In which I co-write a musical…

Date: Mon 23 March 2015:   Event: My first ever full-length musical !

TICKETS AVAILABLE!

I’m super-excited to call myself a London Theatre Impresario! A date, a venue, a show, tickets on sale!

Scary as I’m currently only about 70% of the way through writing every single note of the upcoming musical adventure that will be held in conjunction with the inimitable Hack Circus in exactly one month’s time.

We’ve written a story to go with some expert talks and some rather spiffing tunes as well even if I say so myself. Leila happens to be a genius librettist in my opinion and I’m hoping my tunes and orchestration will do those fantastic lyrics justice. She and I have hatched a musical monster of a night out… What a nerve-wracking but satisfying experience this is!

TERRIFYING REALITY:

• I need to finish building the scores and orchestration
• we need to finalise the order of songs and talks and audience interactive bits
• I’ll have to learn and sing pretty much all the songs on the night
• Leila and I have to pre-record some short bits of audio to give on-stage a break
• I’m trying to build a home-made instrument that may or may not work on the night
• Eek I need to do all the audio show control while performing (Ableton I’m looking at you)
  and;
• people are actually buying tickets so it has to be good because we have a paying audience.

ONE NIGHT ONLY

Talking of which, if you’re in London that evening AND want to be the first to see this quite peculiar and creative take on the musical genre. From the HC site:

We will be travelling in a unique sound-powered tunnelling vessel, currently under development. Please bear in mind: we really don’t know what we will find. We need a strong healthy team. It might be worth getting down to the gym now if you can.

Bring a torch. This is very important. We are expecting it to be dark.

We will be guided on our journey by three experts: monster afictionado sci-fi author Chris Farnell, historian and volcano enthusiast Ralph Harrington and shark-mad comics legend Steve White – but who knows who (or what) else we might encounter?

From: Hack Circus

TICKETS STILL AVAILABLE!

OK, I’m intrigued, tell me more:

hackcircus.com/underworlds/ 

(link for mobile users: http://www.hackcircus.com/underworlds )

DID I MENTION TICKETS ARE ON SALE?

Yes!! I’m ready and can’t think of a better way to spend a Monday night!

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!!

(link for mobile users: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/hack-circus-underworlds-tickets-15756232315?aff=es2&rank=1 )

^^This link goes to the EventBrite Ticket Page if you’d like to buy a ticket or two.

**For some reason, none of my links work. Head over to hackcircus dot com forward slash underworlds. Oh the humanity…

London 2012 Paralympics Ceremony – Behind the scenes!

Pictures from the London 2012 Paralympics Opening Ceremony – taken during August 2012.

Click the Pic to go behind the scenes!

Presenting Ideas Persuasively

I gave a presentation for the London Girl Geek Dinners 6th Anniversary event. For  a brilliant blog post all about the event – along with an unfortunate picture of me and an angry bird, click here.

Meanwhile, my aim for the presentation was to use some of what I’ve learned from my experiences as a TV presenter and producer to help other people get their voices heard, whatever their walks of life.

During my talk, I repurposed some of the techniques in telling a story for television for use in real-world situations.

I used an example of one of my most recent features for BBC News as a way to illustrate the core elements of presenting ideas in an easily accessible manner.

Presenting Ideas Persuasively – LJ Rich

I was incredibly flattered that the original Girl Geek asked for my last slide to remain up so she could communicate her ideas to our audience using this technique!

After the speaking was done, something amazing happened – quite a few people came up to me after the speech to tell me that they were inspired!  Inspired to pitch something at work that they knew they could do, or to try again to present an idea they had faith in but didn’t quite manage to convey it the first time.

Before I gave the speech, I remember thinking that if I could encourage just one person to have more confidence in their abilities, and act positively, I would feel like the presentation was a success – so this result was even more gratifying.

I had a few requests to stick the slides up online, so here they are – and GirlGeekDinners, thanks very much for having me!

The video I used for talking about presenting

 

 

London Snow Day – pics from last night

Here are a few pictures of the “extreme weather event” in London and the South East last night.  It took over 3 hours to make a 45-minute journey, complete with car-pushing and buses getting stuck.

London Embankment

City of London

Trafalgar Square

Piccadilly Circus Snowball Fight

Near Charing Cross

Piccadilly Neon in the Snow

Taxi on Truck, East London

 

Safe journeys today, everyone! Back with more gadgets soon.

Covent Garden Wishing Well

This is what I saw when I went to Covent garden to briefly visit a blogger lunch.

What is THAT????

I nearly bumped into a conspicuous gigantic triangular shaped structure that’s there till January.

Spinvox Wishing Well

 

Spinvox, the people behind the structure, have left this silver wishing well in central London, the idea being that you call and leave a message from your phone, and it gets converted to text and displayed on the inside of the installation.

 – Here’s a shot  a bit closer in – you may be able to see me in it – I’m in the X box…

(Visual Pun! How I wish I did that on purpose!)

Needless to say, there were many others there including my fantastic underground blogger mate, and of course whatleydude who kindly invited me along.

This is what it looks like inside – I stood in here for ages, reading what other people were wishing for.

inside the structure

I particularly like the fact that if one spoke a swear-word into the message, it would be replaced with &* ?*&!£ symbols, so even though the best words went, the sentiment remained. 

Of course, if you were one of those people who looked up rude words in the dictionary at school and laughed (English and other languages – oh, hang on, I still do that now) then you will appreciate the work that must have gone into creating the database to recognise them all.

I loved reading wishes ranging from “I wish for World Peace” to “I wish I had gigantic nostrils”.

If you’re in London, it’s definitely worth a look –  http://www.spinvoxwishingwell.com/

Photo Captions that Rhyme 1

… and so this first pic is entitled:

“Bloke on Tube Does Rubik’s Cube”

Neil (for that is his name) has no idea what he’s just started – unless he’s reading this… taken on the Central Line from Tottenham Court Road.

Shared with Flock – The Social Web Browser  http://flock.com

Skype is 5!

F-f-f-freezing c-c-c-cold d-d-d-drink, p-p-p-please

After a short bout of being a bit poorly (dodgy tummy, I won’t elaborate unless you’d like me to…) I found myself recovering with Blue Drinks at Skype‘s 5th Birthday Party, held at the Absolut Ice Bar, in central London. I took my good friend Decabbit along, you’ll see her in my flickr pics.

The venue’s gimmick is of course the Ice Bar, where guests are served drinks in what is essentially a gigantic freezer set to -5 degrees C.  The glass you can see was made of ice, as were the seats, the bar itself and various sculptures.  I caused great amusement by attempting to send out a twitter microblog from my N95 mobile phone with my increasingly numb fingers, heroically taking off my protective gloves in the name of blogging.

Believe it or not, Skype is only 5 years old – and we were duty-bound to celebrate with blue drinks, blue cakes and a sneak peak at Asus’ Skype Device (not out yet), below.

The current President, Josh Silverman, delighted us with some amusing Skype Stats, some of which might make it into the mini-video I’ll be editing together tonight.

Not yet out, Asus' Trek Communicator style Skype-type Thing

 

I took a stealth pic of this skype device from Asus, which isn’t even out yet – I’ve sent an email to my contact at Skype to ask for the proper name of it as my caption is, quite frankly, poor.  

Oh, and meet Robin from WeAreSocial in my shot, ha ha, as the evening has gone on, and a few more blue drinks have disappeared.

It turns out that I met Robin once before at the Moo print party in Brick Lane.  

… poor chap – I said embarassing things whilst being covered in mini stickers (long story) and I also told him more than once of my desperate and immediate desire to go to my favourite curry house across the street because I was starving.  Despite that previous meeting, he still came up to say hello.  What a good bloke.

If you want to see the other piccies, please feel free to click on my flickr stream above, or click here for the full set on flickr.

Dell Latitude Launch – live from Altitude, London

Dell Latitude let off the leash

Currently at the top of London’s Millbank tower, in the venue known as “Altitude” for the Dell “Latitude” launch (I’m pretty certain that one is an anagram of another – how pleasing).

We arrived here (myself and anniemole) at around 4.30 and were given a short presentation followed by a live link up to San Francisco.  These computers appear to have some sexy new extras, including keyboards that light up in the dark, and a much-hyped 19-hour battery life (this is with the 9V battery and a battery slice on the e6400 model).  If you want to read the press release before quite a few others, have a look here for the skinny.

Dell has also launched www.digitalnomads.com today, which you’re welcome to have a look at.  The press have now got a feast to look forward to, up here on the 29th floor – as for the food, we’re hoping it’s Dell-icious…

Flash Mob, Liverpool St London (UK)

So this weekend, apart from spending time in front of my new toy (see previous post and youtube clip) , I attended my first ever flash mob on Friday. I had the presence of mind to take the camcorder with me – I’ve just finished editing together the footage of this crazy event that actually made the news!

I was there with MissGeeky (who played Tosh in the Sweded Torchwood S2:13 Episode), whatleydude, and various others – after the event, we all went off to the Pitcher and Piano for the celebration of a job well done.

Have a look at the footage, embedded here

(RSS readers/can’t see the Vid? Click here)

Bar staff kindly placed Rick’s Finest on the jukebox – not sure they realised what was going on, and certainly when 30-40 of us sang along (some with lyric sheets) it did look mighty strange. City workers and pub regulars looked on with a mixture of bemusement and intoxication, which made the encore thoroughly worthwhile, especially when people started to join in.

_

… as for Flash Mobbing? I might have to add that to the ever-increasing list of things I’m getting addicted to.

also see http://www.ljrich.com for more info