Archive for November, 2006

Growing older

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

Sometimes things happen which make you feel immensely old. A prime example happened yesterday. I was on a train with a non-zero number of attractive, young, sparky ladies where we having a discussion about the pointless re-branding that occurs in this capitalist world of ours. The usual discussion of ‘Starburst’ vs. ‘Opal Fruits’ arose with a tedious air of inevitability and I chimed in with “and don’t forget Marathons!”.

The sight of 10-or-so fresh-faced young people looking at you with complete bewliderment is not a pleasant one. It transpired very few of these people have ever known the peanut and chocolate confectionary bar by any other name than ‘Snickers’.

“But,” I persisted, “they only changed name like 5 or 6 years ago!”. It transpires that the name change was in 1990, when some of these people were three fscking years old! It saddens me that there are adults in the world that can’t view the brain popper which is the ‘Snickers Marathon‘ without wondering what life would be like if it were the ‘Marathon Marathon’.

Posted in CULES, Funny, Life, Rants | No Comments »

Pantoland

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

Yesterday was the first performance of the CULES panto. Almost everything went well. We all arrived at the venue, got changed, knew our lines (mostly). The one fly in the ointment was that neither the main music CD, nor the independently burned backup CD, wanted to play on the night. The show went on using the inspired musical accompaniment of a Kazoo.

Said merry making has not helped my mood of late however. This past month I’ve found myself more often on the verge of tears than not and generally very, very down. I suspect the dark evenings and general tiredness. Despite this I shall be attempting to make people laugh tonight on the ADC stage.

Finally I’ll be being interviewed on the CUR 1350 Arts Show tomorrow (Thursday) so do all of you tune in. Pimping your own show on the radio, eh? First rung of the slippery ladder to reality-show stardom that is…

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Crazy social life

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

For some strange reason my social life is immensely over-booked at the moment. Take tomorrow for example, technically I have agreed to go to 3 social events at 3 pubs spread around Cambridge. Argh!!!

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What I do

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

Next time someone asks what my job is I can just point them to an appropriate article with enough lies to children in to sound good. Even I think what we do sounds exciting in this article :).

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Bad Mood

Monday, November 13th, 2006

I am in an incredibly bad mood today. Work was very stressful and the ADC are being idiotic over poster design. Just a heads up to any publicity people out there; if you ask for a look at a poster to check it over for content and someone sends you a 200×400 jpeg as a preview then that is probably not the full print resolution. Even a complete fuckwit wouldn’t try to print a 200×400 image at A3…

Posted in Rants | No Comments »

Sigh

Sunday, November 12th, 2006

I’ve just been browsing some details on the guest OS feature of the PS3. Annoyingly everything is done via a hypervisor. Even more annoying is the following (emphasis added):

PS3 has a powerful graphic processing unit with high speed host connection. The GPU is connected to both HDMI and AV multi interface. Although the GPU is connected directly to CBE, no direct access by guest OSes to the GPU is allowed currently. Video mode/format setting is also the role of AV setting driver. PS3 Linux fb driver calls AV setting driver to setup video modes.

Currently X server uses virtual frame buffer to render its image. No hardware acceleration is supported under Linux.

Now admittedly the PS3’s GPU is nothing speical compared with what you can buy off the shelf for a couple of hundred quid, most of the excitement should be generated from the Cell, but the above restriction is just annoying!

Posted in Hardware, Rants, Technology | No Comments »

His given name is Richard

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

In improv we have the concept of a ‘bag’. A ‘bag’ is a joke which is not funny in itself but is funny because it is designed to be shocking and offensive and hence creates humour by its unexpected occurrence. Generally we try to avoid ‘bagging’ because

  1. It is an easy, cheap laugh;
  2. They tend to stop a scene in its tracks and
  3. I feel the best comedians have always been those that can be put on a Saturday morning TV show for kids and still be genuinely funny.

The comedy God Mr Richard Herring recently wrote about ad-libbing in standup. His example has to be the most outrageous bag in the Universe. Sexually, morally and religiously offensive. At least it wasn’t racist :). Given the subject of the set it wasn’t out of place however.

It did raise an interesting point. People think ad-libbing is hard. Far from it. Given an object and an action it should be fairly easy to come up with an example of someone who shouldn’t be performing that action. Everyone has a large bank of shared knowledge about people, experiences and objects so merely moving to the opposite side of the database, so to speak, for comic effect can’t be that hard can it?

Posted in Funny, Improv | No Comments »

Burnination

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

I have just returned from attempting to burn down a small portion of Grantchester meadows. We sucessfully managed to construct man’s second most primitive invention (after masturbation) and soon a fire was indeed burning. Prior to the burning, a selection of people could be seen wandering near to Grantchester gathering almost an entire tree to construct said small fire.

Lost of smothering vegetables in butter, then tinfoil, then roasting happened. The obligatory marshmallow was toasted. Foiled terrorist plot thus sufficiently celebrated, we went back to Caius to watch the Lion King (at which my presence was mandatory having not seen it before) with pizzas from Ask.

I am now back home with legs slightly sore from having walked from my house to Grantchester, Caius and back again in the span of one evening. And so to bed…

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Tiredness

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

Well the show last night was fun. I was a bit below form and am knackered now but generally I enjoyed it. Now the panic before the 4-nighter at the end of November can really start.

Posted in Improv, Life, Social | No Comments »