Run Zombie, Run!

Have you ever wondered what a cross between Simon Pegg's Shaun of the Dead and Run Fatboy, Run would produce?

No, me neither, but today I discovered what the result could look like as RoadRunner* kindly pointed out that the pics are in on the Great Run website, so now the world and his mum can see the full horror for themselves!

Number seven says it all really...


* Unfortunately, RoadRunner has stopped blogging, but you can still check out her pics with race number 35018 ;-)

Done and Dusted

Well, the curtain has been called and the set dismantled for another three-and-a-half months as our production of "A Murder is Announced" closes with a record audience number of around 130!!

Henderson Hall is not a particularly large place and we generally have a maximum audience of 100, but due to so many advanced bookings for the Friday and Saturday nights, we had to put a couple of extra rows out.  Everyone has been astounded :-)

I think it is safe to say that everyone felt Saturday night's performance was bugged by a few little gremlins, but everyone took it in their strides and the feedback from the audience was that it was a very enjoyable production, so smiles all round!

As a way of saying thanks to the cast and crew, the producer managed to sneak some little gifts up to the dressing room for when the play closed and we all piled in full of the highs of a complete production ... I now have my very own Oscar!  LOL

My first ... and final ... 'Oscar'!!

Some of you are probably wondering how the kiss went as I was originally a little concerned about the age difference between myself and the girl I was to be kissing.  Poor girl!

Well, I thought it went well and certainly the audience enjoyed it, the first night eliciting a sinister 'Ooooooh!', whilst the following two evenings were a fair bit livelier and included a few cheers and wolf-whistles that came close to putting us off, but we managed to save our laughter until we had left the stage.  

Then she uttered those immortal words: "Well, at least we won't have to do that again!"

Hmm.

Everybody Ready?

Whoever coined the phrase "Out of the frying pan and into the fire" wasn't far wrong!

No sooner am I back from the Great North Run than I am straight into final rehearsals for the next production by the Centralian Players, "A Murder is Announced", a fifty-year celebration for one of the group's members. Fifty years!

That's a long time to dedicate to a hobby - I usually get bored after just a couple! :-)

After three days of technical rehearsals that ranged from absolute disaster* to pretty good run-through, we finally opened last night and that's when the nerves finally hit. Its fine when its just the group of you that learned the script together, but add an audience to the mix and my stomache suddenly starts somersaulting like a clumsy trapeze artist.

In fact, its starting its little routine again as I sit here typing this!

Andrex is making a mint out or me right now.


* Tuesday's technical rehearsal was the worst to date. That said, I haven't laughed so much in a long time!

Run Fatboy, Run!

Okay, not so much fatboy as love-handle boy, but the Great North Run 2008 was still a challenge!

As per usual, I was a little late booking a place to stay but was incredibly lucky to find a characteristic little guest house called Bush Nook about a month beforehand, situated along the A69 between Carlisle and Newcastle.

My little bed - very comfy! Slept like a log!

The shower/toilet room - where I broke the flush :-$

Some of the room's character :-)

Due to the bad weather on the way up on Saturday, I was rather late arriving and the owners were starting to wonder if I would arrive at all. I did ... seven hours after I set off. I know I'm not a speedy driver, but that's a long time even for me.

The forecast was that there would be showers on the Sunday morning, so I had made sure that I had a suitable running jacket. I didn't need it. When I opened the curtains first thing Sunday morning I was greeted with a view that made me long to live in the hills:

Imagine waking up to this first thing in the morning...
*sigh*

Okay, it was in the middle of nowhere, but soooooooo peaceful!!

Ask anyone I went to school with and they will eagerly tell you I was the least athletic or sport-oriented person they had ever met, prefering to hide behind my asthma wherever I could get away with it. Just the thought of a games session would make my lungs start wheezing like a clogged up extractor fan.

I think even my sports teacher thought I was a lost cause ... I was not a sporty person!

Okay, I can argue that I am still not a sporty person, but at least I can now hold my own with Mr Average Runner. Despite the inability to run for 1.5 weeks beforehand, I still managed to knock around three minutes off my 2006 time, coming in at position 21,497 out of 52,000 with an official time of 2:14:40 - a vast improvement for me considering I was always last in the cross country run at school!!

If you fancy checking out the rest of the stats, why not pop over to the Great Run Results page and search for race number 25261 ... see, I really did it :-D

To top it all, people have been more generous than ever before and donated over £500 for Marie Curie Cancer Care, so thank you to you all for your generosity ... which leaves me with just one more thing...

As promised, this run was dedicated not just to members of my own family who have left us, but also to those people whose families donated in memory of them:

Arthur Lesley Coleman

Michael Parker

Delmira Goncalves Carreia Gomme

Adrian Worsman

Marilyn Trower

They will be missed.

Where'd ya go??

A year or so ago, I wrote a rather harsh review of the cappucinos made by a new smoothie bar that had opened in Tring, called Smooth ... and no, I'm not adding any links to that post as I am quite ashamed of how harsh I was!

However, that didn't actually stop me from going there most lunchtimes to grab a smoothie and cookie for lunch: prior to M&S opening there, it was the only place to get anything reasonably healthy without hiking out of town to the little Tesco store.

With the opening of M&S, all the good food options started appearing, so Smooth, Sandwich Plus and Tesco were all pushed to the back of my mind.

Smooth re-opened after a short refurbishment period, but something seemed to be wrong. You couldn't guarantee from one day to the next that it would be open. Pretty much every other day, there would be a sign in the window stating that it was closed due to staff sickness, somewhate ironic considering the nature of the business!

Then finally, during the summer break and a couple of weeks after I started going back for the smoothies, it closed. No warning, no notice, just a series of black sacks stuck to the windows.

As Shaggy once said: It wasn't me!!

IT Certainty Principle: Part Two

In the previous post, I introduced you to what can only be termed the ultimate law of the IT Certainty Principle:

For any piece of IT work, the chance of implementing that work is inversely proportional to the amount of effort involved.

This is, essentially, a law that defines the likelihood of a project being shelved. However, there are a series of other laws that you need to get through before this ultimate law can define the final fate of the project.

The penultimate of these is one that I see all too often on projects and jobs that have the dreaded 'NOW' deadline:

For any piece of IT work, the closer the deadline and the higher the priority of the work, the greater the occurrence of system issues and general interruptions.

You all know what I mean by this!

You either have a project that is closing in on the deadline with lots still to do, or you have just been handed a piece of work that needs to be done 'NOW'. All of a sudden, your computer - which was running fine up to this point - starts behaving like an insolent child, doing everything at hyper-slow speed and even chucking a few programme crashes into the mix.

Then, in the middle of all this, you get bombarded by telephone calls from individuals who decide that they must have your assistance at that very second, and then proceed to keep you on the phone for an inordinate amount of time whilst telling you about all the details they are putting into an email to you: you'd be amazed how many people do that!!

In the very worst of circumstances, it is the servers that decide enough is enough and give up the ghost whilst you are in the middle of doing something critical.

It is exactly this last point that happened earlier this week.

We had spent innumerable hours transferring data from a series of text files into an Oracle database when the server we were using screamed out "I QUIT!" and promptly seized up - admittedly, something I've been feeling like doing myself for the past couple of weeks!!

Unfortunately, this was the only local machine with the setup required. The only other machine with a similar setup was in another office fifteen miles away and there were no spare machines available to duplicate the setup locally ... cue fourteen hours of data transfer.

Of course, there is the odd project that bucks the trend, they just tend not to come my way!!