Daily Archive for March 11th, 2007

Bright Sparks

Published
by
Anton
on March 11, 2007
in Blue Fusion
. 0 Comments

After spending 11 hours at work on Thursday setting up everything for Bright Sparks and Blue Fusion, the first day of the event (Bright Sparks) for the year eight age group occured on Friday. The day had a bit of a bumpy start with everything just pulling together in time, but once the ball started rolling the rest of the day flowed like clockwork.

Blue Fusion (previously known as Young Visions) attempts to inspire children about Science, Technology and Engineering and is run during National Science and Engineering week. The event is run be recent graduates to IBM Hursley, with 5 of the previous years graduates making the lead team and twenty most recent graduates making the rest of the organising team. The event is run during the week by around 200 volunteers from all over IBM UK, and we have 80 schools, each bringing six children over the week.

Each year develops new activites to be used during the event, and many of the activities are reused for other events in IBM like Bring Your Child to Work Day, and University Challange (previously known as Thinkpad Challenge). We have six new activites this year, and I will hopefully get the chance to describe some of them in depth later.

I will put up some photos later, but for now just wanted to warn you that most posts over the next week will be Blue Fusion related.

Nine Inch Nails

Published
by
Anton
on March 11, 2007
in Music
. 0 Comments

On Wednesday night I went to see Nine Inch Nails as a christmas present from my little brother. We got to Brixton Academy shortly after 7pm, having paid over £30 for the train, when the gig tickets cost only £25! The first band was not on until eight, and I should have gone into the pub just outside that had advertised NIN starting at nine as the first band was rubbish.

Nine Inch Nails played an awesome hour and a half set, with lots of new and old songs. The theatrics of the performance were the best I have seen. An incredible amount of lighting, including more strobes than I have ever seen and enough smoke to completely hide the band at times made it quite a spectacle to watch. They also had several hanging lights, just over the heads of the band and they swung these around so that the lights flashed on and off while moving, making the whole performance quite different and dark.

This gig was most definitely one of the best I have ever been to! One of the best received songs was probably Hurt, which started with just Trent Reznor singing and playing piano, and the rest of the band only joined in right at the end. If you have not heard the Johnny Cash cover of this song, it is definitely worth a listen too!