Ross Noble and Jo Caulfield

We managed another couple of comedy events as part of the Brighton Comedy Festival. Last Sunday we saw the excellent Ross Noble at the Dome. Very funny, and judging from some of the reviews, he improvises a lot, changing a lot of his material from show to show.

Last night we saw Jo Caulfield at the Pavillion Theatre. Her show is all about things that make you angry and annoyed, allowing for amusing rants about argos, familes and leaving time to take audience suggestions – a lot of people in Brighton seem to be annoyed by cyclists!! She’d done her research about Brighton, being able to name various landmarks and appreciate the difference between Brighton and Hove (actually!) which is always a good sign. I thought her idea for a range of greetings cards were great – “Congratulations on your marriage, remember the gift I bought you for your first wedding? Good” :-).

Both of these have been “laugh out loud funny” for me. This afternoon we’re off to see Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns which includes a full showing of Laurel and Hardy’s Big Business.

Zurich

Bridge
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Bridge

Last weekend I was in Zurich with work. Lots of partying, a bit of business. We were there with 500+ other EurotaxGlass employees, but I have to confess that I didn’t spend much time with our european colleagues, instead I spent time with some of our Weybridge colleagues that I deal with on a day to day basis, but rarely spend any “out of office” time with. It was a really good weekend, with even a bit of sight-seeing thrown in for good measure amongst the drinking and partying.

We went to see

We went to see Marcus Brigstocke‘s show at the corn Exchange on Monday. A surprisingly flat evening: the performance was fine, there was some good material, but…. meh.

Also annoying was one of his ideas for Atheist Airways, which ended with pun of the pilot not saying what the cruising altitude was because he wouldn’t commit to anything. Which is fine, except it’s confusing atheists with agnostics, and even then an agnostic might actually say that the cruising altitude was something that couldn’t be known. You know what… it’s best not to analyze jokes.

For anyone who’s familiar with his rants on The Now Show, you’ll know about his problems with BT. So it was fun to see two large BT trucks parked right outside the theater at the end of the show, with some burly engineers standing around, maybe waiting for someone…

Economist free for day

Economist, free for a day

The Economist are doing something quiet interesting at the moment. If you go to their home page, you may be given the opportunity for a free day pass to the site, in exchange for watching a short Nokia advert. It’s worth it, as you get full access to all the archive. Cool. Now if only they could stop recording their audio content in a toilet…

We joined ski safari

We joined ski safari at Alfresco’s last night for their start of Season party. We’ve been on two excellent trips with them, to BC, Canada and to Colorado over the past couple of years, and so it was good to go and meet the people behind the trips. The evening was sponsored by Vail Resorts, and so I’ve brought my Vail Resorts pen and Vail Resorts post-its into the office, and we managed to have some tasty canapes and beer too. We discussed our next snowboarding trip ideas with them, and also learnt more about their new offerings – weekends in Switzerland! At one point Richard was getting advice (and olympic anecdotes) about Utah from Graham Bell (former British Olympic Skier) which was kind of fun (especially as Richard didn’t realise who he was and wondered why he was so obsessed with the olympics).

After the excitement of looking at ski brochures, trail maps and talking to people about alternative snow trips – like Chile in summer, we headed off to the Black Horse Inn to meet up with the Sussex Geek Dinner. We missed Tristan‘s talk about plone, but did get to meet some interesting people. Nice organisation Simon!.

We went to see

We went to see An Inconvenient Truth last weekend at the Duke of York’s. Very well put together, with some really eye-opening statistics. Other people have reviewed it far better than I could, so I’ll leave it there.

Last year, when we went to the Eden project, you could buy some carbon offset packs to compensate for the amount of miles you drive per year. I thought about it, but didn’t pursue it. This morning I’ve just paid for a carbon offset for the 6.5 tonnes of CO2 emissions I have used driving and flying. I’ve been researching the options primarily between Climate Care and Carbon Neutral. The calculators at Carbon Neutral for flights cover more options, but for driving there seemed little difference between the two.

In the end the choice of supported projects swung it for me. Carbon Neutral have a Natural Woodland portfolio (although there weren’t any available for me to buy), an International Communities portfolio and a Futures portfolio. All which seem pretty worthy. The Climate Care projects seem to be a bit smaller scaled and helping more local communitites, concentrating on efficient cooking stoves, efficient lighting and things like that.

The other thing that concerned me slightly about Carbon Neutral was the fact that you got gifts for having your certificates posted to you – surely this is adding to carbon emissions?

Tomorow we’re going to see Who Killed the Electric Car? Not sure if the Duke of Yorks is having an eco-season or something, but we seem to be.

was looking to redeem

I was looking to redeem some of my nectar points earlier, and so attempted to log on. I couldn’t remember my password, but I know both my card number and my email address. Their Forgotten your password page allows you to enter either email address or password.

forgotten password

I chose to enter my email address, as it saved wandering off to find the piece of plastic.

enter nectar number not email address

So despite the fact that it says twice to enter either email address or nectar card number, they don’t allow you to enter email address on this form. You’ve got to enter your nectar card number. So, I’ve had to go and find that plastic card anyway. An example of poor user experience.