TimsterC

M and I found ourselves in a music club in Kingston-upon-Thames on Saturday night. Now we are not normally into Jazz. Harry Connick Jr, is about as close as we get. But we had a good reason to be there on Saturday night, my brother had a guest spot to sing a song that he has written, his vocal coach has created the melody. He has been learning to sing “Jazz Standards”, whatever they are ;o), since last year and he’s good at it too.

I can honestly say I was really moved to see my brother singing in that club with paying punters listening and giving him a well deserved hearty round of applause at the end.

The three headline ladies did a fantastic job of entertaining the 50 strong audience in two sets. Kat had us all in awe of seeing her play Jazz Sitar. Yes you have read that right.

Thanks for Kat, Bibi and Penny for setting up the gig and for inviting Steve to be their guest star.

Thanks to everyone who commented to the whole "labs" post. I have collated your feedback and we are having a meeting in the next week or two to discuss such things.

I will be championing the best suggestions from you all, so when I can tell you the name of the lab, you’ll all have something to come take a look at and see if we managed to get your idea in.

There is one tiny caveat I would like to raise at this point. Most of the work for a large trade show in January, is done in peoples spare time, out of hours and stuff like that. The point I’m trying to make is that, we won’t have time or resource to do it all. However we have recognised that this is something we can start now and continue to build on, so you might only see the start of something fantastic in 2007, but it should keep on growing.

I’ll let you all know what happens soon. 

So I bowl into work this morning thinking that nothing special is gonna happen today. But then, like normal on those sort of days, something side swipes you from left field.

I see a colleague in the office and he says "So are you still coming to this training today?".

"Urm, yes, of course I am", thinking to myself whilst I’m saying it "what the hell training is this I’ve forgotten about?". 

When I get into the classroom, I see a whole bunch of business partners that I half recognise from working with them in the past. The scary thing is that I can’t remember half of their names. But I’m saved from too much embarrassment by the register being called. Yes they really called a register this morning.

I discover that a fellow blogger is amongst the folks who is here for the two day training. Paul Mooney, as I live and breath. Would you believe it. No nor did I for a while.

Anyway we got to talking and now it transpires that we are going out for a few drinks later on this evening. I don’t think/hope that this is going to turn into a "legend session" as I will have to drive home afterwards.

But anyway we got to talking throughout the day and discussed something that I’m involved in that we might need some help with. Paul thinks it will be a great idea to get some feedback from all of you. I need to clear it with someone first, but I should know tomorrow if I can let you all in on the project. Believe me, this is HUGE if you can help and want to get involved. You will see the benefit, so it will be worth your while. 

Hello again,

 Well loads has been going on since I last wrote here. 

A one week trip to France with the guys on our motorbikes was fun. We had a blast running down through France and staying in some cool hotels, eating some great food and drinking fantastic wine. This culminated in a two day track attack at Nogaro. What a circuit. Some really challenging corners and whilst it’s easy to learn this track, it’s hard to go really fast. You have to have your head on the right way, if you know what I mean, and be dialed into your bike and the circuit to get it all right. When it comes together it feels effortless and you seem to be going quite slow, but check the lap time and you will have been hammering around quite fast.
The trip home was just as nice as the run down, great hotels, food, wine and roads. We stayed in one of our favourite haunts "Château de la Vallée Bleue" near Le Chatre. This place is fantastic and we always have a great reception when we go. Check out the pictures from the trip here.

When I got home, I had organised a fund raiser for the EnduroIndia trip. This was a day with Sim Racing Ltd running round Silverstone in 1965 Honda RA272 (as seen in the "Power of Dreams" TV adverts).
This raised £70.50 and the raffle produced £15. My thanks go out to everyone who came along and especially to Adrian for helping me organise this and believing in the trip enough to allow me to run it.

At the moment I’m in the middle of a RedHat Linux System Administration course in Guildford. This is a great course, or it has been so far, we’ll see what happens on Friday when we get to take the Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) exam.

ttfn. ;o) 

Well we got to snowboard on Saturday and it was really bad weather. There was snow and wind and gusts and blizzard conditions and it was about -20c with wind chill.
Sunday we boarded and it was changable weather, but they opened the upper lift and we had a couple of runs down. The funny thing here is that most of the people we have met, and most of them have been on the lifts up the mountain, have all come from St John’s on the other side of the Newfoundland Island. It takes them about 6-7 hours to drive here. In that case, it’s quicker for us to fly here from Gatwick than it is for the “locals” to drive here.

Monday (today) has been a good day for the mountain. The weather has been kind and we even found time for me to get an hours lesson. Wow, what a difference an hour can make. My toe side turns now work. I am now getting the hang of carving turns instead of just side slip, slow down, turn, side slip, slow down, turn…… repeat until the bottom. Now I can turn, turn, turn, turn…… COOL !!!

Anyway, back soon. ttfn