Lucy Porter Northern Soul

Lucy Porter touched my bottom!! Ok, so it’s not because she fancied me and I really must stop pretending that it was. It was because I hugged her and she’s a little bit shorter than me and I’m sure it was unintentional. Still, I can dream….

Lucy Porter is by far my favorite comedian. I’ve seen her a few times before and I was thrilled to meet her on this occasion and to tell her my story. We were quite early and she’d only just arrived at the venue. I’d seen Lucy at the Norwich Arts Centre in 2005 and part of her act then was complaining she was single. I am sure had I not gone with a friend of mine that I really fancied at the time I would have asked her to marry me! Lucy laughed, smiled and asked Charlotte how long we’d been married when I told her. Lucy was lovely and I really appreciated her taking the time to stop and talk to us.

When I meet celebrities (don’t get me wrong it doesn’t happen very often and please don’t ask me about the time I met Joe Elliott from Def Leppard) afterwards I get quite shy and start feeling they must think I’m a stalker! To avoid this as much as possible we sat in the second row. Until someone from the venue came and asked us, and the people next to us, to sit in the front row. Luckily Lucy decided to pick on the guy behind us with a beard! Although that may of been because she thought I was a stalker!

Lucy’s show was of course brilliant. For me at least it was all new material, except for the hen and stag party joke she does. There was nothing about Mother Teresa moisturising this time! It was interesting to hear how she’d got herself into trouble with the people of Derby! Sadly I suspect the threats to move to Norwich were just that. There were two halves and all too soon it was over and we were heading off back into the cold and rain. I’ll certainly be making the effort to see her next time in Norwich and maybe one day I’ll get to Edinburgh.

Comments

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...

Remember to Delegate: The Triangle of Trust

So you think you can lead a team? I’ve been talking and writing a lot about leading a software engineering team in 2025. I started thinking about it more deeply the year before when I decided to give a colleague, who was moving into team leading, some advice: 'Doing the work' isn't the only way to add value Remember to delegate Pick your battles Talk to your team every day Out of this came a talk, “So you think you can lead a team?” which I gave at work, at meetups and at conferences in various different formats during the first quarter of 2025. Here I am looking at Remember to Delegate and an idea which came out of discussion around the talk, The Triangle of Trust, in more detail. Delegate Delegation is a crucial skill for any team lead, yet it is often one of the most challenging aspects of leadership to master. Many leaders, particularly those who have risen through the ranks as individual contributors, struggle to let go of tasks, fearing a loss of control or a dip in ...

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...

Paul Grenyer

Search This Blog