French food for dreams

I'm off to Cannes for an intense week in April, as I'm attending the MipTV and Milia. The main themes for the five conference days are known but the speakers are yet to be announced.

And right outside Cannes, there's a lovely paeonia garden, La Villa Noailles. I do hope I can arrange time for a stop there! It's my dream to run a lush, green, quiescent garden where peonies would grow throughout the season starting early spring and ending in autumn. I'd run a small café with sherry, gâteaus and orange liquor, with tables only for two or three parties maximum. It's intentionally not a very profitable enterprise, rather it's the spirit, l'esprit of it. Hopefully, I get a bit of nurture in Cannes for my dream.

Dating

I feel like a polar bear squinting against the sun after months of hibernation. Or in my case, weeks. I've been busy with a client's audience research and yesterday, after days of collecting data and analyzing it, the conclusions were finalized and the report was handed over. In such projects, I do nothing but devote my time to that, I don't check my calender to see what's up next month or follow up on interesting links I get. I'm "live by the hour" and "carpe diem" personalized. But now, when there's time for dating, that is to cruise around in the digital calender, I notice there's a lot of interesting things going on.

• The conference on Media Literacy, in which I participate with a poster, is taking place here at my university in two days. There's a blog too for posting ideas and sharing experiences during the conference, which is a great idea! I wish there were more digital meeting spaces around events taking place off-line.
  

• The date of the conference that my colleagues are organizing, Eyes on iTV, is also hurdling towards us. Registration is still open.

• I'm off to Amsterdam in two weeks, for the EuroITV conference. Makes me kind of wonder, where was I during the spring? It feels like it's 2 months or so away. I guess I need to start preparing for it.
  

• The deadline for submitting abstracts to the Virtual conference is 15th of May. More here.

• And regrettably, my loan of the excellent but yet half unread book Psychology of Entertainment is way too soon due. Which, by the way, is an excellent excuse to occupy the cozy sofa in our lab :)