Current location:	Living Room
Current mood:	Burnt
Entry tags:	conference, life update, mercure, sheffield, showcomotion, sunny, work

Showcomotion - Sheffield Ahoy!
So yesterday night at about 8.30pm I got back from Sheffield - I went there for 3 days on a business trip to Showcomotion. I mentioned it briefly and provided a link in my last blog so I won't bore you guys with too much detail - basically its where people who work in the Kids Media around the world all come together and hold mostly talks (some workshops) discussing different aspects of the Kids media - hoping to educate others and exchange new ideas.

I went with the head of Department, Mark Wilson, deputy head, David Kangas, our 2 new web site employees, Gemma and James, & finally David Murthy our business manager. We got the 10:55am train from St Pancras; it took just over 2 hours to reach our destination. We got a cab to the Mercure hotel, unpacked and then wondered down to register and to see the event for the opening ceremony. Firstly, to follow up on my previous entry about my rant of the Mercure hotel, things got more aggravating once I got to the hotel. I didn't sign the disclaimer in the end (the front desk didn't ask me, so I assume they forgot/weren't told) but I was told that there would be a fridge in the room for me to store my food. Sadly this turned out to be NOT true...there was instead a 'cooler', it only stores drinks - it doesn't reach the temperature it needs to store food. I went to the reception to ask why I wasn't given the fridge I was promise - all they could do was apologise and say that they don't keep fridges in the room for 'health and safety' reasons, since I didn't know the name by heart of who said there would be a fridge, I signed, I stored my food in their fridge and promised myself to write a stroppy e-mail to the owner of the hotel owner when I got home.
Despite the hotel qualms, the other worries I had about my diet went very smoothly. Such as our first meal out there (in Pizza Express) the staff were so nice and made a salad with ham just for me! And in the second evening we went to a restaurant of my choice, which marked on the menu which foods were gluten free! The staff were again lovely and the food was very nice, too bad they aren't anywhere where I actually live! Check out the site here: http://www.thewalnutclub.com/

Anyways, back to the reason I came there in the first place! The event started at 2pm on the Wednesday and ended on Friday 4pm. In between there were several interviews (including with Peter Salmon, the new head of BBC North) and conferences were many in variety, including talks about children's habits on computers, how much they spend, how children's animation was growing, how the recession has affected the industry, why gaming is so important to the kids industry and why they should invest in it more and so on...I could go on. Of course I checked out the video game based talks - feeding my personal endeavours.
One talk that caught my attention the most was where they were talking about how to get children creative using digital media, and one guy with the computer games industry demonstrated this game.

Sadly the trailer doesn't justify it enough, we had a full demo set up and played on the big screen through his speech, I was very impressed with the capabilities of the machine and the software for this game. Sure, I would probably get bored of it after a month if I bought the game, but it did look very cool!

Several conferences were interesting, some had people talking who were boring but had interesting slide shows to help me stay awake, and others just had boring people talking with no visual aids. There were a couple of talks that could've easily been condensed into half an hour, yet most of them were an hour to 2 hours, therefore I dipped in and out of the talks easily.

Overall I found the trip interesting, mostly because it was something I needed to experience. I needed to experience travelling with colleagues 'cos I'm in an industry where I would need ot travel every now and then with them. I was nervous when travelling with them, and there were times when with them that I felt uncomfortable (like when I want to go to bed at 11.30pm yet they gave me that look that said' "why aren't you networking?") yet I survived it! So I can handle trips with colleagues in the future with ease(er).
My boss said that the event would be inspiring; I didn't get that at all. But I think I know the reason why; I made my decision when I started looking for jobs last year to move out of kids. It wasn't something I wanted to stay in the long term, 4 years was enough for me. If my decision was different prior to coming here, if I was passionate about Kids Television, then this event would've interested me more. But because I don't, to me, the talks bare no relevance. Its shame, but it's how I feel. If, for whatever reason and if I'm still at GMTV, I get offered to come again, I would decline. Pretty much everyone in my office would have benefitted more than I did.

To wrap this up; I surprised myself by enjoying Sheffield! I wasn't expecting to hate it or anything, but I thought I'd just go there without much thought to the place after leaving. But I ended up liking the place a lot. Here's a picture I took from my window of my hotel room.



We stayed at the centre of the city, which of course has many shops, restaurants and here we have a fountain - where all the kids were playing in 'cos of the hot weather. Sheffield seemed to have the 'busy London vibe', with all the executives rushing to work, but it was much cleaner and the people were lovely. Also; it reminded me of Greenwich, it had the combination of modern art (with lots of fountains and glass panes) and golden oldie charm (like the Tudor styled pub and cobble roads). Funny thing is that, due to my horrendous Geography skills, I had no ideas where the area was before I came here. But it's only 2 hours from London! I've actually seen media jobs at Sheffield advertised, so who knows? Maybe I would consider checking out the area more in the future?

Anyways, next week, I'll update with the weekend life updates and hopefully a CD review that I've been putting off for a while...hope everyone is well and enjoying the lovely sunshine we've been having!