The week after a show goes down tends to feel rather flat and anti climactic, especially after the adrenalin rush of the previous week. Certainly "Attempts On Her Life" prompted more adrenalin rushes than most shows I have been in.
I have started work as movement director on "Bronte", the next Bench production, which opens on April 24th. However I will keep you up to date with how that goes on my companion blog, "Bench Hamlet 2008".
The Penroses, Best Beloved and I went to see Sondheim's "Merrily We Roll Along" on Thursday for a matinee at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury. Again this is reviewed on my companion blog. I have realised I have lots of Sondheim compilations and am enamoured of favourite pieces by favourite artistes such as Mandy Patinkin and Maria Friedman but don't have many of his musicals on CD. This is because I have a magnificent collection of musicals on tape, which cost me hundreds to gather and haven't yet replaced them with CD versions. I can see another project arising.
The Bench Club Night was fun as the Best Beloved led a session on "Bronte" and it reminded everyone that Club night have become a bit sedentary. We have tended to sit around a lot and talk about future productions, rather than get up and do something. I was a bit "giddy" and silly and owe apologies for embarrassing behaviour all around. I did start a post about embarrassing behaviour to which I am prone but decided to abort it as it was too navel gazing even for me.
This week has also seen me looking at the Internet in a more organised way to see what i can get out of it rather than just idly surfing aimlessly. I have updated various aspects of my computer but am still appalled at how slow it is. I have plenty of storage memory but the operating system slowly grinds its way through tasks. I am now back online with Messenger but have only two people on my contact list. I like the idea of video calling but obviously need more contacts to make it worthwhile.
Today is a sporting day with Pompey taking on Man U at lunchtime in Old Trafford, followed by England tackling Scotland in the Rugby Calcutta Cup at teatime. The family is attending the wedding of Damon and Vicky ( he was director of Bare Bards' "Measure for Measure" in November 2007) and the Best Beloved and I are going to the evening reception. We wish the young couple the very best in their married life together.
The Best Beloved has an operation lined up on Tuesday and will then be out of action for five or six weeks recuperation thereafter. I will be her nurse and housekeeper. I have all the skills necessary but am unreliable if I get stuck into my own activities. The Firstborn and Cat will relieve me on occasions and will no doubt keep me up to the mark if they observe any slacking on my part. I have observed many times in the past a genetic tone of voice that the female members of my family possess when they find it necessary to reprimand me. If the Best Beloved is not there to take charge herself, the Firstborn sounds remarkable like her as does Cat if the other two aren't around. To my ear it sounds like the Best Beloved has never left the building. I am reluctant to get my greyhound, "Rosie", because I think this phenomenon would only confuse her. She would have to rely solely on the voice of her master to know whether she was coming or going.
In recompense the details of our canal boat holiday in June, our extension building in the summer and our nephew's wedding in September in Italy are beginning to firm up beautifully.
This has been posting for the sake of posting but I do have plans afoot for revitalising my blog so patient reader please stay with me. I must go now, someone has signed in on Messenger. I wonder if they will talk to me? "Rosie", heel, girl!
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Slow operating system? Sounds like a PC to me. Solution? Get a Mac :-)
We have 3 systems here at home. The old Dell PC upstairs in the main bedroom (still quite nimble since I maxed it out with 4GB RAM), a one year old 20" iMac with 3GB RAM and my new 'Work from home' system of Dell Latitude D630 laptop + 20" Acer widescreen display and a wireless mouse + new desk.
This lot is all strung together with Apple Airport Extreme 802.11n wireless and connected to 4 mbps cable internet from Virgin/NTL (utterly reliable) which they are going to upgrade to 10 mbps for free soon.
We eschew Windows Vista in this house (top heavy and a resource hog) and use XP Pro on the Dells. (Mac OSX on the iMac obviously)
I assume you defragment your disk regularly, Ours are done automatically with Diskeeper 2008. I hope you also have a regular regimen of freeing up space on your hard-drive and keep your PC free of all malware/spyware/adware 'nasties' with AVGAS or Spybot or Spyware Blaster (the best) or something similar.
It goes without saying you are using a good Antivirus/Firewall and keep it up-to-date and do a regular scan.
Once a month or so it may also help to do 'start', 'run', 'cmd' then type 'CHKDSK /F /R' (check disk, fix and repair) in the window. Next time you restart the PC it will scan the entire hard-drive and move data from any dodgy areas to good areas and quarantine any dodgy bits of the HD never to be used. It takes a while (maybe an hour on an older machine) but keeps things sweet.
Do you have a backup strategy? What's best is probably an external (firewire) hard-drive formatted with two areas. In one area you have a complete system 'clone' backup (bootable) using something like 'Acronis True Image' software , and in the other formatted area you can just drag and drop selected files/libraries of your choice in case you ever just want to restore a file rather than a whole system.
Acronis True Image will do a complete system backup (a bootable one) the first time you use it and henceforth you can do incremental backups at whatever frequency suits you. (Monthly, weekly or whatever.)
Booting up and restoring from a complete clone of your system is far easier than rebuilding from scratch.
Use good quality surge protection (Belkin Surgemaster for instance) to plug your PC equipment into. Stops those nasty mains spikes degrading the components.
Put in as much RAM as your system can handle. It is cheap and effective. (Crucial UK is the best supplier in my experience.)
Use Mozilla Firefox as your browser and load Adblock Plus onto it. No more ads when surfing. Lovely.
I am sure you do all of this anyway. Most teachers are part-time IT pros at their schools so I expect you are pretty experienced in optimising and safeguarding PCs.
Just a thought.
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