tonywhitmore.co.uk  

Laura and I have just got back from seeing Richard Herring perform his stand-up show “Hitler Moustache” at the Ashcroft Arts Centre in Fareham. I’ve been following Richard on twitter for a while and enjoyed the AIOTM shows and have recently been getting into the Collings and Herrin podcast a bit more too.

It’s the first proper comedy gig I’ve been to in a long time (apart from Eddie Izzard at the Wembley Arena – a great gig but more akin to watching a DVD on a giant screen). That I was there is a testament to the ability of twitter to engage very directly with a (potential) audience, as the Scotsman noted. Plenty of people were tweeting during the interval. Would I have been there had it not been for twitter or AIOTM? Probably not.

The venue was pretty much what I was expecting; small and warm. It seated about 120 people in unreserved seating. We ended up in the second row. That can be foolish at a comedy gig; you’re in the firing line for being picked on. However, I thought that it wouldn’t be that kind of show, and by and large it wasn’t.

My first thought was, rather predictably, that Richard was shorter than I expected. I wonder if performers go around thinking that “normal people” are all taller than they expect. Wearing a crumpled suit and sporting a masscara-darkened toothbrush moustache, he launched into a show which was funny and thought provoking, inventive and full of invective.

The venue was so small, it would have been hard to have felt more involved without being on the stage. You could notice tiny nuances which would otherwise be lost; his almost obsessive kicking of the microphone lead, the occasional subconscious check that his flies were done up and the mostly suppressed smile when he amused himself. Like all good performers he was making eye contact with the audience, particularly those in the first few rows. At first this rather put me off: I felt under pressure to look like I was enjoying myself, to laugh louder because I was being talked to. But it wore off and even added to my enjoyment.

The only downside to the gig was the hideously drunk woman sat two rows behind and across the aisle. She was clearly plastered before she came in and got worse as she tipped more drink down her throat. Her accompanying male friend seemed similarly inebriated. He didn’t display the same overly loud laugh that she unleashed at any opportunity, although he did manage to match her efforts at talking throughout most of the first half. It was as if they thought they were watching a DVD and were oblivious to the presence of the rest of the audience, who where tutting and glaring at them.

Richard used a range of put-downs to try and get the couple to shut up, but to no avail. Although she shouted out a few things, she wasn’t trying to be a “proper” heckler, she was just pissed and either didn’t realise or didn’t care that she was spoiling the show for others and disrupting the pace of the performance. So the heckler put-downs didn’t really work. In the second half he made clever use of a comic character to be incredibly rude to her. If I had been the target, I would have been mortified and left. However she was almost oblivious, despite the round of applause that the tirade received. It was only when, during the start of the climax of the show, Richard stopped and very quietly told her she was spoling the show for everyone else that she quietened down, almost until the end. He couldn’t have done anything else by that point: To have gone on a typical comedian’s rant at her would have spoiled the build-up to the end of the show.

If it had been a gig consisting of 90 minutes of assorted knob gags and swearing, I wouldn’t have minded a few heckles distracting the comedian and the heckler receiving some abuse as recompense. But this show wasn’t like that. It had a clear objective and serious topics to laugh about. The drunken women almost de-railed the denouement. It was a great show with a real structure but that structure was undermined by the simple, thoughtless act of someone blithering away a couple of rows behind.

At the end, Richard stayed around afterwards to sign programmes and flog a few DVDs. We were at the end of the queue and witnessed the hideously drunk woman having the gall to ask him for a hug. He declined. He was out packing his car by the time we reached ours and left the venue as we did.

I can thoroughly recommend the show – go and see it. Just hope there aren’t drunken, thoughtless idiots in the audience.

Laura, Richard Herring and me.

Richard also blogged about the gig. Pleasingly we agree about the impact of the drunken woman on the flow of the show.

This review is a supplement to the one on the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK Local Community.

The COOL-ER ebook reader is available in a range of colours. When the good people at COOL-ER told me that they only had pink review units left, I had a mental image of something the colour of Barbie’s car. It was a pleasant surprise when a unit in the palest of pinks with a brushed metal look arrived. Something I could definitely hold on a train without my innate masculinity being threatened.

The device is supplied with a standard USB cable and a quick start guide. No software is bundled, meaning Windows and Mac users have to download their copy of Adobe Digital Editions from the web. The lack of bundled software is reassuring to Linux geeks, because it means the device must operate as a mass storage device, which work flawlessly with Linux. On plugging it in, the COOL-ER automatically started charging and was detected and mounted on my Ubuntu system. The directory structure follows that of the on-screen menus: one for “Digital Editions”, one for music, another for other documents. Adding Free content to the COOL-ER is a simple click and drag operation, but adding DRM-protected books requires Adobe Digital Editions. Adobe initially promised a Linux verison of this Flash application, but have since reneged on it. So users of Ubuntu and other Linux distros are pretty much stuck to free books like those available from Project Gutenberg, a very worthy project and full of some great classical works, but a little light on pulp fiction.

The COOL-ER has 1GB storage, which equates to just under 900MB usable space. At about 1MB for a novel in ePub format, that’s a lot of books! It can also be supplemented by a 4GB SD card. I loaded the PDF version of Jono‘s Art of Community and a variety of books in HTML and plain text book from Project Gutenberg. Bizarrely, whilst the COOL-ER was rock solid whilst displaying the ePub book, it crashed repeatedly showing the HTML and plain text books. Some crashes resulted in the unit rebooting (a rather slow process which takes about theirty seconds) and on a couple of occasions required a reset using the dimpled button on the rear.

Because it is so light, the COOL-ER build quality doesn’t feel great. It doesn’t flex or bend in the way that you would expect a poorly constructed product to, but it does creak a little. A screw fell out of the unit whilst I was using it, although being a review unit, I can’t tell whether this is due to poor build quality or whether a previous reviewer hasn’t dismantled it and not tightened everything back up properly. The device is very light, weighing in at under 170 grams. It is lighter on the wrist than anything but the thinnest paperback. It has a beautifully simple appearance, with the only button on the front being an ipod-like 4-way dial with centre button, although the print on this did wear off whilst reading a single ebook. It looks as if it’s been designed as the ebook reader for the Apple fan. The high resolution epaper display is clear and easy to read. It is not backlit, like all ebook readers, and is ever so slightly too small to display a useful amount of text in a legible size at a comfortable reading distance. This means changing pages much more frequently than a paper novel and, as page changes seem to be as slow as with other ebook readers, the reading process feels disrupted.

It charges over the USB cable, meaning there’s likely to be a way to charge it pretty much anywhere. Charging seemed pretty slow, taking about 9 hours to charge from nearly empty to full. Geeks with the Ubuntu travel adapter will be able to charge it on holiday even without a laptop to hand. Next to the USB connector, on the bottom edge of the device, is a 2.5mm headphone jack. This is smaller than the standard 3.5mm size but apparently there is usually an adapter supplied (it was missing from this review unit). The chassis of the device is big enough to to incorporate a 3.5mm jack socket, so presumably it is the internal design which prevented one from being included. Hopefully a full-size socket can be included in future versions, as the need for an adapter detracts from the convenience of having the unit play MP3s in the first place. The right hand side has a rocker switch for increasing or decreasing the size of the text, whilst the left has four buttons for navigating the menu and other functions. The landscape-view button switches the orientation of the screen and works very well as a landscape display too.

What appeals about this device is its simplicity. Unlike the kindle or the Sony ebook readers, the front of it isn’t cluttered with buttons. It doesn’t try to be anything more than it is – a replacement for books. Yes, it incorporates MP3 playback, but reading a book and listening to some suitable music go hand-in-hand. What could be better than having your COOL-ER provide the music when you’re lying on the beach reading the latest Dan Brown? The COOL-ER is a great device for the price. If they could address the software issues in a future firmware release, it would be an excellent purchase.

There has been a lot of discussion about the experimental move of the window buttons (maximise, minimise, close) from the right hand side of the window to the left in the new theme for the next release of Ubuntu, Lucid Lynx. People have approved of the innovation, submitted it as a bug and helped people to change the buttons back to the right hand side. Some people said that they felt the decision to change the button location was made without consulting the community.

We were extremely pleased to be able to interview Ivanka Majic on the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK Local Community. Ivanka is the Design Team Lead for Canonical, the team responsible for the new look and feel of Ubuntu, from the ethos of the rebranding, through to the website to the font and of course the pesky window button placement. She talks about the button placement, the work of her team, why it is so important to have good data to back design decisions up and communicating with the community. It was a fascinating discussion which could have gone on for three times as long. I hope to have the opportunity to meet Ivanka in real life to continue it one day! The lengthy interview makes this bumper edition of the show “Behind The Screen” especially worth listening to.

You can download the episode here:

– MP3 (81MB download)

– OGG (40MB download)

When you’ve listened, please give us your feedback. Details are on the website.

We’ve just released the latest episode of the Ubuntu UK Podcast. In this episode we’ve got an exclusive interview with Stuart Langridge about the Ubuntu One Music Store. We also discuss the new branding for Ubuntu, which has just been announced! There’s a whole heap of other stuff in there too – a Command Line Lurve, the “Bit About Ubuntu” and some great feedback. Download it now!