Fat Lil's in Witney

I had heard about the 'One Night Stand' Open Mic night from a friend who is a comedian/poet but came across this article whilst browsing the Witney Gazette:
One Night Stand Invites All Talents (from Witney Gazette)

We are not really involved with our local community yet and it has always been somethign we have meant to be. 'Local' people.

Also, I have always meant to try my hand at stand-up since it's somethign I hear alot "you should be in stand-up". Maybe I should try it out and see. It takes a lot of work though.

I am reading Richard St John's book "Stupid, Ugly, Unlucky and Rich" and one of the quotes I notice is by Chris Rock who said "I was never the funniest kid at school, but I was the kid who work the hardest at being funny." Which I think about summarises my struggle with humour too. I was always facinated by it. What made people laugh. I am constantly amazed at the craft of such people as Barry Humphries, Eddie Izzard and even Bob Monkhouse who just seem to be able to effortlessly wind an audience up and bring them into their world of humour.

Anyway, see you at Fat Lil's on Weds 23 May!

technorati tags:comedy

Blogged with Flock

Icelandic Flickr Member of note

0474-03
Originally uploaded by johannes asgeir.

I had Johannes comment on the composition of a shot of Joy in Pinsley Woods on my Flickr account. But taking a look at his pictures I am amazed! Their so beautiful. Such colour and vibrancy. There's a genius behind these images. Johannes obviously has an amazing eye and talent.

TED: Rick Warren

Rick Warren is the pastor of Saddleback Church in the States whom I have read and listened to for years. I was really surprised to find that there was a presentation by him on the TED site. Rick wrote a book called The Purpose Driven Life that was incredible successful. Here he gives an account of that book and why he wrote it.

Charity Shop DJ - Vinyl Saves

My Brother's blog has a post about Andy Jupp's Charity Shop DJ site. Specifically about the gallery of people with their favourite recovered-from-charity-shop vinyl album in their hands. (And an exhibition of the photos in Paddington - see Jim Byford's blog)

What a fantastic idea!

The site brings to mind the Saturday mornings that I would spend in my teenage years trawling through the second hand record shops of Notting Hill Gate with my mates Seb, John AA and Larry. We would dig out obscure records that we had heard mention of in Guitarist magazine and get them for 50p or whatever because one of the vinyls was missing from a two lp set or because the front cover was torn in half. Then I would bring them home and show them to my mum and brother who would usually have some piece of information about the album I had just bought.

Still trying to think of which album I would love to be 'foto'd wid.

Did consider the The Police but I see this guy got there before me and his picture is way cooler than mine would be.

Remember buying this album for my uncle Tim's birthday and then being thrilled when he said I could 'look after' it for him. Hey, I was young and hadn't got out of the buying-stuff-for-myself-for-other-peoples-birthdays phase. Not sure I'm out of it now...

technorati tags:vinyl

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Free Playstation3 with mobile

Was on the Carphone Warehouse website a few moments ago and noticed a deal that offered the above mobile with a free Playstation3. This is the console that costs about £475. An you cn get it free with this phone. Wow! But, before you go clicking on the picture and checking out the offer I'd better mention that the plan you are signing up for costs £75 per month. I wonder if it's one of those plans you can downgrade after 3 months?

technorati tags:deals, mobiles

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Three system snap

I was doing a remote meeting/presentation on Monday (after spending the entire night preparing!). The meeting was in Venray, Netherlands, I was in Oxford and another of my colleagues was in New York State. I took this snapshot when the guy in the States was presenting.

I was on a Vista laptop running a Win 2k VM image running a WebEx session over a VPN:

Vista -> Win2k (VM) -> XP (WebEx)

All that whilst attending the conference call on Skype.

Earlier I was logged on to a remote desktop remote controling another session. So that would be:

Vista -> Win2k (VM) -> Win Server 2k3 (RDP) -> Win Server 2k3 (RC)

All off one laptop. Now that's impressive!

"Dude, you're such a multi-machine wizard, dude!"

I'm such geek! :)

Firefox Unusable

Unfortunately, I recently had to stop using Firefox. Not sure why but the browser just kept on hanging for a few seconds and then continuing. It kept doing this everytime a new page was loaded and just got unbearable. It does not seem to be the case with Flock with is based on the same Mozilla Core as Firefox so I have taken to using that as my main browser.

It's just so frustrating when you have an issue like that and don't have the time to debug. All the URLs I found whilst searching for online support were talking about doing things I had already done such as turning off all the extensions, running in safe-mode and even a post on how to write a batch script to kill the Firefox process task manager when it hangs. I mean, the mind boggles. Why keep on using the browser if it keeps hanging?

Thank goodness for Flock.

Anyway... maybe it's something to do with Vista. Yes, I have my new laptop. Surprisingly very little has troubled me about it so far. I haven't yet written about it as I have been busy working on it. More about Vista later.

Mobile Anti-theft Feature

In case you haven't seen this one...

New TED site

There's a new TED site going live later today. You can register and become a small part of the TED community for free.

One of the things I like about the new site is the inclusion of embed code for talks (though they it's certainly a clipboard full). So I am able to publish the following video of Richard St John's excellent Success talk on my site.

You can view my profile (I think) at http://www.ted.com/index.php/profiles/view/id/2535

Look forward to exploring this site some more. Plenty of great stuff there.



Update- probably worth noting that I had add a closing 'embed' tag so that Blogger would publish the post. Not the first time I've had this issue. Whose fault is that? Blogger or TED?