My first stand-up show listing just went up on the net this week (http://amusedmoose.com/shows). You can book tickets online. Sunday the 14th at 7:30. Reality has just hit like a sock full of coins. I’m bricking it.

A while back I had a good look at myself and decided that life was too short and it had to be lived. After all, no one really wants to spend their limited time living the day to day grind until retirement. Since then I’ve gone out and traveled more, taken a few career risks and clocked up a good few adrenaline sports. And I’d encourage everyone to do the same. So in that continuous vein of putting myself out of my comfort zone, a couple of months back I signed up to a stand-up comedy course.

My best description of it would be that it’s a bit like that feeling you get when you go skydiving and the plane takes off. It’s that horrible thought of “what the hell am I doing here”, rapidly followed by “what was I thinking”. An adrenaline sport where the build up fear lasts for months.

It’s two months in, with a month to go until the course end and with it my first gig. And this week I finally hit a couple of breakthroughs. And none too soon. After 8 weeks of writing on an almost daily basis, there’s finally some stuff there on paper that looks like it might get laughs. That’s been one of the hardest things – you just can’t tell after a while. Dissecting sentences trying to extract that little nugget of mirth that you know lies within tends to kill the joke for you. It’s been a huge relief – kind of like getting to cloud level (if I can go back to the skydiving analogy) and being told that by the time you’re here again the chute will be open.

Stand-up is not like telling jokes. You can’t run them past your mates. It’s all about atmosphere, context and typically a chained story (you could be doing one-liners). So there’s no real test bed other than getting out in front of an audience and giving them your best shot. To make it more complicated, it’s 90% delivery. If you want proof, just check out these sets that Michael McIntyre wrote for TimeOut (spoiler: they’re not that funny when you read them). So it’s this bizarre art form with immediate feedback when you perform, but absolutely none beforehand. No wonder it’s mind-numbingly terrifying to those of us who haven’t braved the stage yet (and probably for a good number of gigs afterwards as well).

The course has been really good in getting some valuable stage time in front of an audience where anything goes. So far, I’m loving it. Lots more writing and practice ahead.

Pretty much everyone who comes to London goes on to the London Eye. If you want to save yourself some time and money, book tickets online at their website to get a 10% discount, and you get to skip the ticket queue when you turn up to collect your tickets. Great way to save yourself 15 minutes.

The guys from Intentional Software did a presentation on their Domain Workbench at the DSL DevCon which is now available at the Oslo Developer Center. The company was started by Charles Simoyi (of MS Word and multiple space trips fame), who has used the squillions he made from his work at Microsoft to try to come up with a who new way of developing software. The idea is that programmers work on the heavy lifting of software while the business users do the business logic.  The idea is a bit “ho-hum, we’ve heard all this before”, but when you see complex maths, and circuit diagrams sitting alongside code you have to sit up and take notice. The first couple of versions of the grand idea were scrapped when they ran into dead ends, and they just started again from scratch – that’s conviction! I’ve been keeping an ear to the ground for a while to see what comes out of their shop and I am really impressed. Just watch it.