VI. There will be free tea and coffee available during the breaks and the bar will be open until the last film starts. The tickets are £26 (and only £16 for students), which is a great deal for 6 movies!

The rules are the same as usual. Leave a comment behind here answering the following question: “What would be your perfect Halloween costume?”. Anybody above 18 is free to enter, but you must be able to come down to London on Halloween to enjoy your prize. The competition ends on Monday 26th 14:00. The winner will be contacted later that day.

Episode 144: “Mauw”

I actually thought I had blogged about this video when it came out 3 weeks ago, but with all the stuff I’ve got going I somehow forgot to actually write the post (you know how sometimes you have a dream just before waking up, that you’re waking up, getting out of bed and going through all the motions of getting ready for work? And then you realize you were actually still asleep and dreaming? Like that but for a blog post.)

You all must be familiar with Simon’s Cat by now (Cat Man Do, Let Me In and TV Dinner, The Fly), so enjoy the latest episode of his antics:

I was also thrilled to find out there’s also now an actual Simon’s Cat book and it’s only £6.48 on Amazon.co.uk. I think it could make a perfect Christmas present for someone (right along with the Bunny Suicides).

Interesting links for October 4th through October 20th:

• People With Same Name as Tube Stations – Hehehe, love this post. Especially because of some of the more 'hidden' tube names like Edward G Ware. (Ed G Ware -> Edgeware) or Stephen Bury, who entered the army and became Gunner S Bury. Lol.
• Thoughts on my “How To Be A Good Interviewer” Session at Blogworld : Ewan Spence’s All New Musings. – Great slides on how to interview people (something I should really work on).
• Bazaaro – Gorgeous and weird Tim Burton spread in October's Bazaar. I'm not sure though it it's just "inspired" by TIm Burton, or if he actually also worked on it. (I'm thinking the former)
• Kashiwa Mystery Cafe – Great idea, and it must be amazing to stumble on something like that while on holiday.
• Ironic Sans: So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica? Quiz – Yay! I got 19 out of 20. How did you score?

One of last year’s best conferences I went to was Playful 2008 (see my blog post about it); it was an interesting day with a fun collection of speakers from different fields, all talking about game design (without necessarily being game designers or working within games). It was great to hear that this year they would hold another event, and the lineup of speakers is again pretty amazing.

Here is Playful’s description of what their event is all about:

Playful is a one-day event all about games and play – in all their manifestations, throughout the contemporary media landscape. It’s a conference for architects, artists, designers, developers, geeks, gurus, gamers, tinkerers, thinkerers, bloggers, joggers, and philosophers. We look at what PLAY means both creatively and culturally, and put speakers on the stage who offer different perspectives on where we are currently, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. We want people walking away talking about the nature of games…what they mean to different people inside, on the periphery, outside or miles away from the industry.

Check out their programme to see the full list of speakers that will be there. I know all the talks will most probably be great, but in particular I myself am looking forward to a couple of the speakers: Robin Burkinshaw, who is behind the blog Alice and Kev (an experiment in The Sims 3 with two homeless sims), Simon Oliver, the founder of indie games studio HandCircus, creators of the Rolando series for the iPhone, and Roo Reynolds, because his talk from last year was awesome!

There are still a couple of tickets available on the Playful evenbrite page for only £40. That’s a bargain compared to most conferences! But be quick: tickets are limited, and I have no doubt that these will be snapped up before you know it.

So, see you all at Playful?

I’ve been a huge fan of Eric Tan’s work ever since I saw his retro posters of Ratatouille (at least I think those were the first ones I saw from him). These two new posters of his of Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid are just gorgeous:

I so want framed versions of these! I was 6 when The Little Mermaid came out, and I still have a very memory of actually going to the cinema and seeing this (right down, to the where we were sitting in the cinema and the layout and feel of the chairs in that cinema).

The two posters are part of a book that will soon be released, The Art of Disney Princess. Several internal Disney artists were asked to give their own spin to some of the Disney princesses. I love what Tan came up with, and so want to know what the other interpretations are. Adding the book to my Christmas list…

Check out Eric Tan’s website for more amazing art (Up, X-Men, Incredibles, Indiana Jones, Ratatouille).