Firetop

After many years of musical mixing enjoyment at Brighton’s Honey Club (Guy Ornadel, Benny Benassi etc.) the curtain has finally closed for Suzie_Q and I - refused entry on the grounds that we are from Dorking. On Saturday evening we had planned to visit to hear what used to be the best house/trance in the South East, the occasion - our wedding anniversary, and after a year away from clubbing (having a baby) we really needed it! We even went to the trouble of booking an expensive room at The Grand Hotel so we could be within walking distance. After bracing the gale and rain, a bouncer resembling Eastenders’ Phil Mitchell told us ‘Sorry, you can’t come in because you’re from Dorking… and I’ve got seven in already’. To say we were taken aback would be an understatement, at first we thought he just had a Jack Dee style of humour – but no, he was serious, The Honey Club now discriminates based on where you live. (more…)

Facebook is a great platform, not only can you find long lost friends (or enemies), you can share all your personal information with them. However, with such a powerful tool comes a few concerns about identity theft or even personal safety – much of the information we use for banking security such as home address and data of birth is readily available on our profiles. The good news is that the privacy settings within Facebook allow you to restrict the levels of information that are available to your network, friends or even specific individuals. The alternative default makes almost everything available to everybody via member search – friend or not - so it’s worth reviewing in my opinion. (more…)

Saturday evenings are sometimes a weekly ‘baby escape’ for Suzie_Q and I, a time when our babysitting in-laws kindly take charge of listening to the baby monitor for the night. This week, having successfully ventured to Dorking and Guildford in the past month, we thought we’d really push the boat out… and go to Redhill - the town we first lived in together. We began our evening at ‘The Sun’ (a Wetherspoons pub) and reminisced about how every Friday it used to be full of deaf people busily signing to each other, odd really that they should have chosen the only non-music playing establishment to do that, since presumably anywhere would have been OK in even the loudest environment? It was after perhaps fifteen minutes in the Sun that we suddenly realised we had changed an awful lot this year what with the wedding and becoming parents - unfortunately it seems we have become responsible adults. (more…)

Six months after my first article about the use of Clubscan to scan the driving licences of all drinkers at the Rat and Parrot in Crawley, the news of my petition surfaced on the front of The London Metro newspaper today. It seems James Brokenshire (MP for Hornchurch and Shadow Home Affairs Minister) has heard about what’s going on with software like Clubscan and raised some concerns publicly. Yesterday I was contacted by the Metro news desk and asked for my thoughts – today I was quoted in the Metro. (more…)

So it’s time for the 2007 Eurovision song contest already; in my family the annual ‘Sit around the telly with a score card’ bonding session. Unfortunately I’m going to miss the finals again this year attending a wedding – so that’s two finals I’m missing on Saturday (my beloved Stevenage Borough FC are in the FA Trophy Final at Wembley). My mother remarked to me this week that she’d read an article saying that the United Kingdom would never win the Song Contest again because of the geographic break up of Eastern Europe and subsequent social voting collusion. As I’m putting a cash spread bet on Eurovision this year I looked for a method of winner prediction similar to that which I use successfully for the Grand National. I found some extremely useful information… (more…)

We were obviously very disappointed that we didn’t get a phone call from a researcher this week offering us tickets to ‘Making Your Mind Up‘ on BBC1 tonight. Two of my colleagues did get tickets, but neither of them wanted to go anyway so those went unused (non transferrable). Having tuned into BBC1 tonight to watch the show from the comfort of our living room, it did seem to be a bit of a farcical show from a voting perspective; after the first round of telephone voting Terry Wogan announced that Big Brovaz were going home in favour of a French woman called Cyndi - the studio audience were shocked, Suzie_Q and I were sitting stunned on the sofa. At the end of the final round of voting Terry announced that Cyndi was the winner to much cheering and indoor firework exploding, whilst Ferne Cotton had to tell him (and us) that the winners were actually Scooch and try and reverse the out of control situation. (more…)

Whilst discussing the Eurovision Song Contest with colleagues at lunch today (which involved describing what exactly Eurovision is to one of our American team members) I discovered that tickets for the finals in Helsinki have been all sold out since December. However, on the plus side I found out that BBC1’s ‘Making Your Mind Up’ show - where the UK Eurovision entry will be chosen, takes place this coming Saturday at studios in Maidstone and free tickets are available! (more…)

On Saturday evening Suzie_Q and I went for drinks in Crawley to celebrate my cousin’s belated birthday, our destination was the Rat and Parrot pub. We’ve been there before, it’s a bit on the rough side with clientele that probably wouldn’t look out of place at ‘The Jockey’ in TV’s Shameless; it lacks character, the staff seem to deliberately ignore you at the bar and it would be very easy to inadvertently get into a fight. When we arrived at the Rat and Parrot the doormen were checking ID, when we presented them with our driving licenses both sides were scanned into a laptop. “What’s that for?” I asked the bouncer, to which he replied in a deep voice “So if there’s any trouble we can find out”, “Where’s the data stored?” I asked… “Oh it’s just for Crawley you know, to check nobody has been banned.” I was slightly disconcerted by the fact my ID had been scanned and stored without my permission by somebody who didn’t seem to fully understand why. (more…)

Valentine’s Day – a day of love, romance and kissing… lots of kissing if London is anything to go by; come early evening the Tube was jammed with couples kissing on platforms and in carriages… not snogging, just repeatedly kissing each other and whispering sweet nothings – all quite nauseating. Suzie_Q and I were off to the Royal Opera House to see the opening night of Madama Butterfly – a Christmas present I bought my wife… to be received on Valentine’s Day – see what I did? Genius This was our first outing to the opera… and I can also safely say it will be our last. (more…)

Towards the end of 2006 I wrote a short article about the legality of digital broadcasting to UK audiences using SHOUTcast; essentially it’s quite legal to broadcast music in the US - to the US - at a small license fee, however if UK residents download the stream then a separate license is needed – and at the time of writing it was believed that there wasn’t one available… (more…)