Blogging and all that Malarkey

Marc Thiele’s started posting videos from his excellent Beyond Tellerrand event in Berlin last month.

People sometimes ask me about what I listen for when I’m choosing guests to talk with on Unfinished Business.

Artist and designer Brendan Dawes is back on Unfinished Business this week. We get started by talking about past popular pop princes and princesses S Club 7, The Handsome Family and Bren’s one day trip to Argentina. For the remainder of the show, we talk about when it’s acceptable to give our time for free and when we should say no? Why every project should include a ‘goodwill’ budget and what the heck are those party paper and whistle things that come out of Christmas crackers called?

A complete change of subject for this week’s Unfinished Business, Relly Annett-Baker and I talk about parenting and education and specifically how she’s homeschooling her two young children.

For someone who hasn’t travelled or done much conference speaking for the last two years, this past three weeks have been pretty busy with both. I’ve spoken at three conferences and hosted two workshops and I enjoyed every one.

This week on Unfinished Business, Paul Boag, Jon Hicks and I dispense with any pretence that this is a show about business and spend 90 minutes talking about something much more interesting. Peter Capaldi’s first series as Doctor Who. We talk about our thoughts on Peter Capaldi’s Doctor and the best (and worst) episodes of the season. Then we finish up by discussing the series finale, Clara and Danny Pink and of course Missy. If you haven’t seen the final episode of this season, there are spoilers galore.

When I arrived at Beyond Tellerrand in Berlin this week, conference organiser Marc had a nice surprise waiting for me, a new Joli Originals laptop sleeve for my Macbook Pro with Retina Display.

I really like Norway and the Norwegian people are among the friendliest I’ve met, so I never need convincing to visit them. While I was in Oslo in October, speaking at the Making Web conference I met the wonderful people at IGM and when they asked me to take my CSS3 For Responsive Web Design workshop back to Oslo on December 3rd, I jumped at the chance.

This week is Geek Mental Help week and on Unfinished Business I’m joined by Liz Elcoate, one of the people who helped to spark the idea. We ask if our industry attracts people with issues or cause them, does our working environment add our problems and what we hope the outcomes from this week will be? But not before we talk sport, Liz’s obsession with wrestling and my Uncle Haystacks.

Next week, starting October 27th, is Geek Mental Help Week: A week-long series of articles, blog posts, conversations, podcasts and events across the web about mental health issues, how to help people who suffer, and those who care for us.