Year: 2005

Over the weekend the Telegraph ran a story about a new report, apparently funded by the BBC, recommending that children’s TV presenters should be older and more conservatively-dressed. At least, that’s how the Telegraph chose to tag the article – quite what the report itself says is anyone’s guess. I was alerted to the story by Sam Pinkham, erstwhile presenter of this parish. Or at least, of The Big Bang, anyway – he’s mostly a DJ for Heart 106 in Nottingham, doing the drivetime show. Would I, he enquired, care to record a brief interview on the subject, since they were going to discuss children’s TV this afternoon?

Of course, I tried to fob him off by offering up Fred Dinenage, who’s a living rebuttal to any concern that children’s TV is entirely full of scantily-clad youngsters barely out of their teens. He’s been presenting the same show since 1966, you see. Fred gamely stepped out of a meeting down at Meridian and did the interview… but then Sam rang me again anyway, and we recorded a little something.

Now, I get nervous as heck doing this sort of thing. I’m OK again in front of an audience – finally! – but radio brings back horrifying flashes of a live interview I did on BBC Radio Humberside when I was 17. It was supposed to be a two or three-minute piece, but some link or other went down… then the news feed collapsed… then something else packed in… and before I knew it the host and I were twelve minutes into the discussion, surrounded by terrified-looking station execs frantically making ‘s-t-r-e-t-c-h’ movements.

So I regret to report that I’ve absolutely no idea what I driveled on about. I think I got a good boot into the BBC at some point, for not showing anything much resembling factual programming and thereby setting a terrible example to the rest of the industry. But really, for all I can remember I could have been wittering on about the weather in Patagonia. I’m just hoping I didn’t make too much of a fool of myself.

Wow. There’s a blast from the past. I’m currently – that is, over on the other Mac right this very moment – editing the last session video from July’s OpenTech. I got most of it done and uploaded the week after the conference, but then this inconvenient job sort of drove in and sucked up all my time. But now I need the media drive space back so I can prepare DVDs of Scrap It!, which is something of an incentive to get the laggard sessions edited, compressed, and uploaded. These include Suw, Gavin, Ewan‘s iPod Shuffle Shuffle (which I didn’t think I had, but it turned out the other camera more-or-less caught the audio), and Rob McKinnon’s demonstration of the most amazing GreaseMonkey site rebuilding.

And I’m nearly there. Only… oh gnats! I’ve just spotted James Larsson’s Motherboard Kerplunk, which was sort-of not on the programme, only it’s very lovely and I do actually have video of it and… bother.

Heigh-ho. More video hackery to come, then. And I was soooo close.

David Rowan, writing in the Times Magazine back in May (though I’ve only just seen this), explores the games children play in the school playground. A fascinating insight into an alien world. I may make television for children, but I wouldn’t claim to begin to understand them.

OK, this is so mad it has to happen: the Mini Concept Tokyo, as reported on CoolHunting. As they put it, it looks like the designers have been ‘smoking some Marc Newson weed from a Paul Smith bong.’ Make sure you scroll down until you see the roof interior shot. You’ll be glad you did.

More pictures at Mini2.com; it’s a reprinted press release with all the expected nonsensical marketing/design drivel. Awful pretty, though. And personally, if this is the 2006 Mini’s front end, I much prefer it to the current ‘facelift’ version.

(And if you’re wondering: yes, I’m catching up with NetNewsWire again. Hence the sudden flurry of posts).

It’s Sunday afternoon. Four cars just parked up on the road outside my flat. Six people got out, five women and one man. All are wearing blue polo shirts, white boiler-suits and green rubber gloves, and appear to be carrying cleaning products. They’ve just entered a house opposite. One of them has a stepladder.

There are several scenarios I could hypothesise to explain this, none of them pleasant. I haven’t been in all week, so I wouldn’t have noticed… oh, I don’t know… a large police presence or whatever.

Yikes.

Update: They’re now marching in carrying multiple Numatic Henry vacuum cleaners.

Update 2: Ten minutes later, they’ve all gone again. Er… weird.

A sometime colleague of mine theorises that any noun can be turned into a west-end musical by the simple addition of an exclamation mark. For example: Squid! works better than you’d expected, right? How about Elastomer!, or maybe Sprocket!. Hair! has, of course, already been done.

Thus: Teach!, inexplicably called Reach! on the video itself, which is clearly a typo. Or something. It appears to be a bunch of students doing the sort of thing students do, only with amplification, multiple video cameras and perhaps a little more panache than most of us managed back in the day. Made me laugh, anyway. Linky to Quicktime video: enjoy.

There are more videos too, though they’re mildly obfuscated by one of those annoyingly slow Flash interfaces, and there’s nothing I can see about the perpetrators.

Cassini-Huygens: Multimedia-Images

I’m posting this with the very-very-beta-release of Flock. So far I’m in the ‘meh’ camp, but I need to test rather more and see if I can tell what’s intentional and what’s just plain unfinished – it’d be rather mean to complain about stuff too early, except constructively. The Cassini photo’s stunning, however.

I’ve often suggested that television is surprisingly free of jargon. This position is somewhat hard to maintain when faced with exchanges thus:

“Where’s my tone gone?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m sending tone to the racks relay, but I can’t find it. Where’s it gone?”

“What’s it routed to?”

“The DS, SP, Digi, DV and SX decks. Everything but the D3.”

“Try the other Digi?”

“Nahhhhh Oh! I know! It’s that weird 440Hz for the M&Es, not 1K”

“Oh that’s what the hum is! Who the hell uses 440?”

“Read the delivery spec sheet.”

(does so) “Gaaaaaah!”

Why are Fridays never simple?

Clock details confirmed? Check. Audio sync? Check. M&E tracks in place? Check. Tone and alternate tone? Check. Presenter captions? Check. End rollers? Check. Textless elements? Check.

DigiBeta tape loaded for 16:9 archive master? Check. BetaSX backing tape loaded? Check. DS Nitris suite primed for 14:9 letterbox transmission master render? Check. MiniDV tape loaded for internal archive? Check.

Run it.

First problem found – four seconds in. Bollocks.

There’s a production going off in London that I’ve been meaning to look up – actually, there are two, but that’s another matter. Turns out an old mate of mine is doing it, which is great and all but actually I’m a bit jealous. At least, I was, until I spoke to him. Turns out he needs help on the thing, and while the money’s a bit crock and the job title might be a step backwards in some respects, for historical reasons I’d leap at the chance to do the gig.

Only, another old chum is also in the running for it. And, me being me, I gave her a hugely positive reference, since I think she’s wonderful.

My mum will ruddy throttle me when she finds out. And yes, she does read this blog. Come to think of it, I might ruddy throttle me, when it sinks in. Still – no decisions made yet. We’ll see what happens.