Yesturday afternoon I was at Ubuntu Live: London. This was a co-hosted event between Canonical and IBM.

The Canonical presentations were aimed mostly at businesses, and sysadmins in particular, delving into the Ubuntu Server distribution. IBM on the other hand went deep into Ubuntu Desktop model – this speaker was really entertaining. Mark Shuttleworth was there too of course – smart guy.

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Yesturday I attended the BAFTA conference on the convergence between Film/TV and Games. There were some very interesting speaks, mostly about animation in film/tv, with comparisons to pre-rendered footage in games.

As part of the London Games Festival, this was my first invite-only conference. So I was very excited to see the contrast between this and other conferences I’ve been to lately.

The BAFTA HQ is very swanky. The free lunch wasn’t bad either
The conference was very small. Theres a bar/restaurant for people to hang in, between talks in the theatre. There were round-table discussions at the end of the presentations, which was nice.
I feel I saw a brief insight into the film/tv/gaming industry, and made a couple of useful contacts.

October is officially the month of Expos. Well if it isn’t, it should be!

Today I attended Linux Live Expo which was a part of the Creative Pro Expo / Mac Live Expo.

As it turns out the event was more Creative/Mac Expo, with a touch of Linux. The Linux area consisted mostly of IBM and The Open Source Consortium/Forum.

The .org village was larger than the ‘Linux Live Expo’, which is somewhat embarassing? The Mac Expo, by contrast, was huge. This Expo was much more aimed at the Designer/Adobe fanboy than Linux techies.

Don’t get me wrong, the stands were really good, it’s just that there were too few of them.

I bought a load of Linux magazines from Linux User/Developer and Linux Magazine. Both had some really good offers on. So that’s my reading material sorted for the next couple of weeks!
I picked up a few stickers for my eee PC too lol.

If I could re-design this Expo myself, I think I would probably invite a whole load more Linux and FOSS groups. I also think the *nix/FOSS stands should probably be a little more focused on the newbie.
My beleif is that we should be introducing FOSS/*nix to the masses. The way things stand at the moment, is these stands are more geared towards people who already know about this kind of thing. Techies like you and I.

I had a good day helping out on the GLLUG stand though. The guys were all friendly, in fact the whole .org village were really good people. I had a good chat with a few people – made some interesting contacts.

Right now I feel even more inspired than ever. I want to advocate Linux and Free & Open Source Software solutions to Local Education Authorities and small/mid businesses. I’d love it if I could get paid to do this, as a part-time job while I finish my last year at Uni. That’d be my perfect job right now ^_^. Something like Open Advantage – but in London.

Today Aaron, Ysmael, Simon, Mo and I visited Handheldlearning. While the conference didn’t really feature any games industry experts, as we had initially thought – it did offer a little insight into the online education sector, which could very well help me with my final year project.

I won’t blog about my final year project just yet though, because it’s still in the ideas stages.

I made a few contacts and got a bit of information, so it was quite a successful day.

We also got to play a couple video games while we were there. ^_^