Freshly Social

South West Four 2010 is slowly but surely edging closer, and the organisers are continuing to sporadically drop names, details and other bombs, which collectively suggest that this year’s event will be the best yet.

The festival returns to Clapham Common this year for the sixth time. Clubbers and dance junkies will be delighted to know that the event has gained an extra day, making 2010 the debut of the South West Four Weekender. More time, more acts, more party!

The dance music spectacular will take place over the Bank Holiday weekend on 28 and 29 August. Eight arenas, loads of bars and food stalls, and fairground rides will combine to create a 48 hours of foot-stomping, crowd-crazy euphoria, enough to satisfy even the most hardcore party people.

Ronnie Wood: guitarist for one of the most defined bands in musical history, this Rolling Stones musician is a rock star in his own right. But with fame comes scandal, and Woods has had his fare share of public upsets over the years. Recently, the once vibrant rocker has attempted to sell his Chelsea home and it seems that he is in quite a hurry to do so. Even with the unstable current property market trends, Wood’s Chelsea home is up for sale – and the asking price is a considerable amount less than he bought it for.

If you think Paddington Bear is a has-been character from the 50’s, my friend you are dead wrong! Although children of today are more likely to be watching Miley Cyrus or the Jonas Brothers doing whatever it is they do on the Disney Channel, it is somewhat of a comfort to know that there is still a healthy subscription to the quaint and more innocent old school

In recent times Paddington has been quite the busy bee. He is the inspiration for a musical spectacular by the Cascade Symphony Orchestra, which debuted last Saturday at the Edmonds Center for the Arts in Washington, USA. The anthropomorphised bear has been constantly liaising with creatives behind the project to ensure his core values of politeness and ‘trying hard to get things right’ are accurately represented in this musical adaptation of his life.

Health and safety in the construction industry is already under a very big metaphorical microscope thanks to 2009 being one of the worst years for health and safety statistics in the industry’s history. The continuation of the recession into 2010 has caused experts to question whether or not companies will be able to do anything to rectify this issue due to a lack of time and money.

Mactavish, a research firm specialising in commercial risk and insurance has recently voiced their concern about the cut in UK health and safety budgets of many a construction company. Health and safety management as well as providing workers with the correct safety clothing such as work shoes could be overlooked due to cuts in the relevant budgets. One would be surprised at what a difference it makes when men wear the correct shoes and women are provided with appropriate ladies footwear.

Words cannot effectively convey the experience of driving along a South African national road in a car with three of your best friends, eating chip rolls and blaring music that you will forever associate with this time and place, while laughing and talking excitedly of the amazing adventure you’re about to have.

Through the rolled down windows you can see the wild terrain, perhaps dotted with buck, or sheep or ostrich. There are some other cars and trucks on the road, but it’s an exhilarating relief from the sluggish city traffic you’re accustomed to. You take silly snapshots of yourselves pulling faces and distracting the driver; you put your feet up on the dashboard in front of you; you prepare yourself for the good times ahead.

And now for some tabloidism…

Are you looking to buy a house? I heard of a sweet deal that might be coming up on a Chelsea property. No, not a house or flat in the upmarket London borough, known for swanky restaurants and fashionable night clubs – a different type.

By Chelsea property I mean the million pound mansion currently owned by John Terry. The disgraced former English football captain has been the centre of a media storm over the past few weeks, initially for his sexual transgression and dicey moral conduct, and more recently for speculation around his financial stability.

These latest rumours emerged last week when it came to light that the mortgage on his mansion, located in Oxshott, Surrey near Chelsea FC’s training ground, is nearly double the original price of the property. Terry purchased the extravagant house for £2.25 million back in 2003, but last year he took out a mortgage to the value of £3.95 million.

Action Against Hunger: The orginization behind the Putney pop-up restaurants

Rebecca Mascarenhas who owns and runs popular Putney Restaurant, Phoenix, is the lady behind the wonderfully generous idea of hosting some of London’s top restaurants and chefs in her very own Putney restaurant. The drive is in aid of raising much needed funds for the island of Haiti which is still struggling to get back on its feet after the disastrous earthquake that hit the island earlier this year. The Putney restaurant owner is working in conjunction with Action Against Hunger and is currently doing an excellent job of raising funds for Haiti.

The basic formula is that up to 15 dates will be arranged when popular restaurants will take over Mascarenhas’ Putney restaurant for a day. Chefs and staff will work for free and do one service each. Patrons can expect to pay a flat rate of £60 each for a three course dinner of the highest drawer.

Many people don’t have a great impression of RAID drives, mainly due to the slight fragility of the product. Occurrences such as power failure or the crashing of an operating system can cause the drive to suddenly fail and start instilling panic in the owner of the drive. The truth however is that a RAID array is a much more reliable method of storing data as it keeps its own back-ups on striped or mirrored drives. If you get an error saying that your drive has “failed”, don’t panic – a “failed” error message when related to a RAID drive failure is rarely a hardware fault. It’s often just a matter of one or more of the drives becoming out of sync with one another.

No need to call the RAID data recovery specialists just yet. Thanks to a blog I found at Keyliner Thoughts, I was able to restore my drive and simplify their article for your reading pleasure right here. Follow the steps below to resolve the issue:

What a great job Stefan Gates has.  First he travelled the world exploring how people under extraordinary circumstances feed themselves for his BBC series Cooking in the Danger Zone.

Then he travelled the world yet again looking into traditional feasts for his BBC series Feasts.  How his wife, award winning food photographer Georgia Glynn-Smith copes with their two young children on her own is anyone’s guess!

Now, Stefan’s curious mind has been turned onto the subject of E Numbers and he is currently researching and filming a new 3 part series for the BBC which will seek to debunk all the myths surrounding the topic. I think so far he has found out that basically we can’t live without E numbers!

As if that’s not enough to do in a day, he’s also writing a book to go with it for Conran Octopus Publishing, so if you don’t catch the series, you can go buy the book.  Like all his previous projects, it promises to be full of surprises!

If you’re a fan of JLS and missed all their shows at the London Hammersmith Apollo Theatre last month, then fear not as there is one last chance for you to make sure you get to catch the boys in action. 3000 tickets are being given away to readers of The Sun newspaper for a one-of-a-kind performance on the 7 March 2010.

Whether you live in a Hammersmith property near the theatre, or on the other side of the country, there’s no need to rush over to the Hammersmith Apollo box office to pay for tickets! All you have to do is collect four tokens from different editions of The Sun newspaper available during February, and then mail your tokens off to The Sun along with a self addressed envelope. The organizers of the JLS show which is being hosted by the The Sun’s Bizarre column will then randomly draw 3000 people to whom tickets will be awarded for the Hammersmith Apollo concert. Even if you don’t get awarded with Hammersmith Apollo tickets to attend the show, you will still receive a free JLS lanyard as well as a signed photo of the band.