It’s light now when I leave work in the evenings. Roll on summer!

Last night was the final night of this term’s DramSoc production, Don Juan on Trial, which I had been roped into doing the lighting design for (by Jude, of course). It was in the round in the concert hall - which made my life harder - but it was still one of the most fun productions I’ve been in recently. Oh, and the lighting was marvelous. Photos to follow.

And that brings me to my final light-related thing - photography. Taking photos for Don Juan was again fraught with difficulties - mainly a lack of light. Which is not surprising, given that it was set in an abandoned chateau at night! I’ve been waiting a while for a new lens with a much bigger apeture, but it hasn’t turned up yet. So the photos were all heavily underexposed, and taken using ISO 1600, in the hope of getting a fast enough shutter to get sharp photos. For reasons that I’m not quite sure of, most compact digital cameras are much better in low-light situations - they ‘force’ the photo by default (i.e. use a reasonable shutter speed, and push the ISO to the limits). It’s a lot harder to persuade my SLR to do it’s stuff when it’s outside of it’s happy zone.

Nia managed to get there before me (and has better pictures too, dammit!), but here’s my selection of photos from the Comus Dinner. I haven’t got round to tagging or them properly or giving them titles yet, but I’ll get there eventually.

I’m back from Devon, and completely Kiss-Me-Kate‘d out. Once again, doing the same show over 13 times leaves me a bit exhasted - and this time I had slightly more to do than the three followspot cues during “The Grand Duke” in summer 2003. Trucks in, trucks out…

Although I’m completely knackered from all the work (including the annual epic last night, get-out, get home, unload and collapse routine for the final weekend), I feel a bit refreshed from getting away from work for a while. I’m trying to put more effort into making good use of my free time (and trying to focus on some things that I keep putting off). So we’ll see how long that lasts then, as usual.

It’s been two really busy days, trying to finish the staff renewals in the Hammersmith Library before the weekend. Thankfully, there was a coincidal staff day out on Thursday, or else I’d have never managed it. But at 5.30 today I finished everything, except for the little cluster printing issue they “forgot” to mention until 5 o’clock. Fools.

Anyway, that’s me finished my stint in Hammersmith, and I’m back to South Ken for the foreseeable future. Which is nice. And I got paid today, which is even nicer. Drinks are on me.*

And to whoever left their iPod on the Storeroom desk - one, that’s really, really feckin’ stupid, and two, it’s just the right height to prop up the keyboard to a comfortable typing angle.

*Offer for one night only. Large clues may have been given as to which bar I’ll be in. Be there, and prove you’re a geek, cause you’re browsing my weblog on a Friday night.

A while ago, me and Gary collaborated on a method to stop nasty types from getting emails off of the dramsoc website. It’s a low hanging fruit solution - using javascript to write out encoded characters, cunningly done so that nobody even notices what’s going on. The point of it is that it raises the bar to harvesting the addresses, and most importantly, since it’s just some little thing that me and Gary cooked up, it’s unlikely that someone will reverse engineer it to get at the email addresses. If our little method (it’s Gary’s really, but I don’t mind stealing credit) became widely used, it would be somewhat juicier fruit, and someone would attack it. (That’s a hint by the way - don’t anyone start using it to list millions of addys. OK?)

However, the dramsoc email address (the one at the top of the DramSoc website gets lots of spam apparently (although I’m not sure if this relates to the @ic address instead), and here’s the problem - our method doesn’t help when you write out the email address on the page. Try entering in “www.dramsoc.org” into this page (explanations). Notice that the email link to elpresidente doesn’t get found, since that just has “Martin” instead of the email address. If you’re techy minded, have a look at the source to see what’s happening.

Oh well. Next time he’s bored, maybe Gary will write another little javascript thingy.

See, my IT provider (for all my email, this website and stuff) has such a super-dooper triple redundancy setup for their connections to the rest of the world, that they’ve got no need for an off-location message or status board. Except, of course, when the (all too common) digging-through-all-the-fricking-cables event occurs. And when I phoned them (to find out about the outage today, and make a friendly suggestion about the off-location status board), I had a full-volume, half-second delayed echo coming out of the telephone. I did a very similar thing to one of the Capital Radio announcers recently, and spent the first few seconds stuttering through what I was trying to say. Offputting, to say the least.

Talking of the radio, when are those bastards going to bring the speakers back from Devon? I can’t get the fricking wavefront set up in the storeroom all by myself, unless someone dares me to push the amprack (sans-crossovers) down the stairs…