Bill Bailey
After ordering the tickets what feels like years ago, last night I finally got to see Bill Bailey with Rach, Dok, my sister, my brother and my Mum & Dad.
At least 15 seconds after the introduction voice started speaking, the audience was laughing loudly and it's at that point we knew the laughter wasn't really going to stop and we knew it was going to be a damn fine show.
There where too numerous musical references to mention here, plus I don't want to spoil it for others that plan on seeing the show, but the Peter Gabriel/trouser press moment had me absolutely crying with laughter, along with the Katie Melua – Nine Million Bicycles parody.
The encore comprised of more jokes and the 2 classic Bill songs “love song” and “Das Hokey Kokey”, with Kevin Eldon onstage along with Bill for the later song.
I was very please that the show wasn't just all music, there was quite a bit of stand-up and lots of crowd interaction sprinkled among the melodies.
As is the normal at the CIA in Cardiff, We were crammed in like sardines and it got very hot in the arena area, yet this fact couldn't detract from the greatest that is Bill Bailey.
Browser-woes and Firefox 3 beta
Excuse my lack of updates this week, I have been quite busy creating themes.
I must admit that I haven't had quite as many problems in the past as I'm experencing now with IE6. Only my laptop has IE6 running now which makes for fun testing, yet I managed to get VirtualPC installed and using a hardrive image I have IE6 working on my desktop.
In addtion to having that resource for testing available I've also being using http://browsershots.org which is a free open-source service that takes screenshots of the website you specify on various browsers on windows/Mac or Linux operating systems. It cant take a little bit of time the screen capture to be returned as each request is placed in a queue.
Here is an example I created for my website http://browsershots.org/http://welshtroll.co.uk/ as you can see the results are interesting. I think you'll agree for those of use without access to a Mac or Linux operating systems it's interesting to see how a website renders for your non-microsoft visitors.
While on the topic of browsers I'll quickly mention the fact that Firefox version 3 is available for beta testing. I only managed to have a quick try of it last night and from what I've seen it's shaping up nicely.
Here is some of the functionality that you can expect to see : The ability to click the Favicon on the address bar and have infomration relating to the website pop up is a nice feature. That along side the warning for potential hazardous websites via a blacklist or google certainly brings security to the forefront again.
The MIME system appears to be greatly improved, which wasn't that difficult as previous versions weren't user friendly or intuitive.
A new feature that is quite far down the list but one of my favourites, is the save password functionality. New functionality aims to offer you the ability to save the username/password once you can see if you have logged on successfully.
I'm not sure how hopefully starring and tagging URL's will be in the overall big picture, but you never know it could become a common feature.
Woo Stardust
I finally went to see the film version of Stardust Monday evening, I found it really enjoyable and I'm happy to say that it was nearly everything I expected it to be.
All of the characters were very well cast and they nearlyall portrayed the novel descriptions very closely. I agree with comments others have made about Robert De Niro, who I thought was damn brilliant as Captain Shakespeare. I was pleased that Ricky “I can only play one type of role” Gervais couldn't even spoil this film for me.
There are alot of known British faces in this film, albeit in cameo roles but it was very nice to see them pop up occasionally.
Considering that the film has been out for a while now it's still sitting the top ten UK films, which should make Mr. Gaiman happy. If you get chance it’s well worth going to catch this film at the cinema before disappers to the small screen.
