Lugradio Live 2009. This was the second time that the Last Ever Lugradio took place. There won’t be another one. Well, probably not. Well, who knows…
Anyway, it was just as much fun as all previous events. Except for the pigeons, that is. More about that later.
The drive to Wolverhampton was rubbish: dark, foggy, rain, spray, no fun at all. Then, as dawn broke over the beautitful city … no, I’m sorry, I can’t keep that up. Wolves is nothing like that.
On arrival at the hotel, I bumped into a few familiar faces: chatted to Felim during the walk over to the Venue. It was straight down to business with the first talks. Spoke to many other regulars: MrBen, Popey, Tony, Bruno, Dotwaffle, Essk, Pinkoi and others, not to mention the Large Gents themselves.
Everyone who attended was encouraged to sign one of the big banners which had been used for the past few years around the various venues. This was to be given away later in the day to MrBen; however, due to a lack of any means to transport it home, he entrusted it to my care. I’ll get a decent photo of it uploaded at some stage soon: it is a magnificent piece of Lugradio memorabilia 🙂
Lugradio book of condolence
The rest of day was a good mix of informative and interesting talks, fun and games, plus downright silliness, especially the live on-screen twitter feed.
By the end of the day I had acquired (i) a Bytemark mug, (ii) the above-mentioned banner and (iii) no copies of Jono’s book whatsoever, thankfully.
The highlight of the whole event, like last year, was The Great Lugradio Karaoke. Oh yes. This year I successfully rickrolled the Lugradio attendees with my rendition of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. See this tweet and pic from Aquarion. Steve Lamb (the regular lamb-to-the-slaughter Microsoft chap who always comes along to Lugradio) said immediately afterwards that I had given “a well-delivered” performance. I wondered whether he meant “well-delivered” in the real sense or in the Windows Vista sense. I also wondered whether he noticed on my later song “Another Brick In The Wall” whether I altered the words to sing “We don’t need no Windows 7″…
After the karaoke, I slept very well. Until dawn, when I was rudely awakened by the pigeons on the hotel roof. Noisy buggers. Still, it meant that I got up early-ish and had a long, relaxing breakfast. Chatted with a number of people for ages, mostly a long conversation about clocks and calendars, kicked-off by the fact that the clocks had just been changed. I like to think that I provided information of a Quite Interesting nature. Helps being married to a clock/time geek, I suppose.
All done until next time, whenever and wherever that may be.