Month: February 2006

It’s done. I’ve said ‘no’ to the Birmingham job.

Scary. As. Hell.

Today, I have to decide what I’m doing for the next few months. On the table are a TV series in Birmingham, and a more-or-less accidental video podcasting project that has significant interest – but confirmed funding only for a pilot stage – from NESTA.

Financially, it should be a no-brainer. But, somehow, I’ve been agonising over this for days, swinging back and forth. The Birmingham gig is going to be hard work, and after last year I’m not quite sure I’m ready for another TV job where I have to be the hero who sorts it all out. The podcast project, on the other hand, would do my TV CV no favours whatsoever, but is at least unexplored territory for me, and I’d be my own boss. The biggest practical concern is whether I can secure enough funding for it to pay for enough of my time that I can actually live off it. I get the feeling one is supposed to do these education/inspiration/engagement projects as adjuncts to ‘normal’ work, but TV is so all-consuming that for me, it’s all-or-nothing. The NESTA thing would be part-time (which has its own appeal), but I still have to live off it.

Over the weekend, at Colin and Sophia’s wedding – of which more anon – I’ve swung this way and that.

Oh hum. Perhaps I should toss a coin?

This has been all over the web for the last week or so, but I’ve never been proud about avoiding linkbloggery: food photographers go a bit nuts with little tiny figures. Simply glorious.

“Can you help me move some boxes on Monday?” asked a chum. Of course I could. Somehow, however, I mustn’t have heard when the dear chap described the contents of said boxes. Which turned out to be outrageously valuable hifi speakers (B&W Signature 805s, if you really want to know). Outrageously valuable, flamboyantly beautiful, elegantly constructed… and, it turned out, stupendously magnificent-sounding.

The boxes, you see, were being moved from one shop, around the the corner, to another shop. Wherein they were attached to a succession of similarly-stratospheric amplifiers, and equally celestial boxes which schlupped in little silver discs and span them around and around.

We sat. We listened.

After three hours, we went away and had a spot of lunch. We then returned.

We sat some more. We listened some more. We even – and this is remarkable – Decided.

We then packed everything up and went away again, bearing our boxes of speakers. We did not, however, walk out with a Quad CD-P and matching 909 power amp, which in my book was a crying shame since the combination was unbelievably clear and yet delivered deeply pleasant listening. Tragically, chum’s ears are a tad more discerning (which is mildly reassuring, seeing as how he’s a BBC radio sound engineer and all) and he was bothered by a slight harshness in the not-quite-top-end. Which, frankly, I didn’t hear at all, but I was with him most of the way until then and actually I’m rather proud of that.

So poor chum is having to make do with his ancient CD player and a skanky Rotel 1062 integrated amp we’d purloined from the first shop. A mere £600-worth, and barely fit to be in the same room as the gorgeous speakers.

And, at length, I returned home. Whereupon I made the mistake of putting one of the discs we’d been listening to into my own system. My beloved bought-for-a-song Marantz amp, the almost-matching CD player I lovingly nickname ‘Skippy,’ and the twelve year-old baby Mission speakers which were a bit rough even before Lucy trod on one. The disc span up, and I listened.

…

Shit. I need a new stereo system. Anyone got six grand to spare?

Remember that story about Michael Crichton winning the Association of Petroleum Geologists’ 2006 Journalism Award? It gets better.

He met with George W. Bush, too. In the White House. They are said to have talked for an hour and been in near-total agreement, but the meeting was kept secret for fear of outraging environmentalists. No, as they say, shit.

Story at that paragon of double-sourced accuracy, the New York Times (free registration required)

Can’t… resist… must… not… gaaaahhh! … too much… hubris…

Surely somebody else must have noticed that Yahoo News’ list of ‘Ten Reasons to Buy Windows Vista‘ is comprised entirely of things that have been available elsewhere for at least ten months already, and mostly for several years?

Gaaaah!

Gaaaah. I just watched Battlestar Galactica (better episode this week – maybe I won’t give up after all). Usually I’ll watch it on one of my Macs, in either QuickTime Player or VLC, but tonight I was using them both for the aforementioned ninja CSS work, and only wanted to half-watch the show for the aforementioned thinking-of-giving-up-on-it reasons. So I dumped it down the network to my PC and played it on that.

Bad move. First, I tried to watch in QuickTime Player for Windows. Now, this was a torrent download, and like many of them it had been compressed using Xvid. Which is a curious codec. It appears to generate standard (and, indeed, rather good) MPEG4… but then it bundles it up in a Windows Media AVI wrapper. MPEG4, you will recall, is itself an industry-standard container format derived from… er… QuickTime. The point of wrapping it in AVI has always escaped me, since every media player I’ve tried on Windows seems quite happy to play standard .mp4 files, but there we go.

Unfortunately, QuickTime Player for Windows decided, on this occasion, that recursion was a bad thing, and disappeared in a nifty little vanishingly-small loop all of its own. So, in desperation, I double-clicked the file instead.

That launched some weird part of Nero I’ll swear I’ve never seen before (not a great surprise – I mean, has anyone ever seen all the different applications? Is it even philosophically possible within one lifetime?). After a little poking around I discovered firstly how to switch it to full-screen mode, and secondly the keyboard combinations for volume control. Hurrah! All was well with the world.

…for about twenty minutes. After which the audio was leading the video by about three frames. Now, maybe most people wouldn’t object to that, but I make TV for a living and it bugs the hell out of me! Never something I’d noticed on the Macs, so for kicks I started playing the video over the network on my PowerBook, muted the audio, and shoved the window to the back. It stayed in sync throughout, but I probably didn’t need to say that. Meanwhile, I tried to resync the video in Nero. Start/stop didn’t do it. Neither did closing and relaunching the app; at 22 mins in, it was three frames out. Every time. Ugh.

So I tried Windows Media Player. Which is ugly as sin, but… worked! I even managed to zoom it to full screen, and after a few moments of trying to work out how to hide the chrome, it slid gracefully out of the way of its own volition. Hurrah! Only… it was too loud. Prodding at hopeful-looking keys didn’t do anything (Windows Media Player must be the only such app that doesn’t stop the video when you hit the space bar, for heaven’s sake – I can’t imagine why I thought +/- might affect audio levels), and I had to resort to the mouse. After which the window chrome refused to hide ever again. Yes, I found the little camouflaged button that’s supposed to toggle that behaviour. It merely toggled itself.

Gritting my teeth, I staggered to the end of the episode, then deleted the media file from the PC with as much aplomb as I could muster.

[sigh] Really, do people think this sort of crap is normal?

Curses! My CSS foo is not strong enough! (you sort-of have to read that with your mouth moving as if your voice is being dubbed from Japanese, à la Monkey – which is back, hurrah, but that’s another post).

I’ve finally had to get off my arse and work out what the difference is between ‘#’ and ‘.’ as CSS selectors. I read a book and everything. And now I know, and all is clear. It’s…

…

Oh, damn.

Ben Hammersley – who it’s tempting to describe as the enfant terrible of the web, only that’s doubtless (a.) been done & (b.) not true anyway – is up to something. Again. Today, he’s dropping big hints about online journalism. Oooh! Aaah! Shiny!

Also of note: in a month when everyone’s going doo-lally about Tom’s ‘oh, that’s what all this two-point-nought crap is about’ ‘Future of Web Apps‘ talk, Ben’s gone to iWeb, with what I imagine is a face of extreme innocence. Tee-hee.

Quartonian is one of those jaw-dropping pieces of software that does something so insanely wonderful, it’s almost entirely implausible that anyone will ever have any use for it. I stumbled across it while looking for video mixing software last year, but this is video mixing in the ‘club’ sense rather than the ‘outside broadcast’ sense I needed. It’s still startlingly wonderful, though – and the latest VSM stills manipulation version is getting close to being usable by mere mortals.

While you’re at it, though, do muck about with Quartz Composer itself, from the Developer CD that comes with OS X v10.4. A whole new world of crazy; see Sam Kass’s blog for examples. You can do similar stuff (with far more control) using something like Max/MSP, but Quartz Composer is (a.) free, (b.) easier and (c.) runs on your graphics card, so is stupidly fast until it blows up in your face.

Sorry, kids, but this stuff really is Mac-only. In fact, it’s all Tiger-only, and you need a fairly kick-arse video card for it to work properly. Or, indeed, at all. My desktop Power Mac throws up its digital hands in despair and refuses to play, but my PowerBook has a decent go at it so long as I remember to close a whole bunch of other stuff first.

Now if only I could work out what to do with it…