Rachel the action hero

Rachel walked 40km at the weekend camping and carrying her food on the way. It was a Duke of Edinburgh Award expedition.

If that's not impressive enough, the first day was her birthday - and she had to be at school at 6.15.

The day after she got back, she hauled herself into school, and acted on stage in the evening, and did the same again on Tuesday.

Today, she's off school looking a bit the worse for wear.

Time for some Ruff stuff

So, yesterday we had six hours of rehearsal. Can people really put this much work into an amateur play and still enjoy it. Yes!

We got our ruffs, and enjoyed trying them on. I think Anne looks more and more like a raddled Gloriana every rehearsal. Dermot, yes your bum does look big in that.

And my beard. Still not looking Elizabethan. Time to take arms against it.....

The Letter of Marque

I just finished the twelfth book of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin saga, which started with Master and Commander.

There's no point adding to the general praise which fans heap on the series. It deserves every bit of it. This one is - as ever - the best in the series so far, with a last chapter full of a powerful pleasure that wouldn't mean a thing if you haven't read the previous eleven books.

And you should...

Elizabeth: My Part in Her Downfall

Things are getting closer and we now have a poster, props and so forth. There's more here, and box office details (hint!).

Learning lines is harder than it was when I acted at school, and I keep getting hung up on really obvious points to do with, well, acting.

When someone is about to snatch a book from you - it may have happened a hundred times before (and it probably will have with the amount of rehearsing I need), but you have to look like you weren't expecting it.

It's one of those things that you think is easy, but actually there's a lot to it - and stuff to (humph) learn even at this late stage....

I'm working hard, though, so I won't be the weakest link. It's going to be a very funny, very silly show.

Count your blessings

So far, I've "forgetten" and had a drink on three out of the five days, since Lent started last Wednesday. I never quite get to grips with Lent, and yet again, it feels like Christians are out of step with the rest of the world. Everyone else gave up booze in the "secular Ramadan" of January, and they are now busy re-toxing.

And anyway, it's not about giving things up. It's about appreciating what we have, appreciating the world, and being more connected to it all. Christian Aid has a better idea, and a lovely leafelt - "Count Your Blessings" - which gets you to do just that.

Today, the leaflet tells me to give 5p for every fairly-traded, and 10p for every non-fairly traded cup of tea or coffee I have (20p and counting...). Yesterday, it suggested giving 10p for every disease I've been vaccinated against (no idea, but it's probably at least £1.50).

I'd recommend this one to anyone, of any religion or none.

Bad English is evil

Here's a refreshing start to a Monday morning. A post on the Authority blog sends me off to read Orwell. Specifically, his excellent essay Politics and the English Language

This isn't altogether expected. The Authority blog is written by journalist Michael Cross and sponsored by local authority IT supplier Civica. And, from my experience of local authorities and IT suppliers, neither world is particularly concerned with good English.

But a look at the essay reminds me of two things:

• Bad English is evil. Not unfortunate or disappointing but, by allowing sloppy thinking that might permit evil, actually evil.


• It is actually possible to stand against this sort of evil.

There's a third, somewhat depressing thought, though. Orwell was writing of the decay of politics in 1946 - just a year after the Labour party arrived and when - from our prespective - politics was really alive. The welfare state was being started, and Churchill was out, on a 72.6 percent turnout in the 1945 general election.

Compare that with now. You don't need me to draw the comparision. Over here, the politicians have nothing to offer but words. Those words are now without meaning. And over in the US, you can get up an invasion on the basis of lies and fudge.

And even Orwell has become the thing he hated: an abused cliche.

So - I'm a real historical character!

Well I never. Bizarre though this play may be, I'm a historical character! Thomas Egerton, chief of police in Dario Fo's Elizabeth: Almost by Chance a Woman, was in fact one of her chief advisors, along with Cecil and Bacon (a different Bacon from the one who "wrote Shakespeare's plays", I believe). Ben Jonson wrote a poem to him.

The play happens at the time of the rebellion led by the Earl of Essex in 1601. I wonder if the queen really did call Egerton a "fuckwit" and point a pistol at him?

The Vampire Bunny?

Watching early Buffies (yet again) with the girls, I couldn't help feeling that the big bad guy in Series One looks familiar.
Something about the pink nose rang a bell.

Then I saw Rachel's rabbit, Salt...

Bum-rolls and Beards

This blog may go a bit thesp for the next few weeks. Normal rubbish about children, church and wireless should resume eventually.

Monday night we had a frock-fest. Nearly everyone else gets to wear a skirt, with a bit of Elizabethan padding known (in the theatre at least) as a bum-roll.

Anne as Elizabeth I looks "like a knitted toilet roll holder" according to one observer (which is apparently more or less the effect we're aiming for).

Dermot looks fine in his bum-roll as Dame Grosslady, but he will have to lose the beard apparently.

And then there's the question of my beard. I'm going to have to do something goatee and Elizabethan-or- with it

Luckily there's plenty of pix online, as the Guardian runs an article about what Shakespeare really looked like.

My searches for Elizabeth Beards lead me to a play called The Beard of Avon an American play which sounds a good enough proposition for someone to have a go at over here. The idea is that bumbling-but-good-with-couplets Will Shakespeare runs away with the theatre, to get away from his wife, and ends up in London, where he becomes a "beard" for prominent people who want their plays put on anonymously - starting with the Earl of Oxford, obviously including Bacon and finally even Queen Bess, who write The Taming of the Shrew.

Almost by Chance in a Dario Fo Play

So, unexpectedly, I'm in a Dario Fo play. Turned up at the wrong audition at South London Theatre, and found myself with the part of Egerton, a spymaster, in "Elizabeth: Almost By Chance a Woman", a foul-mouthed political farce set in the latter days of Elizabeth I.

The good news is I'm one of only six actors, we have a great director, and lots of ambitious plans for props, set and costumes. And it might be funny!

The bad news? Well, I'm feeling a lot more exposed now I'm off the chorus line. The show is on a lot quicker than I thought, so we have five weeks to get it together. It clashes with almost everything else in my life, and the rest of the family are a bit miffed.

Alos, I have to break it to the Sunday School, who said our panto was the best they'd been to, that this swear-fest might not be suitable for them (though I reckon any teenager doing the Tudors should enjoy seeing Elizabeth as a "moody, manipulative, foul-mouthed, incontinent hermaphrodite").

And I have to tell my Morris team that, yet again, I'm going to miss a lot of practice - including tonight!

NetEvents nerds raise cash for cancer

Picture(18)
Originally uploaded by judgecorp.

Nan Chen of Strix is holding a cheque for $32,000 raised in a charity auction at NetEvents.

The money is forCancer Research and the Prostate Project. It was raised in an auction of items including six bottles of pink wine, two World Cup tickets (to see France v Togo) and a ride in Manek Dubash's Aston Martin.

Well done everyone!

Another fine mess...?

These NetEvents meetings are not just speed-dating for nerds. Oh dear me no. They are so much more.

In interactive sessions round a table, we get the skinny on top companies' tech strategy, and even help to shape it.

Steve Vogelsang is a VP of the data networking division of ECI Telecom - which was created when ECI bought a company called Laurel Networks.

I was able to suggest a strategy that I believe they will now take forward. They absolutely have to buy Hardy Networks.

Then they can move on and buy Keystone Networks and launch products that implement the COPS protocol.

Municipal wireless is like platform shoes

"Everything goes in buying cycles, because we forget how awful it was the last time around," says Ian Keene, analyst at Gartner, talking at NetEvents. "Like platform shoes.

"Maybe local governments are only building theirown wireless networks, because they've forgotten what a pain it is to own your own network. It's fifteen years since they owned their own cables. All those people have retired by now, so they think 'own our own networks? Great idea.'"

But he admits he might just be being negative. Wireless can be much easier to deploy. And there are some very useful applications, like CCTV (easy to move cameras around), environmental monitoring, and so forth.

But the big headline-grabbing application, Internet access, could be a flash in the pan, he says. Public access and regeneration are political issues, not driven by real user pull, he says: local governments are generally felt to be poor service deliverers, so will people use their metro networks? .

And the technology issues is a surprise too. There's a fixation on Wi-Fi, and Keene is surprised that few - in fact, he says absolutely no - local authorities are planning to use the operators' 3G networks for their own applications.

Single Point of Failure - the power cord

OK, so I should get a newer laptop that can actually live on batteries for an appreciable length of time.

But I never spotted this particular single point of failure. My power lead just started crackling. I've borrowed one, but I'm maybe not going to be online as much as I thought.

Time to put my attention back into the room, I guess...

NetEvents in Germany

I'm blearily listening to a product marketing geezer talking about his network security product. There's snow outside. It must be NetEvents.

I've been coming on these computer-industry speed-dating events for years now. In the next two days, I'll get about 20 hours of product spiel.

The difference is, now we are all on wireless. This means Guy Kewney can post the news, and I can switch off and play around and write this.

The bad side of this is, I'm not sure I have enough attention left in the room to pick up on any interesting debates that might actually happen.

Physics through Morris Dancing.

So, tonight. my Morris side is dancing to explain science. We're showing how Rayleigh scattering makes the sky blue. We will have to explain it to weather forecaster Sian Lloyd, so I've done a quick check on the Web to revise how Rayleigh scattering works.

And of course, this being the Internet, there's also a rock band of the same name. They have tracks to download, but unfortunately, their music is the wrong tempo to use as we dance our explanation.

I have a theory that within the next few years, reall information will disappear on the web. Already, you bump into obscure rock band at an out-of-the-way American universities have nearly got it covered. When China really takes off and completely adopts capitalism, the world supply of alienated students will be multiplied by a factor of 100, and all Internet search terms will lead to rock bands.

With this RFID tag, I thee wed

Apparently a couple has exchanged RFID tags in the US. The radio beacons, implanted under their skin, give them access to each other's house, car, computer and so on.

This sounds very modern - they're also modern enough, you'll notice, to be a couple but not to actually be living together - and it certainly could have practical benefits.

Take me, for instance. I'm currently not exactly sure where my wedding ring is. I took it off because it was irritating a cut on my finger, and Alison put it in a drawer to keep it safe. But which drawer?

Now, if we'd had RFID tags implanted instead, there'd be no danger of losing them.

Thank goodness - Civil Partnership is old hat

I went to my first Civil Partnership ceremony on Saturday. That's officialese for Gay Wedding - legal in Britain since December. I like the official phrase because it expresses the ordinariness of the occasion.

Not ordinary, as in dull, disappointing or anything like that. It was, like any wedding, a wonderful occasion. And actually a bit more so because - like a lot of the first Civil Ceremonies - it was between two people who've already been together for years. There were lots of family members and lots of friends, and a certain feeling of "about time too".

Two months on from the start of Civil Ceremonies, there are a lot of ways in which Civil Partnerships are - and should be - old hat. The registrar looked very pleased to be doing the ceremony, but it clearly wasn't her first, and there have been plenty more in Marylebone Registry Office.

That's the mark of a real change: when it's unremarkable.

Worm speed record

Ever noticed how fast worms travel? I was watching a big one in the park, moving across a large tarmac area.

Ten seconds elapsed between the first picture and the second one, and a distance of three or four inches.
I say, well done, worm!

Sleeping bunnies - the most useful page on the Web

Our rabbit, Salt, needs medication in a sensitive area. Given how big a rabbit's back legs are and how sharp his claws are (they're made for digging!) this could be a risky business.

But not for us! I happened to stumble on a page where someone called Miriam explains how to put a bunny into a trance. Lay it on its back, and stroke its nose and cheeks.

With Salt, it works without fail, in a few seconds. This is the best "sleeping bunny" pic we have so far. More later.