Relocation....

I have moved this blog across to Wordpress - http://nailingjelly.wordpress.com/ - so this will be the last post here, and the entire blog may be deleted later.

Theatrical Going Ons

Currently the theatre is dark - there is 4 weeks of work being done on the heating system (conveniently in one of the colder periods).

A week back I did my first show of the year - a dance show with a company that I haven't worked with before, although thats not too suprising since they only put a show on in alternate years. This dance school was fun to work with - well behaved, hard working and technically very good, however it was hard work because the staging aspects - lighting and set requirements - were being revealed to us as we went along.

However it was a good start to the year - next show is very different - Up and Under, which will be far more of a straight comedy play, but is likely to be quite creative in what they are doing. I hope to get to one of their rehearsals in the next week or so and get an idea of whats needed.

The Return

Hmm.. it's been a while. A very long while in fact.
However I think I will resurrect this blog - I did wonder about quietly killing it and starting another rather than have the embarassment of an 18 month gap in posting, but I'll live with that for now.
We can at least see where it goes from here.

Still tired...

So we finished the run of How To Succeed In Business... last night with a pretty good performance, followed by one of the best aided get-outs I have ever seen - we had a good sized bunch of people helping, cheerfully, get the set out, everything cleaned up, and finally repainting the stage floor - the stage surface is hardboard with normally a coat of graphite grey paint on it, if someone wishes it a different colour for a show we have to return it to normal afterwards.

The real shame is that, despite a stonking show, lots of energy and really good staging and set, the audiences were disappointing because (we believe) its not a well recognised show (despite being a real big one back in the 60's).

Afterwards we had a post show party - pie and peas. And then I collapsed into bed, and still feel fairly zomby-like today.

More Bees

I'm back in theatre again - this time to stage manage a production of How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The bees are also back. There were many wandering around and dying on stage in the morning - then I found one on a cloth I was tying up to a flying bar (it didn't like being found and stung me).
Setting lights was a problem because the things are attracted to them when on - my colleague also picked up a sting then.
Later we rigged an insect killer up on a flying bar near the root - it appeared to be picking up a large number of victims.
These are supposed to be Masonry Bees - which apparently are unable to penetrate human skin. However several of us were stung. Hopefully the maintenance guys can do something about them after the weekend.

Not Happy Mac

My MacBook has managed to trash my preferences again - not too drastic maybe, except that also means its lost all my Mail settings (glad the mail itself is on imap) and all the calendar settings including the actual entries....

It looks like changing the video setup whilst it is suspended is a good way to break things - suspend then unplug the external video and open it up again without the external video, and it can hang. Suspend without external video, plug it in, then unsuspend and again it can hang - to the extent that I had to force a power off and restart it.... at which point when logging in again a bunch of things had gone.

Normally I log out when transferring from office to home or back, today I had quit all the applications, but not logged out, so it used that as an excuse to trash things.

Pulling back the main preferences files (in Library/Preferences) from my backups (taken this morning, but on a live system) seems to have got most things back, but its a pain I could do without. Hopefully I should only have lost a couple of calendar entries and a bit of time - could have been so much worse.

Backup on a Mac is also a pain - well it is if you have an encrypted home directory, which seems like a reasonable thing to do on a laptop. How do you get a quiescent filesystem to work with. Maybe Time Machine will fix this.

But this should not happen!!!

Whats the point of NewsForge

I mean, if I want to read linux.com I can go there, so whats the point of having a site that is 95% re-publication of linux.com content - except they only put the first paragraph in, and then link across to linux.com. Annoyingly NewsForge's RSS feed appears to push stuff out faster than linux.com's so I often see content on there before the same (but in this case complete and original) content appears on the linux.com feed.

I've solved that problem for now - NewsForge is off my feedlist.