Sunday, March 08, 2009

Lots of Time Spent in The Cloud

Chorus on Monday was rehearsing at the Roundhouse. We were trying it out as an alternative rehearsal venue and we had four DMDs auditioning. It was a really nice venue, if a little monochromatic. Generally a good night apart, from Martin B having a real go at Mikey for our talking. He was quite threatening, so during break lots of words were had with Anthony and Sacha; Mikey and I may talk a lot during rehearsal, but Martin was out of order with the way he addressed it. I think he thought better of it during the second half though as he apologised to us afterwards.

On the way home, we travelled most of the way with one of the DMD candidates; he was one of my choices and a nice chap in person, but sadly didn’t get the gig in the end.

Tuesday I was up in town for a seminar about the Cloud. It was slightly unusual in that the first three speakers were telling us how easy it was to build your own cloud and the fourth speaker said, ‘Why would you want to? Buy cloud services from someone else!’ It was a thought-provoking session though, so worth half a day of my time.

In the evening I was to Greenwich with all my photography gear to do headshots and rehearsal shots for David W’s play. All went fairly smoothly and I got the dates for the other shots straightened out too.

The highlight of Wednesday was lunch with Owen. He had a lot on his mind about his relationship and where it's going but I managed to raise a few smiles…

Thursday night we had tickets to Fame. Met up with Rosie for food at The Atlas which was good before meeting up with Mikey, Joffrey & Michael M to head to the theatre. Stuart B had choreographed the show by Cygnet Players who did A Chorus Line a while back. Fortunately the choreography was good, but sadly the cast lacked energy – which you need for a show like Fame – and there were problems with the sound levels so you couldn’t hear the lyrics a lot of the time. But even so it was an enjoyable evening.

Friday morning I was at Old Billingsgate Market for another supplier event. This one was less worthwhile (who knew the Google UK CEO would be so dull??) I even managed to miss the free lunch. Back at the office I did my first presentation of the Tech Strategy… just to the team and it was more of a Q&A session, but it went well and everyone seemed enthusiastic.

Got a reply back from a lady in Microsoft’s marketing team too, so it looks like I might be joining their focus groups. I need to start a (technical) blog and get on Twitter (which I’m now on). More to follow on this I suspect.

In passing I noticed that Friday was also Marcus Nicoll’s birthday – not that there ever really was a Marcus Nicol; living in London now the paranoia of a Scottish squaddie seems a world away. I will probably always wonder what became of the guy I knew and will probably never know. Still, je ne regrette rien

We had a full-day rehearsal on Saturday. On arrival I had quite a firm talking to from Sacha (well, as firm as Sacha can do, he is really rather a gentle man) and it seems Mikey had had a similar dressing down from Anthony, so we determined to be quiet – and spent the day on the back row chatting by notepad instead. It all rather got me thinking about taking up sign language; I always was fascinated by the Drasnian secret language… We’ll see!

The rehearsal itself went fairly smoothly; lots of songs about London.

The rest of the weekend has been pretty much all geeky stuff. In my Microsoft researches I’ve come across a couple of neat facilities which I may be able to use (or at least use as inspiration for stuff) at work, so I was playing with them to get my head around how things worked. Housework too. Blah!

Think I’ve finally pulled out of the winter blues. Am fairly looking forward to work tomorrow as I get to start putting strategy into action.

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