Tonight Beth learned a valuable lesson, be careful what you tell an entertainer before the show – you never quite know what will come back at you!

The entertainer in question was Richard Popovich, half of Richard and Deborah, who we saw doing their Roaring Twenties show on the Alberta Prairie Railway, and who did their Hillbilly Show at the Buffalo Fair tonight. Beth was up at the fair all day, and had a chat to Richard there, and I think an English Teacher with a British husband was really too good an opportunity to miss!

In terms of British Jokes there was some good humoured Fish and Chips jokes (which makes a change from the endless ‘cup of tea’ jokes I got when I worked in the USA), which I guess are the equivalent of the ‘All Canadian’s live in Igloos and listen to Celine Dion’ jokes that go in the reverse direction! The funniest moment from my point of view, was when he asked Beth, as an English teacher, what the difference between a Buffalo and a Bison is… She thought for a bit, and then answered ‘Semantics’… Needless to say that wasn’t the correct answer, and the correct answer proved to be rather amusing, and caused Beth to go bright red. (I won’t spoil the joke by putting down the answer). Beth actually said that most things she had mentioned came up during the evening!

Having said that, we weren’t the only source of jokes. Marg had yet again won the Apple Pie competition at the fair, however the regular judge had said that the pie was not up to her usual standards and only awarded her a second place, however as there were no other better pies she got the prize anyway, this provided a good few jokes. Another funny moment was when Richard pointed out that there was a Mercedes SUV in the car park with farm plates (I bet that doesn’t go out on the Prairie chasing down cattle), although I don’t think anybody owned up to that one – we did find it in the car park afterwards.

There was also a nice bit of audience participation, where various members of the community helped out with a song.

All in all it was a great evenings entertainment (even if we were the source of some of the jokes), and something that you don’t often come across in this part of the UK now. I guess as most people would not be able to make enough to earn a living in this part of the UK from playing small venues, as to some extent they don’t really exist. Whilst some places like Finchampstead still put on a Village show, it’s very much by the villagers for the villagers, I haven’t come across any professional entertainers doing similar shows.

You can find out more about Richard and Deborah at their website. There are more of our pictures of their show on the train, and at Buffalo on our pictures site.

Checking out whether the weblog was coming up on Google I came up with a new entry for the site as a result of our link to David Chait’s site. The link was on a site called Blogshares.

The site is a share trading game, but using weblogs as the commodity. Currently we’re not doing overly well, despite my having gone and bought as many of our shares as I could. There are a load of our shares left, and the game engine lists our stock as undervalued. Chance to snap up a bargain then!

Apologies in advance if anyone sent e-mail to myself or Beth and doesn’t get a reply. For the first time in a while I had problems with the e-mail server, and not due to me having to decided to tweak settings!

I’d been using Beth’s laptop to program the GPS, and spotted some important mail had come into the queue at Gradwell, who host our various domains. The Mac was in sleep mode, so I came up to use the machine, woke it up, logged in using my user, and which point I got the Mac equivalent of the PC blue screen of death, and a request to restart the machine. This I did, at which point I logged straight back in. However, when I logged it, it did it again.

At this point, somewhat worried, I turned everything off, left it off for a few minutes, and gradually started it up again from scratch, turning on the external hardware once the main machine was up and running. This time it logged in correctly.

I opened up e-mail, and only two out of the three messages I was expecting had appeared, so I then started digging around in from the shell to try and find the missing e-mail.

Apple, in their infinite wisdom have changed the mail server under MacOS 10.3 from Sendmail to Postfix, which is fine, aside from the fact that my books cover Sendmail, and there is precious little online about Postfix. Anyway, looking through the logs I found that there was some e-mail stuck in Postfix that had been being processed when the crash occurred, so looking through I eventually worked out how to get it all moving again. However, although the mail logs indicate that all the mail was processed and delivered, and there is nothing remaining in the queues, the mail never actually appeared in my inbox! In addition to my missing e-mail, there was at least one addressed to Beth.

Anyway, an equivalent to my Sendmail bible, but for Postfix has been added to my wishlist, although I suspect I may purchase it fairly swiftly myself…

I’ve just got an e-mail from Blogwise to let me know that the site is now listed there. It takes a little time to get listed as all the sites that are on their directory are hand checked, rather than automatically being added to the listing. You can check the site out by following the link below.

Other changes include that I’ve updated the code that is producing the Amazon Wishlist code, as the previous version was not updating the wishlists properly. I’m also slowly moving all of our picture sites across into one, with redirections. So far the pictures of David and Louisa’s recent wedding, and The Queens Oak Geocache pictures have been moved.