Roo Reynolds - What’s Next?

BAFTA Film Awards 2010

Posted by Roo - 23/02/10 at 10:02:06 pm

I was fortunate enough to be invited to help out the BAFTA online team during the Film Awards on Sunday. I spent the afternoon and evening tweeting as @baftaonline and helping their team keep their Facebook page updated.

Initially, I was mainly sharing photos from the red carpet, which meant wandering around with an ‘access all areas’ pass and trying grab pictures of the buildup while staying (unsuccessfully) out of the way of various live news cameras. Here are a handful of the photos I uploaded to Twitpic during the afternoon.

I was only slightly hampered by not having much of an idea of who everyone was, and during the busiest time on the red carpet it was a struggle to get a photo and tweet everything. Fortunately, the Bafta/BBC TV crew I was embedded with were very helpful in confirming names of people I was unsure of, etc. Conscious of a fast-depleting iPhone battery, I was alternating between an iPhone and my Canon camera, grabbing snaps and video of whatever looked interesting.

Once the ceremony began, I went upstairs to the media room where I sat with the BAFTA online team watching the ceremony and backstage interviews live. I was updating their Twitter and Facebook presences with the award winners as they were announced and the response to these live updates was overwhelmingly positive. Rob (BAFTA’s online editor) had proposed a very clean, cut down style for the announcements which worked really well for giving it an official, definitive tone. Keeping it short meant it was more likely to be retweeted too.

During the ceremony, I had a list of who was announcing what, and had to fill in the blanks with the winner as they were announced, tweeting and updating Facebook as quickly as possible. This was pretty stressful, though obviously also an awful lot of fun. I soon found a rhythm and was pleased to be using a laptop where I could quickly copy and paste blocks of text between various windows. The iPhone is nice, but it would suck for this sort of work.

There was some frustration, among people watching on TV, that the twitter stream was acting as a ’spoiler’ for the event (though I should point out this was massively outweighed by vast numbers of people expressing supportive, grateful thanks for the instant updates). I think the call (which was, of course, BAFTA’s to make) to announce live, rather than in sync with the TV coverage, was the right move. People were looking to @baftaonline for the definitive results when rumours were circulating on Twitter, and it wouldn’t have made sense to wait. We should probably have been clearer as the ceremony began that the tweets were going to be out of sync, to reduce the risk of people being surprised by spoilers.

Once the ceremony was over, and I’d reluctantly handed back the iPhone, I found myself on the stage itself. This was, frankly, even more surreal than the rest of the day. Watch this video below to get a sense of what it was like.

Later in the evening, my wife and I attended the Film Awards party, which was great fun.

On returning home, I discovered I’d been seen by the BBC News cameras 3 times. As Ian H pointed out, it’s a bit like playing ‘Where’s Wally’.

This makes five times, to my knowledge, I’ve been spotted on TV. (The first and second both being on the set of Watchdog in 2008.)

So, all in all a fantastic day and what little stress I did feel was entirely exciting. Thanks to everyone at BAFTA for a brilliant time.

Holiday in Pembrokeshire

Posted by Roo - 27/07/09 at 10:07:33 pm

Back to work tomorrow after a great few days holiday. If you’re even in Pembrokeshire, I recommend St David’s, and Porth Clais. Between Thursday and Saturday the weather way very fine and we enjoyed long walks with the dog along the stunning Pembrokeshire coast.

Early Sunday morning, however, it turned not only very wet but also very very windy. Not a great combination when you’re sleeping under canvas, and we kept waking up slightly intimidated by the way our tent was being thrown around. Ray got out the camera to capture the moment (note the dog laying between our sleeping bags, 38 seconds in).

And about 20 minutes later, despite conducting emergency running repairs to the pegs and guy ropes holding us down, our tent had totally collapsed, with us inside it.

We had a lovely stay though, despite the final night. In fact, clambering out of an inside-out, soaking wet tent is a happy moment one that will stay with me for a very long time.

• Ray’s photos
• My photos

On the ground at the G20 protests

Posted by Roo - 01/04/09 at 11:04:55 pm

I took some photos of the G20 protests around RBS and the Bank of England today. I had a quiet afternoon after a meeting in Soho, so decided to head to Bank to take a look at the square mile and see what was afoot with the much discussed G20 protests. It ended up being anything but quiet.

Arriving at St Pauls (I’d already heard that Bank tube station was closed), I overheard various police officers informing people of the best ways to avoid Bank, saying that much of the area was closed off due the protests. Deciding I’d just get as close as I safely could, take some photos and then go home, I started walking towards the Bank of England.

I soon realised that the officer’s advice was sound. There were police blockades on every single street leading in to the Bank of England.

Many streets had not just one line of police but two, with a gap in between them, essentially keeping a safe distance between two crowds. Skirting around the cordons in busy side streets, I got as close as I could get.

Plenty of flag-waving, singing, cheering and jeering. It seemed peaceful and good-natured and I found the police to be largely friendly and helpful. People were having fun.

The guy on the right was being interviewed by Radio 4. When asked why he was dressed as Satan, and which group he was represented, he thought for a moment and said, “RBS”. The interviewer couldn’t help but grin.

2:20 – Note the gap between the two crowds in the photo above. Looking in from the outside, I could come and go as I pleased, as long as I didn’t want to get any closer to the central area filled with protesters. Equally, the people on the inside couldn’t get out. They were hemmed in by the police on all sides.

2:40 – Just as I’m getting a bit bored and thinking about heading back to the office, the central crowd starts pushing and shoving the line of police which is penning them in. Scarily (for me), within a couple of minutes they had managed to break through the line, and were surging in my direction. I moved back a few paces, fearing a stampede, but all that really happened was that two bits of the crowd (the inner bit, and my outer bit) had joined up.

2:41 – But… the police had pulled back and regrouped, forming two new lines, one on either side of me. I ask nicely about leaving.

- “Excuse me officer” (I’m nothing if not polite). “I think I’d actually like to be on that side of you…”
- “Sorry mate, not happening.”
- “Really? I just…”
- “No. No-one gets in, no-one gets out. Those are my orders”.

I’ve suddenly gone from being an outside observer to being one of 2000 people (not all of whom were protesters, I can assure you) trapped in the middle of the square mile.

2:50 – After the surge, things were pretty peaceful. I started checking with officers at the various (9?) blocked streets and alleys that they really were not letting anyone out, and was slightly horrified to learn they didn’t even have any idea of when they would start letting us leave. Frustrated, but trying to go with the flow, I a) rang my wife and b) started looking around at the stuff I couldn’t previously get to. There were no groups shoving at the police now. In fact, perhaps because there was more room, everyone seemed pretty relaxed.

3:00 – It felt pretty much like a carnival really. Singing, dancing, sound systems blasting 3 different sorts of music, lots of friendly, people being happy.

3:10 – Bloody hell, they’ve smashed RBS. This must have happened a while ago. Before I arrived, even? There are mounted police here, and the atmosphere is different here, on Threadneedle Street. There’s still a lot of anger focused here. I don’t like it.

4:00 – Heading back in the other direction, I find some shade and sit in a shop doorway, pull out my 3G dongle and check my email. People ask if there’s any news. When are we getting out? No idea. The news doesn’t know. The police blocking us in don’t know, so why should the news?

4:30 – Hot and tired. Annoyed. Thirsty. Bored. Restless.

4:45 – The general mood seems to be shifting and worsening. I’m not alone in wondering when those of us who don’t want to be here will be allowed to leave. Portaloos have arrived, which is certainly a good idea, but what about food? And water? This part of the city is pretty handy if you need a cash machine, but there’s certainly nowhere open in here to spend any of it.

The police line starts moving people back down Queen Victoria Street (past HSBC) back towards the centre. Once it starts, it happens quite quickly, and in quite an ugly way. BBC News 24 captures the confrontations, while I stay well back from the shoving.

Some protesters were throwing bottles, and I saw one flaming newspaper hurled. A handful of the scary hardcore anarchist-protester-types just stood there, squaring off with the police, intent on being forced back rather than just retreating. From the police’s side, the violence mainly involved shoving people along the street with their riot shields, but I did see the batons did get used a few times. This was the ugliest part of the day. (That I saw). The crowd went wild with shouts of “shame on you! shame on you!” whenever any sort of police violence was seen.

I’m still not sure why it was considered a good idea to compress the crowd back in to a smaller area. It certainly did the police no favours in the eyes of the more neutral observers.

5:30 – Free at last. I finally got out by showing my BBC ID card to a police officer (who I think probably assumed I was press). I was told “Ok. You can go this way to Cannon Street, but you won’t be able to get back in”. I don’t want to get back in. I want to go home. Except that I felt very bad for everyone else still penned in there, and seeing Pete Blakemore’s increasingly worrying updates (and the fact he was in there for at least a further three hours) made me even more glad to be back, but also even more uneasy and a little angry.

Yet more pictures…

Update: the Guardian has a great video and story which sums up the day, plus a balanced look at various videos springing up on YouTube after the event.

Being tall

Posted by Roo - 14/03/09 at 03:03:54 pm

:-(

Wrapping Up

Posted by Roo - 20/12/08 at 04:12:30 pm

As you might know, I’m enjoying a relaxing couple of weeks off, wrapping up the year with family and friends. Staying with family means bonfires, Rock Band and eating copious quantities of rich and delicious food, like this:

My wonderful Mum made them my combining a broken up Christmas pudding with dark chocolate, rolling it into balls then topping with white chocolate and cherry. Quite indescribably good.

Hope you’re having fun. See you in 2009.

There is no plan

Posted by Roo - 19/12/08 at 02:12:36 pm

My last engagement of the year was also one of my proudest. On Wednesday, I was invited to be the guest speaker at my old school’s presentation evening. This is the annual event at which GCSE and A-Level students collect their certificates and awards for academic excellence. I helped award some of the certificates and prizes and, toward the end, give a fifteen minute talk about.. well, whatever I wanted, but it ended up being a potted history of what I’d done with myself since school plus some words of encouragement for the awardees. I wish I’d recorded it. Everything that follows is an abbreviated summary of what I said, based on the 6 pages of notes I used going into it, plus memories of the bits I improvised…

I broke the ice by reminiscing about an afternoon almost exactly 11 years ago in which some friends and I ‘borrowed’ some sort of evergreen tree from the local park in order to make our sixth form common room more festive. It certainly wasn’t a christmas tree, and it smelled of cats.

It’s hard not to be sentimental about coming back to the school. Partly because I have some genuinely warm memories of it, partly because it’s where my Dad now works (as a counsellor, offering a drop-in service for young people who need help) and partly because it’s where I met my wife, when we were taking our A-Levels together.

What do you want to be when you’re older? Have you ever been asked the question? Have you ever asked it of someone else? Do you know what your answer would be?

When I was 15, I knew exactly what I wanted to be; a lawyer. Specifically, a barrister. But it didn’t work out that way. In the end, choosing a degree ended up being about picking a subject I knew I’d enjoy more, and my hobby since I was quite young had been tinkering with computers and programming them. This was before the school offered an A-Level in ICT, so all the way through school it was purely a hobby for my own enjoyment.

In case that sounds strange, or you’ve never experienced the satisfaction of getting a computer to do exactly what you want, here’s a quote from a new book by Cory Doctorow, ‘Little Brother‘ from the end of chapter 7:

A computer is the most complicated machine you’ll ever use. It’s
made of billions of micro­-miniaturized transistors that can be
configured to run any program you can imagine. But when you sit
down at the keyboard and write a line of code, those transistors do
what you tell them to.

Most of us will never build a car. Pretty much none of us will
ever create an aviation system. Design a building. Lay out a city.

Those are complicated machines, those things, and they’re off­
limits to the likes of you and me. But a computer is like, ten times
more complicated, and it will dance to any tune you play. You can
learn to write simple code in an afternoon. Start with a language
like Python, which was written to give non­-programmers an
easier way to make the machine dance to their tune. Even if you
only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it.
Computers can control you or they can lighten your work ­­ if you
want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write
code.

When I was picking a subject in which to take a degree, I realised that if I wanted to really understand computers, and maybe even get a job doing the things I most enjoyed, I could study Computer Science. I found a few really good courses which looked like they’d be a lot of fun. Even better, I found one which was sponsored by IBM; 3 days a week at university, 2 days a week at work, less holiday than most students, but also fewer debts.

After I graduated IBM offered me a full-time job and I accepted, working first as a tester (finding bugs), then service (fixing them and keeping clients calm), then development (writing code and creating the bugs), then emerging technology (first-of-a-kinds and proof-of-concepts, with a lot of freedom to explore new stuff). That freedom to explore brand new territory is how I ended up calling myself a Metaverse Evangelist; I got interested and involved, together with my friend Ian and eventually with a wider team across the world, with how IBM and its clients could use virtual worlds.

In total, I enjoyed 10 long and productive years in different roles in the Hursley lab before I realised it was time to think about moving on.

Earlier this year, I joined the BBC as Portfolio Executive, Social Media – BBC Vision. Social media includes tools for discussing and sharing information, and BBC Vision is the division of the BBC that handles TV. So I look after social online stuff for BBC TV. Half of the room I’m speaking to (that is, the half that are not parents and teacher) probably live their lives on some combination of Bebo, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, MSN, etc. It may seem strange to think that a huge part of my job is understanding how the BBC can use those things, plus other social stuff (blogs, message-boards, chat, rating, comments, games, …) effectively. That job exists now, but a few years ago I could never have guessed I’d be doing it.

Which leads us back to the question, what do you want to be when you’re older? I pointed out that it’s very hard to answer, because you’re making a prediction about what you’ll enjoy in the future.

My ‘career’ has included software testing, service, development, emerging technology, social media. Each of those things has, for me, led to the next, but it’s not a map, it’s a history. It’s one possible route to have taken to get somewhere I didn’t even plan to go in the first place. The job I’m doing now didn’t exist last year. The virtual worlds role was one that a colleague and I created ourselves.

So what would I have wanted to know, if I were in the room having just received my certificates? Well, I’m going to share some secrets from the so-called grown-up world.

It’s OK not to have a plan. In fact, there is no plan. ^[1] Your parents and teachers may look like they know what they’re doing, and they may expect you to have your life mapped out, but here’s the shocker: they’re all making it up as they go along! It’s perfectly OK to do what you think is fun and interesting. Of course, choosing the things you want to focus on means you’ll need to know enough about the world to know what you find fun and interesting, which means you’ll have to be open minded rather than passive. Most importantly you’ll need to be flexible and prepared to change.

I ended by saying that I hoped they’d have as much fun as I’ve had. I’d been wondering about a closing line (everything I’d thought of leading up to the event had been sickeningly trite and glib. “What do you want to be when you’re older? I hope you’ll be happy” just wasn’t going to work), but somehow, just as I was finishing off, I got into a nice little “I hope you… ” pattern. I hope you’ll have as much fun as I’ve had… so it felt quite natural to end on “I hope you’ll change the world” ^[2].

1 – Last month, I shared what I was planning to talk about during the speech, and asked what other people would have wanted to tell their younger selves. The response was staggering. I could have spent hours going through it with them in detail, and really wanted to. If you’ve found this post because you saw the talk, please do take the time to read it. At the risk of sounding like a grown up, I wish I’d seen all of that when I was your age.

2 – As I sat down, I realised where I’d seen that recently; the introduction to Little Brother ends with “He [Cory Doctorow] hopes you’ll use technology to change the world”. Considering that I was unintentionally borrowing Cory’s phrase, I’m glad I missed the bit about technology.

My Computer(s)

Posted by Roo - 08/12/08 at 10:12:22 pm

I have owned many computers, and not all of them have had names. The Commodore 64 and BBC Micro B I grew up with didn’t ever have names. Nor do I remember giving one to the first PC my parents had (a second hand 286 IBM PS/2).

I think I’ve forgotten a few, but here are the names of the computers I have owned, named and remembered:

• Patience (my first desktop, bought during the first year of my degree, and named after the attribute I felt I had demonstrated while selecting and purchasing it. I had a love/hate relationship with the shop, the name of which I’ve now forgotten Something Squared? M², maybe?)
• Portaroo (my first work laptop while at IBM, a ThinkPad 760, as seen on the International Space Station). I still love this name. like Portaloo, with my nickname built into it. Oh, you got that already? Sorry).
• Parity (so-called because I was catching up with my friend and then-housemate Cheesy, who had upgraded his machine at the same time. I think this is a photo of me building it, with Cheesy to my right and Mark sat behind me. We had a lot of fun in that house)
• Quiss (a work desktop, named after a character in an Iain Banks novel)
• Roochelmini (Not the best name, but Roo + Rachel’s Mini = roochelmini. The Mac Mini we had in our living room. It’s a bit poorly at the moment).
• Rupert (a ThinkPad T42p, and now returned to the big warm blue bosom of IBM)
• Shuttle (a Shuttle mini-ITA PC. Not very imaginative. I should have at least called it Apollo or something. It’s now significantly unwell, often taking ages to start up only to power itself down in the middle of playing a game. I have not touched it for a couple of years, but I expect that if I wanted to I’d need to replace the power supply and/or motherboard)
• Sebastian (MacBook Pro. Bought this January. I love it. Looks a bit like this)
• Tristan (MacBook Air. A work machine. It’s less powerful than the Pro, but so light that I love commuting with it. Looks like this, though I should grab a photo of the stickers on the lid. Notice the alphabetic sequence here? My next machine will probably have to begin with ‘U’)
• Moby (named not after the musician, but the great white whale. Strictly speaking, I didn’t actually own this, I just borrowed it for a few weeks.

Licensed with a Licence

Posted by Roo - 29/11/08 at 12:11:00 am

I’m hoping the title will help me remember: License, verb. Licence, noun.

Back in December, I explained why I didn’t have a TV licence, and hadn’t for many years. I also said

“As the BBC (hopefully) continues to open up ways of me watching content on my terms, of course I’m open minded…”

That post gathered a lot of interesting discussion and debate, and continues to attract comments.

Swamp TV shared under a CC licence by James Good on Flickr

I now have a TV licence.

It’s fair to say that things have changed since December. I now work for the BBC, for one thing. In Telvision Centre, no less. I didn’t get the licence just because I work there though. I think there’s room at the BBC for digital, online types who don’t watch any live TV. I actually think the BBC could do with more people who inhabit and understand the web. The point is that I’d changed my whole attitude to TV. I want to watch it, and watch more of it, and the BBC is (sycophantic as it may sound) getting better at letting me watch it in the way I want to.

It took several months of me falling in love with television, but also for the BBC to improve its online offering, to make up my mind. I can now watch BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, BBC Four, BBC News, BBC Parliament and even CBBC and CBeebies (though I’m not exactly in the target demographic for those last two) live, on the web, all for 38p per day. It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally decided it’s worth it.

I wish that Channel 4 would improve their online offering. I’m happy to watch adverts (I quite like adverts For a long time it’s been part of the appeal of going to the cinema, being somewhat of a novelty to see what amazing thing Sony or Honda will do next) but I’m rather annoyed at not being able to use 4OD catchup service on my Mac though, let along watch Channel 4 live on the web. So at least I can watch Channel 4, and other channels, through the TV now.

Of course, getting properly into television means I want to watch more of all television, not just BBC content and DVDs. Strange and ironic that part of the reason I’m getting a license is to allow me to watch The Other Side(s), but it’s true.

I think our TV (a nice big flat screen job) even has a freeview receiver, but since it’s never been tuned in to the ariel since we bought it. It’s so far only been used for the Wii, Xbox 360 and Mac.

I now have to figure out how to use these additional features of this mysterious device.

Forecasting and Ideas Workshop

Posted by Roo - 20/11/08 at 12:11:35 am

The effervescent and delightful Collyn Ahart Chipperfield invited some of her friends to her (amazing) place recently to take part in ‘an evening of ideas, imagination and inspiration from the worlds of architecture, design, fashion, digital and trans-disciplinary creativity’. I was delighted to take part. She’s working on a project, and plied us with booze and food to get the most out of us in an awesome forecasting and ideas workshop.

Collyn shared a few factors she wanted us to to consider in our discussions, and we added some more. Essentially they formed the framework in which we worked. There was a long list, but here are five which particularly made me think ‘oooh’:

• connected isolation
• mediocrity through efficiency / efficiency through mediocrity
• the niche
• exclusivity vs sharing
• discovery vs creation

Before we started thinking about the future, we stared by sharing some things which inspired us. In our group, we had The Palace of Versailles, Dadaism, a Japanese album called Phantasm [?], Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, Ghanaian wristbands, a poem by Oriah Mountain Dreamer (called Invitation ‘It doesn’t interest me if… I want to know…’), Audi, The Sea, LEGO, 3G, Moo cards, Vivienne Westwood as Margaret Thatcher on the cover of Tatler, An Oak Tree by Michael Craig-Martin (a glass of water, accompanied by this text), Food, mis-matching men’s shirt, the White Horse at Uffington, a image of a first-Century Egyptian inn and an image of an Iranian Mosque.

Collyn had very effectively helped us break the ice, get to know each other and get our creative juices flowing. Next, we began to think and talk about our topic, ‘Leisure Time Spent…’, with a 5-10 year outlook. Three other groups discussed three other topics, but here are my hasty notes from our group’s conversation. I have not attributed particular thoughts to individuals, but do bear in mind this is the output from the group, and certainly not from me. I simply scribbled while we talked. (Collyn provided the sort of notepads a waiter might use, with carbon-paper so we could take our notes home and leave a copy for her. Genius!).

We started out by thinking about life in 2008, gradually moving out from there. Hold on to your hats.

1 – Recession causes:

• more sales of sex toys and pregnancy tests (apparently)
• fewer house sales
• more work for chimney sweeps
• stronger links into the community
• fewer people taking flights. more competition. cheaper flights
• people asking ‘what does it cost to get there?’ shifting to ‘what does it cost to be there?’
• more discerning around choices. more local tourism and events
• (diversion of examples of local attractions we had not all seen: cabinet war rooms, packaging museum, museum of childhood at bethnal green, ‘cybersweets’ nostalgic sweet shop, also in bethnal green?)

2 – Will the technical pace slow?

• what if it takes 10 years for us to get back to where we are now, economically?
• is technology being held back, released at the speed which we are comfortable absorbing it rather than the speed at which it is developed?

3 – Social networking has evolved:

• Facebook as the new MySpace as the new Friends Reunited
• Destroying serendipity, or increasing it? Sharing so much online makes it awkward to say the same things to someone face-to-face: have they already read it?
• handy for your extended network. close friends vs contacts
• going beyond Dunbar’s 150
• imagine Facebook in 5 years – even more sharing?
• overcoming(?) privacy fears? a new approach: will we be more honest and accountable?
• going beyond declarative living in an era of informed consent
• internet vs cctv vs oyster vs nectar
• our junk mail as a barometer of what the internet knows about us
• celebrities are no longer alone in being watched. they are a template; we’re all monitored on a smaller scale
• social media as narcissism. ‘famous for 15 people’
• display of life-streams is too me-centric. need more room for serendipity, and highlighting friends of friends rather than stuff I already know

4 – Leisure time connected/disconnected

• time out = being alone. finding nature. escaping from our highly connected lives. increasingly value time to ourselves
• escaping overload. a break from constant stimulation
• we are tired of bombardment of unnatural stimulation
• (another group raised the point that our digital lifestyle is relatively recent, but people have been going to the countryside to have ideas for a long time)

5 – Age, home and TV

• older people are acting ‘younger’. higher expectation about activity later in life
• getting married and having kids much later
• TV as an anesthetic. smalltalk rather than sharing. replacement for social interaction, or lubrication for it?

It would be unfair of me try attempt to summarise the other groups (especially as I missed the last part of the last summary, leaving rather abruptly, suddenly having realised I was going to have to run to the tube to avoid missing my train home) but what I did see of the wrap-up afterwards was very positive. Lots of ideas. Five things that really stuck with me:

• the irony of poor people living in the city centre and travel to badly paid jobs in the outskirts, while rich people life outside the city and travel to well paid jobs in the city.
• a cheaper process doesn’t necessarily make the the whole system cheaper. expensive, difficult creation processes mean we make more effort to get it right first time
• to master something, you need 10,000 hours practice. What happens when we have been using today’s tools for 10,000 hours? Will they mutate and evolve in that time?
• a hammer is technology
• we have poor memories of our own childhoods. Today’s parents have the tools to capture and catalog their children’s lives very thoroughly

That’s enough bullet points for now. I wish I could digest it better, or differently, but fortunately I can just wait for Collyn to do it. I await her output eagerly.

What do you wish you could have known, aged 15?

Posted by Roo - 16/11/08 at 06:11:51 pm

I’m going back to my old school on the 17th of December to give a short talk at their presentation evening.

They’ve asked me as someone who works in the field of technology (they’re (now) a specialist technology college) to award some prizes – some brief handshake, a smile and a word or two of congratulation – and then make a ten minute speech. It should include my recollections of my time at the school, what I gained from it, what I did at university and what I’ve worked on since, at IBM and the BBC.  And then “finally and most importantly – some words of encouragement and advice to the students”.

The factual stuff is easy, but the encouragement and advice?

I started thinking about what the 15 year old me would think of the 30 year old me. He was born in 1993, while I was born in 1978. That’s the seventies. Oh wow, he thinks I’m really old. He thinks I’m set in my ways and comfortable. He probably thinks I’m incredibly boring. He either thinks I’m totally disconnected from his life or (worse) trying too hard to be cool by talking about instant messaging and the web.

I’ve changed quite a bit in the last 15 years, but have I learned anything? And if I have, what can I tell the 15 year old me about it? And would he even listen anyway?

I think I want the 15 year old me to know that it’s OK to seek out whatever you find fun and interesting. It’s OK not to have a plan. And most of all, not to ever, ever listen to anyone who says you have too much time on your hands if you’re doing something you love.

What would you want the 15 year-old you to know?