The theme of the event was “Computer Forensics” and after a fantastic introductory session, we were introduced to some great tools being developed to find people doing bad things or things that had gone before on their hard drive.

Probably the most shocking talk was the first one. It really opened everyone’s eyes to how computers work, how erasing a disk works, how disk recovery works, and how it is almost impossible to erase all information from a hard drive.  As a rather ancient computer sits in my hall waiting to be taken to the dump, I’m trying to figure out just how to wipe all the information from the disk drives or whether a sledge hammer really is enough!

Apparently our identities are bought and sold rather cheaply and one of the reasons criminals like our mobile phones is for our personal data – eek! But the things we learned that night are going to last for all the women who were there. I know I learned a lot and I think everyone really learned a lot that night.

Our next event will be at Sci-fi London and as always, we will also have a special deal for tickets.  Sign up to the Google Group for London Girl Geek Dinners to get information on the event, special discount tickets for the event or information about any of our events.

If you’d like a chance to work at EA Interactive, pop over to their careers page or contact Amanda Cowie and see what is available. See you in May!

In order to win these tickets you have to be a member of the Google Group and tweet which shop on Regent St you’d pick for your stylish shopping outfit on the day and tag the tweet with the hashtag #regenttweet

We’ll pick a winner on June 23rd at noon – You have to be on the LGGD Google Group to win (and registered for the RegentTweet event of course) – one ticket each to two women (or men) – no cash alternative – non-transferable – adults only (there’s alcohol involved) – For June 25^th event only – etc – E&OE

Make sure you have joined RegentTweet by joining again if you want just in case.  Just go to the Google Group and grab the URL from there.

This the third year that the London Girl Geek Dinners folk will be shopping Regents Street thanks to Sister PR who organise the annual event.  In past years we’ve had Swarovski crystal USB sticks as gifts, discounts on dress shirts, champagne, a high tea, and more.  This year they have outdone themselves.

This year it is a change for all London Girl Geek Dinner women to glam up and strut their stuff down Regent St and grab some amazing offers from shops such as Bose, Jack Wolfskin, Ferrari, Brooks Brothers, Godiva, Anthropologie, Penhalligon’s, Uniqlo and more.  We are going to have a fantastic day out shopping on Regent but to be in with a chance to win you *must* be on the London Girl Geek Dinner Google Group.  This is the place where we announce all special URLs for hidden ticket opportunities.
Join the Google Group at:
http://groups.google.com/group/london-girl-geek-dinners

All our events have tickets released to this list only so whether you are on the Facebook page, Twitter list, LinkdIn group or anywhere else, only our Google Group members get the special URL to get tickets so join today – it is FREE after all

Anna Higgs of Quark Films and producer of “The People Vs George Lucas” was first up.  Her film short was amazing and she showed herself to be very passionate.  She was incredibly articulate and in all she was charming as despite being ill she spoke at length about her other projects, including her latest project about the Student protests. We also got to listen to Leilani Holmes from film-makers networking group OTT who had some great clips she showed us.  She described how directing a 23 second animated movie about plastic dinosaurs has changed her life and she went on to do more and more filmmaking.

It was a wonderful evening and those who were lucky enough to stay overnight got treated to 5 black & whitemovies, bucks fizz and Haggen Daz.  YUM!

Stay tuned for news of our next even – SHOPPING ON REGENT ST!  The most talked about, anticipated event of the year!

If you do a google search for ‘women in film BAFTA 2011’ two of the first four hits are about red carpet fashion. Looking though the 2011 BAFTA nominations it seems like women are mostly only taken seriously in film if they are actors or doing hair, make-up and costumes. Leilani Holmes and Anna Higgs have both had successful careers in a male-dominated field and are joining SCI-FI-LONDON and the London Girl Geek Dinners to present about how they make use of new media, crowd sourcing content and engage with collaborative filmmaking forums to challenge the glass ceiling.

Leilani Holmes is short film maker, screen writer and actor who co-runs a collaborative filmmaking group www.ottfilms.co.uk/forum and blogs for the London Screenwriters Festival.

Anna Higgs is a producer with a background in the world of BAFTA-award winning interactive ‘edutainment’ and has been involved the production of a wide range of games, as well as managing digital media projects for a diverse range of clients including Sony, Sainsbury’s, BskyB, Telewest and the BBC.  In 2006 Anna completed her MA in Producing at the NFTS, and founded Quark Films with producer Gavin Humphries.

Quark is a company working across drama, documentary and animation for theatrical, TV and digital platforms with credits as diverse as feature doc THE PEOPLE VS. GEORGE LUCAS, DVD tour film THE MIGHTY BOOSH: FUTURE SAILORS TOUR and BOY CHEERLEADERS for BBC Wonderland and music videos for the Arctic Monkeys.  Anna was recently selected as a finalist for the British Council’s Young Screen Entrepreneur of the Year award 2010 and is a NESTA Fellow on the prestigious Clore Cultural Leadership programme 2010/11.

The wine we will be quaffing are from the Dinastia Vivanco winery and fabulous wine museum in Rioja (Spain).  The white wine  (Vivanco Blanco) is a blend of Viura and Malvasia from 2009.  If this sounds fabulous and you’d like to know more, check www.dinastiavivanco.com and become a fan of the Dinastia Vivanco wine Facebook page to show you appreciate them providing the wine.  We’ll also be asking volunteers to just chat about or give their opinoons on wine in general on the night as well so please do volunteer 30sec of your time if you can

Full Details:

Date & Time: Thursday, 28th April 2011, 6.30pm

Venue: Apollo West End Theatre, 19 Lower Regent Street, SW1 4LR; nearest tube is Piccadilly Circus, Directions here

Hosted by: Girl Geek Dinners and SCI-FI-LONDON

Food & Drink: Drinks and nibbles in the bar, from 6.30pm

Attendees: As usual, men allowed as a guest of a LGGD member.

Tickets: Available from Wednesday 13^th April at: http://scifi-london.eventbrite.com/

The birthday events are always very popular, and this year has been no exception. We decided to enter everyone who wanted a place into a raffle, and our lucky winners are now listed below. We look forward to seeing you on 4th August!

If you don’t see your name below then we’re really sorry. London Girl Geek Dinners is reliant on volunteers and the generosity of our sponsors, and we’re only able to do so much, but please keep an eye out, we really value your membership and we have lots of exciting stuff lined up!

LGGD 5th Anniversary Ticket Holders:

Yes that’s right, five years of bringing girl geeks in London a chance to meet, mingle network, find out about some great tech firms, find a new job, go shopping and enjoy learning.  We have had some phenomenal sponsors over the last five years and for our birthday we have a dazzling array of them.

This year, we have a limited number of tickets (80) so we’ve decided to do a raffle.  You can go into the newbie lottery if you are new (and thus aren’t on any of our attendee lists) or the old hat lottery if you’ve signed up for something before.  Part of our goal in having this event is to increase the number of members we have on the Google group as well as getting new people out.  Please join the Google Group to get the URL for tickets: http://groups.google.co.uk/group/london-girl-geek-dinners

We’ll draw ticket winners on TUESDAY JULY 27th giving everyone plenty of time to get their name in the hat.

The event will kick off at 6pm at Google on AUGUST 4th with a bit of mingling and then some dinner.  We will then have 3 great speakers in Sue Black speaking on the Women of Bletchley Park, Sarah Gordon of Google speaking on mobile engineering and hopefully a third speaker we’re just finalising.  It will be an inspirational evening!  Afterwards we hope to have something for dessert and mingle and mix until 9pm.

The event will be at Google in their main canteen.  Google UK  have generously donated space and dinner and a goodie bag with a few things in it to London Girl Geek Dinners.  We are extremely proud and pleased to have Google as our main sponsor and to have one of their engineers as a speaker! 

In addition to the generous Google sponsorship we have some other amazing sponsors:
 
The wines we will be quaffing are from the Dinastia Vivanco winery and fabulous wine museum in Rioja (Spain).  The red wine is the Rioja Crianza 2005, the White wine  (Vivanco Blanco) is a blend of Viura and Malvasia from 2009, and Rose is Vivanco Rosado 2009 – delicious rose.  If this sounds fabulous and you’d like to know more, check www.dinastiavivanco.com  and become a fan of the Dinastia Vivanco wine Facebook page to show you appreciate them providing the wine.  We’ll also be asking volunteers to just chat about or give their opinoons on wine in general on the night as well so please do volunteer 30sec of your time if you can.

Green & Blacks are donating their new Organic Milk & White Miniature Bar Collection to the goodie bag as well!  Green & Black’s NEW Milk Miniature Bar Collection gives you a taste of our milk and white chocolate bars. Contains 12 miniature bars ranging from our uniquely cocoa-rich milk chocolate with crunchy butterscotch or roasted almonds, to our new Creamy Milk and White Chocolate. Oh dear goodness YUMMY!

In the goodie bag will also be VitaminWater’s new drink – i-focus.  i-focus will have you tickled pink, with a delicious strawberry-kiwi flavour, packed with antioxidant vitamin c, energy releasing b vitamins for a little more kapow and vitamin a to help maintain healthy vision.  Pretty in pink and giving away an iPad to boot – defo the water of choice for the girl geek!

We also have the amazing Juniper Networks involved donating some lovely stuff to us though we haven’t confirmed what just yet so we’ll leave that as the surprise element of the evening. Juniper networks provide high speed, reliable switching routers and you can see their suite of kick butt stuff here

The lovely Iona Innovations are also donating raffle prizes for us to help us fund our work at getting charitable status.  So bring your pound coins and buy some tickets on the night!

We’ll even have some Forbidden Planet flyers as we know SF and Girl Geeks often go hand in hand.

So as you can see it is going to be a fantastic evening and one you won’t want to miss!

See you there!

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/london-girl-geek-dinners

Get your name on the list to get a ticket to this event full of fun fabulous freebies.  There will be all sorts of fun and excitement to kick off this day at the Apple Store where we will all gather to hear a great talk before getting our instructions and getting off to explore the shopping of Regents Street.

This is a gadgeted event so bring your smartphone, laptop and all your tech to blog, tweet, and QR your way around the day.  There will be a technology hub called “basecamp” where you’ll be able to plug in your technology, edit your videos, blog, tweet or just relax before getting back at it.

Remember you have to be registered so go to the London Girl Geek Dinners google group for the secret URL and in the top right corner of the special page click on “register”.  If you click elsewhere you won’t be able to sign up.

You *MUST* be registered to get in to this event.  Men *MUST* be a guest of a registered and attending Girl Geek.  There are non  Girl Geek Dinner people clamouring to get into this event so please sign up ASAP.  Any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask (but as I work full time I can only check emails once a day – sorry!)

Here is out schedule of events:

SATURDAY JUNE 19th 2010

Once you’ve signed up, you’ll get details of the timings for the day.

Get your name ticked off our list of registered attendees and we’ll meet and get a talk on ”The Internet of Things: Digital Cows and the ways in which online behaviours are influencing the real world.”

You need to be on the list to get in to the event so remember to go to the London Girl Geek Dinners group and join to get access to the special URL.

 We’ll then head off for some lovely Shopping along Regent Street where we can hit the shops; Enjoy the sunshine; Take advantage of the fantastic offers; But most importantly, Have Fun! The day is yours so make the most of it. Remember you can always nip back to the basecamp to relax, cool down & drop your bags off before heading back out onto the streets.

We’ll end out day at the tech hub called “Basecamp” where you will have been able to store stuff, charge your tech, edit your videos, blog or whatever and we’ll have cocktails, share our experiences with the other girls and take part in the interactive presentation.

See you and your tech there!

Sci-fi London runs until 3^rd May and there are still some tickets left – plus if you tell them you’re a LGGD member you get a fabulous 10% discount! Check out the progamme here!

We also need to say another huge thank you to our panel – our British Women in Manga, for presenting their work and for the hugely passionate panel discussion afterwards. There were so many questions that we could have kept the Q&A open for another 2 hours and still not have finished!

There were a few themes to the evening, with the panel discussing the use of technology within the comic creation process, and the different ways in which the 3 artists work.

Also of interest were the differences between British & European, North American and Asian styles of illustrating, storytelling and portraying emotion.

Getting on to the differences between Shojo and Shounen, the panel were also asked whether it’s more difficult for women to break into the comic industry, to which the conclusion was it’s just difficult; (whether you’re male or female)!

There was also a debate as to our habit of putting everything into boxes; hence the title of this post, a quote from Emma Vieceli, who it’s fair to say, doesn’t like to over categorize things; and we have to say we agree – let’s celebrate having a diverse comic industry and spread the word!

On that note, please check out our panel’s websites:

Emma Vieceli
From Manga Shakespeare to Dragon Heir webcomics… check out Emma’s site at: http://www.emmavieceli.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/Emmavieceli

Kate Brown
See why Kate won the 2010 Arts Foundation Fellowship Graphic Novels award, and follow her work on the forthcoming Fish & Chocolate at: http://www.danse-macabre.nu/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/autojoy

Karen Rubins
Currently working on an intruiging new project, having just finished a residency at the V& A museum, Karen’s  (self coded) website is at: http://www.karenrubins.com

And also worth checking out; her V&A blog at:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/things-to-do/blogs/karen-rubins-comics-artist-residency/home

London Expo

Plus for anyone interested in all things cartoon/manga/illustration; you might like to check out London Expo; at the Excel Centre; 29th and 30th May 2010.

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