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Pat's Blog

Tuesday, October 28, 2003 at 10:15 PM

Drivetime Show!!!

In the words of many an annoying American Teenage Girl: Oooh my gaaawwd, like, wow and, like, totally!!!

In the words of myself, or any Queen's English Speaking person: Wow. I did a primetime show on Dream 107FM this afternoon.

Yep, despite it being a fill in and clearly not a permanent thing (hello real job! I haven't forgotten you!), it was indeed at Prime Time (TM), from 3pm-7pm. I was covering for John "Leechy" Leech, who's taken a coupla days off to rest his voice (he's had a dodgy throat for ages), and oh my god was it fun.

Despite myself being totally petrified for the first hour or so (and the usual plethora of errors that one makes in the first time they do anything (or is that just me?)), it seemed to go pretty well. At least I seemed to be getting some good feedback, which is ace!

To summarise:

The best things

Callers - it's just great speaking with the people you're talking to all the time, as they're often a good laff and also it's a confidence booster to know people are listening to you!
Other people in the studio - e.g. at 5:25, having a chat with Andrea about Sophie Ellis Bextor. We were bouncing stuff back and forth, and it made for really relaxed (and hopefully interesting/entertaining) radio. Quality stuff!
BEING ON THE RADIO - It was amazing fun knowing that I was actually on the radio!!! Aw I want to do more :-)

The worst things

Forgetting what to say - e.g. when I realised there was 5 seconds left of a song, that I had to talk into the ad break and that I'd forgotten what it was I were supposed to talk about. That was a bit scary. Made it in the end, but with some horrible filling to get to the point I was supposed to make!
Running out of time - finding that, suddenly, you're 8 minutes over coming up to the top of the hour, so have to either a) drop stuff you said you were gonna talk about, b) drop some songs or c) both!!!

I'll whack some highlights online after this weekend, when I get the show off the logger tapes.

I knew you'd be thrilled ;-)

at 10:11 PM

Hello! I'm Pat, and I'll be your new house mate from now...

Yep, I've finally "flown the nest" and moved into the new place in Billericay on Sunday. It's really cool, with some top housemates, including my workmate Stu. I haven't yet taken advantage of the curry house and/or chinese and/or offie which are all pretty much next door, but trust me - I will do :-)

And the house is networked up. With a Counter Strike server. And Sky Digital. And a CLEANER. And... and... wooh :-)

at 10:04 PM

Blaine!

I went along to particpate in the flash-mobbing of David Blaine (on Mon 13th... yes, it's been a while since I've blogged, ok? ;-) ), organised by a group of crazy kids, which was really cool, as loads of other people were there, about 70 taking part and another 500 watching, and the whole thing basically went exactly to plan (check out the Flash Blaine web site for details).

Old Blainey boy even managed to stand up and give us a round of applause after the Flash Mob. Quality!

Friday, October 10, 2003 at 11:45 AM

Long time no blog!

Woah... writing a blog. Kinda forgot about that. Guess I'm joining the plethora of teenage girls (no, not like that, you big weirdo) in the "start a blog, then don't actually update it EVER" thing. I happened to wander onto my blog the other day and noticed a couple of comments along the line of "BLOG DAMN YOU!!!". These were added about 3 months ago, but hey: better late than never, huh?

I'll let you decide that one :-)

So... what's been happening?

In short: Lots.

In a bit (n.b. may be a lot) more detail...

Work
Real work
Same old same old... and not too stressful at the mo, which is nice. I'm going to be rotating into another department at some point in December (hopefully) - wanting to work in Tech Services, as:

it's a good team,
it's a nice change from what I'm doing at the mo and
I GET AN ADMIN ACCOUNT

pat does the No Lock Down Client dance

If I were to say "I'm not Sad!" at this point, it'd be too late, wouldn't it?

Dream 107
Wow. Quite a bit has been happening since I last blogged.

I'm now filling in on a semi-permanent basis (certainly until the end of October) on the Early Breakfast show, from 4:30-6:00am, Monday to Friday. It's pretty darn tiring, but great to be back doing radio shows!!1

I'm also now reading out the sports reports on a saturday afternoon too, which is good fun (although sometimes I have trouble getting my words out!!).

In addition to that, I help out here and there with cleaning stuff out of their playout systems... and sometimes I have even rebooted the entire on air playout system, filling in with some CDS. Just like I did last night. I won't bore you with the details (trust me, it's even more boring than this posting!!!11), but let's just say that it was a bit exciting... I love it when computer playout stuff goes wrong* :-)

Not really had a proper chance to think about the fact that, oh my gawd, I'm doing Real Radio now, because I've just been so chuffing busy with my real job and Dream taking up pretty much all of my time.

(* N.B. As long as it can actually be fixed. Which, last night, it was. Thank gawd.)

Home
Still been livin' avec les folkes for the past few months, battling off the demons of student debt and attempting to gather up some savings.

In the next couple of weeks, however, I'll be moving in with a mate from work (it's about chuffing time) and some other Fordies in rented accomodation in Billericay. Mainly because it's about time, but also because of the following attractions:

ADSL + Network
Sky Digital
Cleaner
30 seconds walk from:
- Curry house
- Chinese
- Off license
- News agent
10 mins walk from the train station - which has trains going back from London after 9:15 at night!!!11 (this is possibly my biggest problem with the town I currently reside in)

Oh, and it's pretty good val for dosh too. I think the phrase "Everyone's a Winner Baby" springs to mind. Well, I say everyone... probably only me as the others have to live with me :-)

Holidays
Went on holiday to Fuertaventura (please God don't feel you have to make any Ace Ventura based jokes - trust me, I HAVE HEARD THEM ALL BEFORE!!1) with the family in August, which was very nice and chilled.

I spent most of the days either swimming, reading, watching Sky News or sunbathing - to the extent that I actually managed to get a tan!

Sadly the hotel we were at was a German hotel, so the waiters/waitresses would generally speak in Spanish to you, then when you spoke in pigeon Spanish back to them they'd respond in German to you. AAGH. That wasn't the worst thing tho... the worst thing was the german 50 year old bloke who insisted in walking around in a thong.

I still wake up in cold sweats now.

*shudder*

Last weekend I went over to Ireland with The Dave and Mr Hardman, to visit Paul's top girlfriend Emily. Twas an ACE weekend... some photos from said weekend are in the following places:

Paul's Website
Dave's Website
My Website

'Twas a TOP WEEKEND! Probably the top moment was when Paul was convinced by Emily to kiss the Blarney Stone (which essentially involves leaning over the top of Blarney Castle, with a 40 foot drop under you and kissing an outer wall) because "She'd done it so he could too". She only told him that she was lying about 10 minutes after done it. The look on his face will stick with me for some time to come... :-)

There were just so many amusing moments... wholey ace, and a great break from work!

Other Stuff

The Darkness - Loving their new album, especially Get Your Hands Off My Woman... genius!
David Blaine - People are going to do a big ol' flash mob on him on Monday at 7:44pm - check out the website set up: flashblaine.co.uk!
RaW - Helped out Tal with some (fairly lame-ass, sadly) production for RaW's start-of-term launch, in the shape of three music jingles. I'll whack em online @sp if I remember. Also did the vox for the overnight loop, which Tal lovingly put together and was broadcast all night long before the launch... I'd love to hear it, you know. It'd be great if someone would put it online for me to listen to... (hint)

Blimey, that's a fecking long post... my fingers are starting to look kinda red. I imagine your eyes might be too, by now.

Anyway, yes, there you go, a blog! Huzzah!