Anybody who knows me will know I hate incorrect usage of grammar and punctuation. Back in September I supplied a useful check-list - here are a few more.

1. Employ the vernacular.
2. It behooves you to avoid archaic expressions.
3. Avoid archaeic spellings too.
4. Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.
5. Be more or less specific.
6. Placing a comma between subject and predicate, is not correct.
7. Use youre spell chekker to avoid mispeling and to catch typograhpical errers.
8. Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.
9. Don’t be redundant.
10. Eschew obfuscation.
11. Don’t indulge in sesquipedalian lexicological constructions.
12. A writer must not shift your point of view.
13. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
14. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
15. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
16. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
17. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
18. Always pick on the correct idiom.
19. The adverb always follows the verb.
20. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
21. Don’t use no double negatives.
22. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
23. Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.

25. Ensure lists are properly numbered
26. And always be sure to finish what

Yes, it’s all over. Saturday - 2 shows - has come and gone. The matinee, when I had my parents and various (or to be more precise, members of my girlfriends family there, when fantastically. The evening wasn’t so good, but by then I was ready to drop.

When the show finished, presents were given out (I was given 2 bottles of wine) and we dismantled the set.

Then we went off to one of the members house for a party. My head is still a little groggy, but not as bad as it’s been before.

All-in-all, a damn fine week and I really enjoyed my time as stage manager. Will I do it again? Dunno - I want to be on the stage to be honest. But if there’s a show I don’t want to do and they’re stuck again, my hat will be going into the ring once more.

Update (02/11/06) : The societies chairman has sent me a letter thanking me for the work I did, and has already put my name down as Stage Manager for the next show.

Ok, ok, I forgot to Blog the last couple of nights. It’s all been quite hectic.

Thursday night went, as the graph predicted, reasonably well. Last night went brilliant. Except for the stage curtain ripping at the end of the show (it’s now repaired thanks to a ladder, reel of cotton, some string and a stapler).

I think the most telling thing was that Colin - our usual stage manager - saw the show last night and declared the scene changes as “impressive”. And he was glad to be on the other side of the curtain for this show.

Praise indeed.

Today there are the final two shows (an afternoon matinee and another evening performance). Then an after-show party during which it’s traditional for me to get absolutely bladdered.

So don’t expect a Blog now until at least Tuesday….

Last night could have gone better. One of the stage-hands called in sick, so we had a replacement. Without any practice things just didn’t “gel” as well, so it was all a bit slow.

Anyway, this is at least consistent with how performances should go. I refer you to my chart on the right.

Monday night is usually tosh because it’s, well, first night. We feel so ashamed Tuesday night is great. Then we get cocky and Wednesday drops a bit. Thursdays gets better and Friday is the best night of the week. Matinee on Saturday drops off and Saturday picks up again - but not to the giddy heights of Friday.

This is how it goes. It’s the rules. It’s law.

I hope you’re paying attention to this, as I’ll be asking questions later.

Well, I’m now running on Firefox 2… and very good it is too (even if it asking me to check the spelling of the word “Firefox” in this blog).

Meantime, after the recent publicity, I thought I’d give the Copy+ website a bit of a technical refresh by upgrading it to XHTML. Shame it didn’t work. In IE6 and before, the XML tag causes it to go into “quirks mode” which means my CSS doesn’t render correctly. Yes, I could have sorted that out with time and effort but as XHTML doesn’t actually give me any advantage, it’s really not worth it. So I’ve rolled the changes back and the site is back to how it was. With an added Web 2.0-styley-supermarket-sticker on it (as demonstrated on the left). Just don’t get me started on Web 2.0….