On Sunday I went to Highfields park, just off University Boulevard, to watch and celebrate the Chinese new year. This event kicked off at half 4 with a lion dance (I forgot the names of the people who did it.. sorry). After this rather noisey event it was the turn of a group of school children from the Beeston Rylands school, who were performing a dance based on a story called “king of cats” or something. They explained why cats bury poo and why cats wash their faces. It was really good to see the kids dancing about to the Chinese songs, and I can only guess that a couple of the songs were amusing due to a bunch of Chinese students starting laughing in the crowd. I was quite happy to hear a track from Twelve Girls Band, who I adore.

There was another group of children, this time from the Nottingham Chinese school. They sung a few songs in Mandarin Chinese, and were very cute to watch. But for some reason they came onto the stage twice and performed the same songs each time. There was also a Kung Fu demonstration by the University of Nottingham Kung Fu club. And they did a little bit of canvessing, I might add (maybe membership has gone down, who knows) but anyway, the demonstration was quite impressive.

Now the highlight of the evening has to be a wonderful performance of dance and music performed by a group of Chinese students from the University of Nottingham. Li Yang, a student, was playing a wonderful song on a Hulusi (a kind of Chinese wind instrument) called “yue guang xia de feng wei zu” which was originally by “Guan Mucun”. The other 4 students were performing a dance on the stage to the music and it was one of the most beautiful and moving displays of dance I have seen in a long time. Truely magical.

To round off the evening there was a dragon dance performed by the Nottingham Chinese Community Students Association, which was quite good to watch and cleverly done – specially the way they created Chinese characters using the dragon.

The event was well planned out and the performances were excellent. My only issue is with the two people who were introducing the acts. There was clearly a problem with nerves as the girl was struggling to get her written-down lines out, which wasn’t helped by the urgency on the guys face. Maybe next time they should try and get some people with a bit of character, and who don’t get scared in front of a crowd.

This is a few days old, but interesting anyway.

“Unlike other methods that freeze the activation countdown timer, extending the trial to 120 days requires no hacking, cracking or illegal third party files. All one needs to do is log into Windows Vista with administrator rights, launch the command prompt and type in: slmgr –rearm
After a restart, the countdown timer will have reset to “43200 minute(s) (30 day(s).” Windows Vista will allow you to perform this operation a maximum of three times, so in theory, if one issues the “rearm” command on the last day of each trial period, a total of 120 days may be realized.”

Original page

Google on Wednesday said its Gmail service is now open to anyone who wants an account. Previously the service, which provides users with 2.8GB of e-mail storage space, has been by invitation only.

The service, known as Google Mail in the U.K., has proved very popular. When it was launched, Google raised eyebrows with its practice of indexing the content of e-mails so that the company could place contextual advertisements in them. Nevertheless, early ZDNet UK stories garnered hundreds of reader responses from people looking for free accounts.

http://mail.google.com/mail/signup

I’m not a fan of Mitchell & Webb. In fact, I don’t even know who they are properly and I certainly have never watched a single episode of this show called “Peep Show” or even the other one they did. Apparently, though, the casting of these two people is “spot on” according to some newspapers and websites such as The Register. But anyway I watched one of these new ads. They suck. They suck a little less than the original US ads because they have “famous” people in them, but they still suck.

I love Apple, and I love Macs and I’m proud to be a Mac user. But the ads suck.

This one, however, is lots better http://flibblesan.co.uk/20060513.jpg