My Motley Meanderings

This weekend I gave Fenchurch a service (at 74010 miles). While I was underneath I noticed the exhaust was on its last legs - I poked at the rusty silencer with a screwdriver and it developed a big hole. So I ordered a new two-part stainless steel exhaust from ESM. At £107 it wasn't the cheapest one available, but it is made by GS Exhausts who have a good reputation for quality and offer a lifetime guarantee. The most expensive standard exhaust I found (high-performance ones can cost even more) was £250 from P D Gough, who sounded very surprised that I could get one elsewhere for about £100. I didn't have the heart to tell him there are cheaper imported stainless systems available for £65 and mild steel ones for £40.

The new exhaust system arrived yesterday and I fitted it last night. It seems well made and it went on OK; the only fettling required was to shorten one of the mounting straps by an inch or so. As others had predicted, it is slightly louder than the old mild steel exhaust, even with the rotten silencer. I'm not too bothered (I just turn the stereo up another notch) but some people might be irritated by it. Two good things compared to the old one are the pipe doesn't touch the edge of the hole it passes through in the engine bay, and it has a good downpipe flange that hopefully won't start blowing every few hundred miles.

The plans for my Around Ireland Rally are proceeding nicely. I've put up a web page about it and have had adverts in various places. I'm working on a joint AIR/LEO flyer to hand out at MOT and the National Rally. I have been corresponding with someone from the Irish Morris Minor Owner's Club who has previously done a slightly shorter rally around southern Ireland and is interested in coming on the AIR. A couple more people sound very keen on coming with us but haven't definitely committed yet. Most of my friends list will no doubt be envious to learn that we are planning to visit The Cliffs of Insanity (AKA The Cliffs of Moher, where part of The Princess Bride movie was filmed). I've also decided we will visit Mizen Head and Malin Head (Ireland's equivalents of Land's End and John O'Groats).

I really wish I could go to this gig Madness are doing to promote their new album, The Liberty of Norton Folgate. Unfortunately it wouldn't be very practical because it's in London mid-week - I would have to take a couple of days off work to get to it.

I love the style of the advert, although it could have done with a bit more proof-reading and they have scaled it down too much for the web. "[The Liberty of Norton Folgate] Danced skanked and boggled for the cause of man and woman's need to be." Check out the video too. How many movies do you recognise?

I went to another good Phoenix Ceilidh last night; sadly it was the last one until October. The band were the excellent Hekety from Leeds. Women outnumbered men by a small but significant margin and I think the only time I failed to get a partner for a dance was when I was queueing at the bar.

It quickly got very hot and sweaty due to the warm weather. I was worried beforehand that I might run out of energy due to having given blood the day before, but if anything I felt fitter than I did last month and could probably have gone on for another hour. Slightly bemused that although I still very much regard myself as a novice, more than once people pointed at me and said, "he knows what he's doing," or complimented me on my ability to remember the steps of a dance.

We did one rather unusual and entertaining dance that had something to do with Australian politics - the person in the middle of three rows of three was 'the prime minister' who everyone else danced around and interacted with in various ways, then there was an 'election' and a different row progressed into the middle.

Next Saturday I'm off down to Antrobus for a ceilidh run by All Blacked Up.

I've decided not to buy a ticket for the O2 Arena gig Madness is doing at the end of the year, as I don't particularly want the hassle and expense of going to London for it. I just hope it won't be their only UK gig this year - the language announcing it seems deliberately ambiguous: "The only planned gig in December." The past couple of years they have done a UK tour in December.

On Saturday I drove down to Stratford upon Avon. I saw several traffic jams and accidents on the way, luckily all heading the other way to me. I went straight to the Youth Hostel, oddly having more difficulty finding it than the first time I stayed there (I think the problem was that the address says Alveston but it's not actually in the village). I grabbed a bit of lunch, then set off walking to Stratford (about four miles from the hostel). I'd gone about 2.5 miles when I realised I had forgotten the piece of paper with my theatre booking reference number on it, so I walked all the way back to the car to get it. Having wasted a lot of time already I thought I would drive into town instead, which I did, only to find that it was incredibly busy and there was nowhere suitable to park. The car parks were all full, short-stay, due to lock up early (before the end of the play), or some combination of the three. So I drove back to the hostel and did what in hindsight I should have done to begin with: caught a bus into town from the stop across the road.

Upon finally reaching Stratford, the first thing I did was to locate the cinema and buy a ticket for Iron Man. I had some time to kill before the showing so I went and got an ice cream from a street seller, then wandered around gawking at the huge number of tourists and shops selling Shakespeare-related tat (what must it be like to live and work in a tourist town?). The film was fairly good, only spoiled slightly by the very uncomfortable seat and the inane running commentary from the people sat behind me. I'm not sure it was worth sitting through the very long end credits to see the brief post-credits scene everyone has been raving about though.

Next I walked down to the theatre to pick up my ticket, only to discover that I had somehow lost the bit of paper with my booking reference on it (the one I went back to the car for earlier), probably when I took it out of my pocket in the cinema to double-check the start time. Luckily the box office let me have my ticket anyway after taking my name and swiping my credit card. It was after dinnertime by this point so I went off to find food and ended up in a fish and chip shop near the river before returning to the theatre in time for the play.

The play was a performance of The Taming of the Shrew by The Royal Shakespeare Company at The Courtyard Theatre. It was really very good; easier to follow than Henry V (the last play I saw there) and surprisingly funny. The star of the show was the brilliant Michelle Gomez as Kate (the shrew). The other actor I recognised was William Beck as Grumio. The most confusing aspect of the play was the framing device. A drunk passes out in the street and a noblewoman finds him and decides to play a practical joke by making him think he is a lord. One of the things she does is to arrange for a play to be performed for his benefit - which turns out to be the 'real' play. After a few scenes the fake lord in the outer play suddenly starts playing one of the main characters (also a lord) in the inner play. The main subject matter of the play is pretty controversial now but I think they handled it rather well. I like the theatre (though I didn't get as good a view from the seat I was in this time), the acting was polished, and the scenery and costumes were impressive. I would highly recommend going to see it, but it appears that I went to the last show and they are starting on A Midsummer Night's Dream this week. ETA: They are doing A Midsummer Night's Dream and A Merchant of Venice for the next few weeks but Taming of the Shrew returns on Tuesday the 27th.

I walked back to the hostel afterwards. The room I was in this time didn't have the noisy wooden bunks but I still seemed to sleep very lightly and woke up frequently. When it reached 6:30AM I decided to get up and have a shower before breakfast. The Stratford hostel is one of those where breakfast is included in the price (you don't get a choice about this unfortunately). Afterwards I made some sandwiches for lunch and headed off to Kenilworth Castle where people from the Morris Minor Owners' Club web forum had agreed to meet up.

I arrived before they had even opened the car park so I had to go away and park in the village for half an hour before returning. The rally seemed to go fairly well. Three travellers and two saloons turned up, plus three more people in modern cars. There was a mediaeval reenactment event going on at the castle which was rather interesting. One of the things I saw was a demonstration of mediaeval court dancing, most of which looked very dull, but they also threw in a country dance that I recognised from having done it at a ceilidh recently (albeit at about twice the speed with five times as many couples in the circle). After Kenilworth Castle we left in convoy to drive around the area but it was a bit of a shambles as we got split up two or three times. We visited an unusual windmill on a hilltop, then a very old church, before finishing up at the JLH Morris Minor garage to have a look at the customised cars they are working on.

The bank holiday Monday I mostly spent catching up with little bits and pieces of things and not getting very much of note done. I am making good progress with my route plans for the AIR and we may have picked up another participant.

Cup of Brown Joy by Elemental and Tom Caruana is hilarious.

I'm off for a cuppa now...

I've just found out about a fairly hefty discount available on the ferry to Ireland for people taking part in the Kilbroney classic car show. Unfortunately I already booked my ferry a few weeks ago at the standard economy rate that doesn't allow for cancellations. I just phoned the ferry company up and tried to talk them into switching me onto the discounted rate but they weren't having any of it. On the plus side, this may help to sway some of the people who were previously undecided about coming on the Around Ireland Rally.

After work on Friday I drove down to the_magician's place near Heathrow. There had been an accident on the M6 in the afternoon and the matrix signs were still making their proclamations of eternal doom ('long delays J16-J13' etc), but it had all cleared by the time I reached it. Incidentally, the_magician has agreed to be my co-driver/co-navigator/photographer/evening entertainment organiser for the Around Ireland Rally.

On Saturday morning we paid a visit to B&Q, unsuccessfully attempted to fix a leaky central heating pipe (hampered by the fact that the system is so bunged up we couldn't drain the water out of it), and had a look at some loose guttering, before rushing over to fifitrix's house west of London for an Odyssey 2010 committee meeting. I'm not exactly sure yet what I'm going to be doing for Odyssey but it sounds like I will have fewer responsibilities than I had for Orbital. I left at 2:45PM because I wanted to get to Poynton Ceilidh near Stockport when it opened at 7:45 - the website warned us to get there early because they only let a maximum 110 people in.

After a fast run up with only a couple of brief stops and one misread signpost, I arrived at my destination at about 7:55. It turned out that I needn't have rushed because it started off very quiet and never got really busy. Apparently there were two other ceilidhs going on elsewhere that had drawn a lot of people away. It was a friendly crowd with a reasonable mix of young and not-so-young dancers. At the start of the night there were more single blokes than single women but the ratio evened out later on. I sat out the first dance, then on the second one a girl came up and asked me to dance. After that I was lucky the rest of the evening and didn't get turned down once. The dance floor was fairly small and I imagine it could get pretty cramped if they had the full 110 people in and most of them were dancing. I was slightly disappointed that the bar felt it necessary to charge 40p per pint of tapwater, and briefly considered refilling my glass from the sink in the gents. Overall it was a good night with some fun dances. I'm not sure if I'm getting worse at dancing or getting better at noticing when I've done something wrong - some of the early dances were a bit of a mess but they got better as the night went on and people got into the swing of it. A couple of people did comment that I had 'obviously done this before.' I particularly enjoyed a rather silly dance that involved the gents from each set linking hands and dashing around the room to meet the ladies from another randomly-chosen set, then the ladies doing the same, trying to end up with matched sets (as opposed to eg. eight men in one set and none in another) before the next step of the dance.

Poynton is a fair distance away from me (it's actually in Cheshire) and I think the shortest route unfortunately involves negotiating Stockport centre, but I reckon I will go again. While I was there I picked up a flyer for a "Grand Ceilidh" in Antrobus next month - that's even further away than Poynton but it's a decent run, nearly all motorways, so I might go to that one too. On the way back I was feeling rather too smug about the number of miles I've done recently without any problems other than the sticking speedometer needle, so Fenchurch decided to start misfiring and cutting out on the M60 (the Manchester ringroad) while the rev counter went haywire. The engine never quite died completely though and I managed to nurse her the thirty miles or so home. I had a look under the bonnet this morning and found the fault in a couple of minutes - one of the wires to the coil had broken inside the insulation just before the crimped connector so it would have been making intermittent contact as the engine vibrated. I was sure it would be something simple like that - there's no computerised engine management systems to go wrong on these old engines.

Speaking of electronics going wrong, I thought my new 500GB backup disk had died because first it kept freezing, then it wouldn't even spin up. I tried swapping it into a different Firewire enclosure and it worked fine again. Either the enclosure or its power supply has died. I have had it for several years and it always worked fine with the 120GB disk it came with but when I tried putting that one back in it would no longer spin up either. Perhaps the new disk put a greater load on the power supply or something.

I was in two minds as to whether to write about this story or not. Two Italian women decided to hitchhike to Israel making friends along the way and spreading an anti-war message. As performance artists they chose to do it wearing wedding dresses, calling the trip "Brides on Tour." The pair split up in Turkey, and one of them, Pippa Bacca, was raped and killed.

I can't express how saddened I am by this outcome. It's a dreadful shame and I feel for her friends and family. What really annoys me about this story though are the people commenting that she was naive, stupid, foolish, that she somehow 'had it coming' because she was hitching alone in conspicuous clothing, and that the outcome somehow proves that, a. people (and men in particular) are inherently evil, and b. hitchhiking is suicidally dangerous.

I've never hitchhiked. This has far more to do with a persistent worry that nobody would stop for me than that I might be picked up by a maniac. I have picked hitchers up several times and will happily do it again. I would do so more often if they weren't such a rare sight in this country, I suspect largely due to media sensationalism; the very rare incidents of violence against hitchers being far more newsworthy than stories of people successfully travelling the world, meeting new people and conserving resources. Obviously you need to exercise a bit of common sense before picking someone up or accepting a lift - take a look at the hitcher/driver, ask them where they are going, and say 'no' if something feels wrong. If you're sensible, I really don't think it's significantly more dangerous than other situations where you come into contact with strangers (eg. travelling on public transport).

Pippa Bacca's story is inspirational. Not because of how her life ended, but because she believed in the inherent humanity and kindness of people everywhere. I hope her message will live on and not be tarnished by those who feed on misery and take every opportunity to shout, "I told you so!"

I know there are at least a couple of Sandy Denny fans reading my journal who will be interested in this: tonight at 22:30 on Radio 2, Bob Harris presents Who Knows Where the Time Goes - the Sandy Denny Story. It's a new documentary marking the thirtieth anniversary of her tragically early death.

ETA: That was really good. If you missed it, you should be able to get it through Listen Again soon.

This past weekend I visited Edinburgh. ( Read more... )

Google Maps is trying to be too clever for its own good. It keeps randomly assuming when I enter "Land's End" that I mean "Lands End, Twyford" unless I explicitly tell it I mean "Land's End, Cornwall".

Phoenix Ceilidhs of Horwich was brilliant. It had a completely different atmosphere to the Manchester one. There were probably a couple of hundred dancers there of all ages from five to seventy-five in a large church hall with a stage, a dance floor, a bar, and chairs and tables around the outside. There were lots of couples but a fair number of singles too and the balance wasn't wildly off (probably slightly more single women than single men), plus most of the couples were willing to dance with other partners and the band did a lot of progressive dances anyway.

I almost didn't find a partner for the first two dances, but one of the ladies organizing the event spotted me wandering around looking a bit lost and took pity on me. I didn't manage to find a partner for the second two. After that I was lucky for the rest of the night and always found a partner when I needed one. When it came to what the caller said would be the last dance of the night (actually there were two or three encores after that one), one of the young ladies there saw me going round the tables unsuccessfully asking for a partner so rushed up and grabbed me herself!

The 422 band were excellent. The caller may have overestimated our skill level somewhat - several of the dances were really complicated. He would talk us through about eight steps of a dance, then he'd say, "and now we'll learn the chorus" and it would be even more complicated than the verse! Luckily everyone was there to have a good time and nobody failed to see the funny side when people got confused and tried to do it in the wrong order or changed sex. There was a dance with five couples in a set that got everyone on the dance floor into a complete muddle, and there was another one where our set gave up trying to make sense of the steps half-way through and made up our own instead!

I lost count of how many different dances I took part in - I'd guess at least a dozen. Ceilidh dancing is very energetic so I'm aching in a lot of different places today. It was definitely worth the 35 mile drive and I certainly intend to go to the next one. Unfortunately there is only one more Phoenix ceilidh this season (on the 9th of May) before they take a six month break until the next season starts in October.

Manchester Ceilidh was disappointing. When I arrived, shortly after the posted start time, the doors were still locked. The organisers arrived after a few minutes but other dancers were slow in arriving. The second dancer to arrive was a single woman. After plucking up the courage to introduce myself I spent about fifteen minutes chatting to her before running out of small-talk and grinding to a halt. This is better than average for me.

As other dancers gradually arrived, two things became clear: it was going to be a really quiet night, and nearly everyone had brought a dance partner with them. People kept commenting on how empty the place was. At its peak there were about 25 established couples who never danced with anyone else, the aforementioned single woman (who, it transpired, was there to meet a couple of friends and didn't seem particularly enthusiastic about actually dancing), a group of about six male students, two or three other single blokes, and myself.

The band took a while to arrive and get set up (in fairness, there would have been no point in them starting earlier due to the lack of dancers). The events list on the website was wrong: Pigeon English played last month. This month it was a young Newcastle band called the Monster Ceilidh Band. They seemed technically competent but were lacking something - none of the songs felt particularly energetic or fun to me, and the dances seemed a bit dull.

I got to dance once. It was a French dance; I don't remember if the caller said what it was called but it wasn't particularly complicated, fast, intimate, or exciting in any way. I stuck around until the start of the second set but no more single women had arrived during the break and it was clear that I would be lucky to get a second dance so I sloped off home early.

I think the most positive thing I can say about it was that at least it wasn't painfully embarrassing like my one attempt at going to a dance class without a partner, and I did get one dance - it looked like most of the other single blokes there didn't get even one. All in all, it really wasn't worth driving thirty miles each way for. I'm not going to give up on ceilidhs just yet after two good experiences and one bad one, but any more people who try to tell me that dances are always short of men are likely to receive very short shrift.

I realised this morning that I hadn't backed up my home Mac Mini for a few weeks, so I kicked off a fresh clone to the external Firewire drive. The backup disk ran out of space part way through (it shouldn't really do this because the backup partition is bigger than the internal disk), so I wiped it and tried again. Naturally the machine chose this moment to totally crap out. Rebooting in single user mode revealed that the internal disk has corrupted itself in a new and entertaining fashion that fsck doesn't know how to fix[1]. I've persuaded it to boot into graphical mode again but it's acting very flaky (applications not starting or running for a bit then crashing, the whole machine randomly freezing for thirty seconds at a time...). I'm trying to back up as much data as I can to the Firewire disk before I attempt to reinstall it tomorrow. Annoyingly this is the third time this particular machine has corrupted its internal disk - I suspect it must have a hardware fault. Luckily there is very little on it that isn't also stored elsewhere.

ETA: Google suggests the disk error code I'm getting basically means "the disk is about to die." I'd better order a replacement in the morning...

( [1]... )

( I've been working on Lintilla today... )

Check out the latest Hijinks Ensue comic strip.

I went to the caving club again tonight, climbed up and down all the rope pitches in the training tower, and found them all dead easy so came back home. I need to arrange to go on a real trip soon but it will have to be something easy to start with because it's been years and years since I used to go regularly.

Here is a video from the Jonathan Coulton gig I went to recently, showing him performing Code Monkey with a Tenori-on as well as his trademark guitar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCZeb83i2DE

At Orbital 2008 last weekend I directed another episode of Torchwood Wobblevision. For the uninitiated this involves randomly choosing an episode of Torchwood from a selection of pre-prepared scripts, casting the characters pretty much at random, staging each of the key scenes in places around a convention hotel using any props that happen to come to hand, taking photos of them, and posting them on the web as a captioned slide show. I stole the idea from Blake's 7 Wobblevision to do at Year of the Teledu and it was so much fun that I volunteered to do it again.

So, without further ado, I present Day One.

We ran into a few teething troubles related to casting but I have some ideas for ways to make the scripts easier to work with in the future. The crowded social space we were working in and the fact that we overlapped with one of the most popular items of the whole weekend caused some slight problems but I think the end result turned out pretty well, I had lots of fun doing it, and I'd like to thank the cast (especially Carys) for being such great sports.

In case you missed the one we did at YotT, it was Cyberwoman.

I have already volunteered to do another episode at Redemption 2009 and could easily be persuaded to do it at other cons I'm going to if you give me a bit of notice to sort out the scripts in advance.

Monday from about 9AM to 3:30PM was spent rushing around finishing things off in the workshop and getting prepared for the Great Crystal Cyberdrome Exhibition. SMS and Eira presented two guided tours while Cuil sabotaged the monorail, then suddenly it was 5PM and I had to rush off to the closing ceremony. watervole and the_magician thanked loads of people by name, then asked everyone who had helped in some way to run the con (including gophers and panellists) to stand up - that turned out to be roughly two thirds of us. Back down to Newbury where we spent the next couple of hours first shifting all the exhibits back to the workshop room, then sorting, packing, and clearing everything out of the room (the hotel wanted it back the next day).

When I came back to the dead dog party after dinner I staggered around for a few minutes in a bit of a daze thinking, "is it over already? what happened? I've only been to one panel item!" before twinfair nabbed me and sent me on a quest to remove the posters from the walls all over the hotel. After finishing that, Vince handed me a small fortune in spare groats! With only a few hours left to spend them, I bought a drink for myself and one for Bazooka, attempted to buy one for Mad Elf (the bar had run out of cider), then came to the conclusion that I was never going to get rid of them at that rate and it really wasn't worth stressing out about it, so I went and handed most of them to a poor student who no doubt was able to find a productive use for them.

I'm back home now and have unloaded Fenchurch. There was one incident of Lorry Rage[1] on the way home. I would like to know who the person in the Volvo estate was who waved at me as they passed, then did it again a couple of hundred miles later. I'm not sure if they were somebody from Eastercon or just a random Morris Minor enthusiast. ETA: That was feorag.

How to summarise Orbital? Having worked on it for over two years (since before I went to my first Eastercon!) I have so many different feelings that I don't think I can adequately articulate them. It seemed to go pretty well from the comments I've heard. We had possibly the biggest Eastercon programme ever, and the highest membership count for over twenty years. The highlights for me personally were the ceilidh, the Beer Hunt sketch in the cabaret, Mitch Benn's act, and directing the second episode of Torchwood Wobblevision. I really hope we can have ceilidhs again at future Eastercons - it's such a fun social thing to do, much more so than a disco in my opinion. I'm already planning to do more episodes of Torchwood Wobblevision and have some ideas for ways to make it run a bit smoother.

The post-con blues haven't hit yet (that will probably come tomorrow when I have to go back to work) but the post-con lurgy has already begun to attack my throat. I'll try to get Torchwood Wobblevision posted up within the next day or two. I have registered my interest in helping out with Odyssey 2010 - watch this space. Finally, I'd just like to say get well soon to multiclassgeek and tracey_jane!

[1] When I'm doing a long journey I tend to cruise along behind a lorry, keeping pace with it for long periods of time. It's less stressful and more economical than constantly overtaking. Often another lorry will creep up behind me at less than 1 MPH faster than the lorry in front, and the driver will decide to overtake. For some reason they expect me to slow down so as to open a gap for them instead of continuing to keep pace with the lorry in front. Sometimes they get quite pissed off when I don't, especially if the gap in front of me increases and I speed up to close it again. One of them today gave me a long blast on the horn and flashed his headlights several times when he realised his speed-limiter wouldn't allow him to go fast enough to overtake a Morris Minor.

The bid session took place first thing on Sunday morning so I headed there instead of the BC workshop. There was one bid - Odyssey 2010 - which consisted of gaspodia, watervole, Fiona Scarlett, and gaspodex. They explained they wanted to come back to the Radisson again in 2010, and that the hotel had offered them Orbital's contract as a starting point, including the same room and drinks rates. Starting membership rates would be £35. A vote was taken and it passed with an overwhelming majority. The main guests of honour so far are Alistair Reynolds, Liz Williams and Mike Carey, with frandowdsofa and johannes_d as the fan guests. Let's do it again in 2010!

I spent most of the day in the workshop again, escaping for a short while to look around the art show, then head down to the dealers' room to join Odyssey, Satellite 2, and Albacon 2010, which I don't know much amount about except cuddles_batcave appears to be involved. I also tried to buy a T shirt with SMS's Orbital artwork on it but they'd already sold out of my size so I had to place an order for them to post me one later.

In the evening I went to the play, then I stayed on for the Mitch Benn set, which was absolutely hilarious. He was still going strong when I had to duck out to go and run Torchwood Wobblevision. I was a bit nervous but not as badly as the first time I did it, at Year of the Teledu. We got enough main cast members despite most of the con still being at Mitch Benn, though a couple of the extras got used several times. I made one mistake in that I cast somebody as Rhys, then cut the one scene Rhys was in. Oops! That character should have been down as an extra in the script. Next time I do this I'm going to have to reformat the scripts to make them easier to use (eg. grouping the scenes by setting would reduce the amount of running back and forth). Everyone involved certainly seemed to have a lot of fun. I've had a quick look at the photos and they seem to have come out pretty well (for a Wobblevision). I'll get them edited and uploaded as soon as I have a chance.

Afterwards I hung around for a while then went to my first panel item of the con: "What is Sci-Fi?" I must admit I wasn't particularly interested in the topic of the panel, but it was interesting to see they had adopted the Redemption tradition of heavy panel/audience interaction (rather than the usual "questions at the end").

I spent most of Saturday looking after the BC workshop again, finally escaping for some food at about 6PM. After dinner I went to the combined masquerade and cabaret. Eira and SMS's "We're Going on a Beer Hunt" sketch made me laugh so hard I ran out of breath! The opera singer (at her first con I believe) was incredible. Unfortunately the cabaret overran and I didn't want to duck out before the end so I missed Blake's 7 Wobblevision. Afterwards I chilled out in the fan lounge for a while until it got pretty late and I was having trouble staying awake.

I've just opened the bedroom curtains on Sunday morning and it's snowing outside! OK, it's really feeble southern snow - the odd flake that melts as soon as it touches the ground - but I can't complain too much. At least it's not a heatwave.

After getting to bed well after 1AM on Friday morning I got up again before 7AM and headed off to breakfast. It seems that if you get there early (it's open before the official 8AM start time) you get seated in the brasserie instead of the overflow area, and they have actual fried eggs! After breakfast I tried to get a key for the cyberdrome workshop room from Ops but nobody was up yet, so I wandered around the hotel a bit and got chatting to asphodeline who had volunteered to be Neil Gaiman's assistant for the weekend was waiting in the foyer for him to arrive.

watervole got me a key so I went and unpacked the workshop and spent ages taping two layers of newspaper onto the wooden table, then assembling the basic structure of the City of the Future. The fact that it was a wooden table should have rung alarm bells - the reason we'd agreed to take that room was because on the site visit it had an unmovable glass table in it and the other one didn't, and Chaos Costume wanted to be able to move the table out of the way and work on the floor. The costumers arrived later on and immediately noticed that their room had a giant glass table in it: yes, the hotel had moved it since the site visit (I'm pretty sure they assured us they weren't going to put any more glass tables in before the con - they obviously thought it wasn't worth mentioning they were going to move an existing one). Anyway, we got everything swapped over and it doesn't seem to have caused too much confusion (though the newsletter somehow got an incorrect notice in it saying we'd moved into the other room on that corridor).

At 2PM I escaped from the workshop and went to the ceilidh training session. They started out slowly walking us through various steps and worked up to some faster dances. It was two hours long and energetic at times so I was pretty tired by the end - not good considering the real Ceilidh was later that evening. Most of the steps didn't sink in but the practise was useful and I picked up some useful tips. The people running the session were trying to teach us the steps to an English dance they didn't know from some instructions on a sheet of paper, and at one point they turned two pages over at once and got everyone on the floor into a complete muddle. As a nice bonus there were about twice as many women as men there so no trouble finding a partner!

In the evening after some dinner and the opening ceremony was the ceilidh itself. It was brilliant fun. I really should try to find a local dance I can go to. I danced for hours with many different partners and was completely knackered by the end. A special mention must go to helenex and munchkinstein who were spinning at double the speed of everyone else! After the ceilidh I wandered around for a bit wondering where everyone had gone (I hadn't realised it was after 1AM) and arborophile called me into the games room to play Werewolves. I didn't know the rules so I was trying to figure them out as the game progressed, while (successfully) hiding the fact that I'd been given one of the Werewolf cards!

As I write this on Saturday morning, it is hard to believe that the con only officially opened about twelve hours ago. It seems to be going pretty well so far as I can see.

After spending all day Wednesday sorting out the stuff for the Beyond Cyberdrome workshop and packing it into Fenchurch, I got up at 4AM on Thursday and headed off down to London. There were no major problems on the motorways (just a bit of congestion around Birmingham) and I arrived at about 10AM and spent a while helping to stuff registration packs before I had to leave and catch the tube into London to meet hermi_nomi at the Theatre Royal and see the Lord of the Rings musical. I was a bit nervous about getting lost on the underground or in the streets of London but actually it was fine and I had time to stop for a hot dog in Leicester Square.

The musical was worth seeing once. The live special effects (especially the giant robotic stage) were really spectacular. Unfortunately the songs were nothing special, and the plot really suffered from being condensed to less than three hours. I complained about all the stuff they had to leave out of the movies but the musical was much worse. Huge chunks were just skipped over. The part where Frodo was stabbed by a black rider occurred in the Prancing Pony. Later on Galadriel was singing about Lothlorien, then suddenly we were in the scene were Boromir tries to take the ring from Frodo. Among the more significant missing characters were Faramir and Eowyn. They never travelled the Paths of the Dead, never visited Minas Tirith, and we didn't get to see most of the important battles. I'm probably being too picky. As others have said, it may be more enjoyable for those who have never read the books or seen the movies (which also left things out but nowhere near as much as the musical). And there is the trouble - the people who enjoy this type of story have probably already experienced it in a better version. The songs and the acting could have made up for it, but unfortunately they didn't.

After the musical I walked back to Leicester Square and had a very nice pizza in an Italian restaurant, then got back on the tube and headed up to Camden for the Jonathan Coulton gig at Dingwalls. Shortly after leaving the tube station I was stopped by johncoxon, flickgc, and others who were waiting for somebody else. We walked up to the venue as a group and arrived nice and early, to find that there was already a huge queue in the yard outside. While we waited, aardvark179, ffutures, and several others arrived and joined our group - there were probably about 20 of us there who were also members of Orbital. The gig itself (once it finally got started) was absolutely brilliant. Jonathan Coulton is a really funny guy, not just in the songs he writes but in the banter between the songs, and the ad-libbed changes making fun out of the Americanisms in his lyrics. At one point he announced he was going to do a Christmas song, so we were all expecting Christmas is Interesting or Chiron Beta Prime, but instead he launched into an impromptu rendition of Feed the World, ad-libbing new lyrics as he went along. Hilarious. It was a very geeky crowd and everyone got really into it, singing along and cheering. Afterwards aardvark179 and I headed back on the tube and arrived at the hotel sometime after 1AM.

That's enough for now; I'll catch up with Friday's report while I'm supervising the BC workshop.

Here is a sneak preview of my entry for The Great Crystal Cyberdrome Exhibition that will be held at Orbital 2008 next week. ( Read more... )

Anyone fancy going to see the Lord of the Rings stage show with me in London's West End at 2PM next Thursday? The cheapest seats are £16 each. ETA: Tickets booked!

I just read in the newspaper that it's only running until July and it sounds like a really impressive production. They're having to move out of the theatre early to make way for the new Oliver production that is going to be cast via a BBC reality show.

I have a work mobile. I almost never get called on it - it's just there in case something goes badly wrong with a client's systems while I'm out of the office. Something quite odd just happened. ( Read more... )

The brilliant geek singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton is playing a gig at Dingwalls in London on Thursday the 20th of March. That's the day before Orbital 2008 opens, so I'll already be in London for the con setup!

I've just booked my ticket. If there are several of us at the con hotel on Thursday who want to go to the gig and can tear themselves away for the evening we could travel as a group. Tickets are £15 + a £1.80 booking fee. Better book your ticket soon if you want to come because I expect it will sell out when the word gets around.

I've just realised that I haven't posted yet about getting the new Morris Minor home. In fact I've hardly posted at all in the past couple of weeks. I must try to remedy that - it's not that I'm doing nothing, it's that I'm not getting around to writing about it. ( Read more... )