Archive for May, 2013

At April, Dr Brooke Magnanti presented a talk on her book, The Sex Myth.

Duck of the Day is clearly a terrible name for this series. Firstly, most of the animals featured in it are in fact not ducks, but other types of birds. Secondly, the same duck appears twice. But it does have alliteration, which makes the whole thing more memorable (even if you only remember it for how semantically incorrect it is).

Recently, I took part in the Area 15 International Speech & Evaluation contest. Having won the speech contest at Leeds City Toastmasters, and evaluation contest at White Rose Speakers, there was no relaxing as I had both competitions to do – not that I’m complaining!

Evaluation isn’t my strong point, so I was quite pleased that I managed to make third place (out of five). I did rather better in the speech contest though, winning by a very narrow margin, but never the less proceeding through to the Division contest at York.

Well done to everyone who took part, it was tough competition indeed!

Regardless of what happens in York, it does mean I have a new trophy to put on my shelf, at least until the Area Context next year.

However, the show was stolen by Erik, who provided Michael with dance lessons.

In the third book of the Discworld series, a dying wizard passes his staff onto a baby without first checking the gender. As it turns out, Eskarina is a girl. But there are no female wizards. What a to do.

I was a little disappointed in the content of the book I think, I was hoping for a in depth examination of gender roles and the struggle of a female wizard in an otherwise all male university. But most of the novel was about the journey to Unseen University rather than what happens when she gets there.

Never the less, it was an enjoyable read and featured plenty of Granny Weatherwax, which is always going to be a good thing.

This video was taken at the White Rose Speakers club level contest of the 2013 Toastmasters International Speech Contest. I had already won at Leeds City Toastmasters, so this was just a showcase, but I went on to win the Area level contest as well.

I’ve finally finished watching the new Jonathan Creek.

Overall, I thought it was OK, trending towards disappointing.

Mainly because he doesn’t live in a windmill anymore. That was the best bit. You can make the argument that they can’t just bring it back after a long break and pretend nothing has happened, but if we’ve learned anything from Red Dwarf X, actually you can, and they should have done.

The first layer of the mystery was good, and while it wasn’t as far reaching as “great”, if you watch back on the original episodes, it was only really series three to hit it out of the park – the rest were about as good as this one. The second layer with the secret assassinations seemed a bit over the top too.

I was also disappointed that there was no nice ending where he decided that settling down was all nonsense and he was going back to solving mysteries in a windmill. But, despite the lack of a windmill, he will be returning to our screens next year, in a new full series.

You may get an error similar to the following in phpMyAdmin.

PHP Fatal error: Class ‘PMA_Message’ not found in /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/libraries/Message.class.php

This is caused when Apache is unable to create a session – perhaps because of a permissions issue on the session folder, or perhaps because you have run out of disk space.