Month: May 2007

My, how time flies when you’re having fun. I’m not posting much here at the moment, and I’m not entirely sure why. Why didn’t I mention a lovely day with Flossie, milling around the Kelvingrove scoffing professionally at the label editing and having our breath taken away by a Lowry seascape? Why haven’t I mentioned the Giant’s Causeway? Why haven’t I mentioned a certain cheese delivery?

Partly because my blogging has always gone in cycles, and partly because comments are still down. It seems I don’t like my blog to be entirely one-directional; it’s plain rude. Sadly, I don’t think I’ll have chance to fix it before I gad off to Devon tomorrow for more SciCast workshops.

So here’s another little blurb, for your delectation. Today, my light cone passes HR9038. A star that doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry let alone a ‘proper’ name, that’s merely a catalogue entry, today joins those that, theoretically, could be aware of my existence. There’s something magnificently egocentric yet simultaneously humbling about knowing this.

[I blogged about Matt Webb’s your-light-cone-in-an-RSS-feed app before; seeing it update in my feed reader still makes me smile. Run it for yourself here.]

Reports are coming in that the tannoy announcer at Cardiff Airport has called for one ‘Amanda Huggankiss’ to make themselves known to airport staff.

First day on the job, do you think?

Last week I was gadding around Northern Ireland (first time there!), running SciCast workshops in schools and at W5. Right now I’m setting up next week’s trip to Devon, and starting to work through the backlog of films. Which is easier said than done, since we’re shooting faster than I can edit (particularly with all the prep). But there’ll be new stuff going up on the site fairly regularly, and the pace should pick up a little as we work out the inevitable bugs and become more practiced with workflow stuff.

First up, this masterpiece from the launch event, at Swinton near Rotherham. Local MP John Healey came along, so we spent the morning turning 20 teenagers into two studio crews. When Healey arrived at 2pm he was fitted with a radio mic, told which cameras to talk to and which not to block, and talked through what was going to happen. Two takes were shot (with proper sync claps and countdowns), and the crews switched over to record a second experiment.

None of this involved me – by the afternoon, the students knew exactly what they were doing, and they did it. They knew that not one of them was going to get everything right, but they knew to trust their colleagues to cover their backs. The atmosphere was remarkable; talk about collaborative work against tight time pressure, I think they might have grasped that part of the project. Great job all round, anyway.

This is the first of the ‘use an MP as a stooge’ films – the second (and notes to support this one) will appear shortly. SciCast film page here, or click the piccy. Credit to Healey, by the way – he was unhesitatingly up for a laugh, helped put some nervous kids at their ease, and I think managed to talk to everybody in the room personally, particularly the students. Sure, this is what one expects of modern politicians, but he didn’t simply do the job – he did it well. Respect due… and I’ll be interested to see where he ends up in the coming reshuffle.

Interesting article at Ars Technica about storytelling in video games (part of a series). One of my 18 or so side-projects at the moment is a critique of the storytelling mechanic in online role-play games, which have their own specific problems. I think I have, if not a solution, at least an expansion to the current systems that would go some way towards addressing the more glaring issues.

One of these days, I’ll have to write it up as a paper. Quite what I do with it then, I’m not sure. I may publish it here – or I may send it directly to the developers of one game in particular, who I think could use it quite directly.

I’m always surprised by how many problems boil down to storytelling, when you look at them in a certain way. But just as many website problems boil down to ‘a blog would be a good way of doing this,’ one starts to wonder if the tools with which one is familiar dictate the shape of the solutions one spots.

Three days of frenzied editing later, I find my ‘gear’ shopping list reads thus:

• 8-port gigabit ethernet switch. 100-base doesn’t cut it for transferring DV, and every system I have has the right ports. Constantly replugging FireWire drives is a royal pain, but at the moment the fastest route. Crazy, given the price of gigabit switches.
• Something more recent than my poor old Power Mac G4/933. It’s a workhorse, but last night I was colour correcting on resized and laterally flipped shots, and the render times were unbelievably dull. A Mac Pro would do nicely; any Mac Pro, but a quad-3GHz with 4Gb RAM, a terabyte of drive, and a nice big screen would save me about an hour or so a day at this point. Ouchie.
• Final Cut Studio 2, on that Mac Pro. No explanation necessary, surely?
• More short ethernet cables. Why do I only have really nasty long ones? Oh, that’s right – they’re spoils from wanted.com, a weird online swap-shop style show we did for CITV one Christmas a few years back, for which I had a dozen or more iMacs in a TV studio, all running a bespoke web-app trading system I wrote. All my networking gear came from that. Interestingly, the other half of it is now running the Scottish Green Party’s Glasgow office. I wonder if that counts as a political donation?
• A new keyboard. I’ve never really liked the one I have now.
• A Mac Book Pro, also with Final Cut Studio. Then I could finish up films in the evenings, when I’m out on the road.
• A sensible data plan with my mobile phone company. Ditto.
• A mobile phone that works like a 3G modem. Is there a sensible option for this sort of thing beyond T-mobile, does anyone know?
• Some clue of how I can force iMovie to import audio in a sensible format, rather than in such a way that moving the clips into Final Cut forces an audio render. Bizarre, and unbelievably irritating for a mixed iMovie/Final Cut workflow.
• Time to have fixed comments here. They’re still borked, sorry.
• A video camera that’s at least half-decent. I shot some smoke rings with the SciCast PD150 the other week and the footage is absolutely lovely, if I do say so myself; you’ll se the results hopefully later this week. However, the PD100s and PD150 I bought last year are all owned by NESTA, which means they’re effectively government assets. Drat. Drat drat drat. I quite fancy a Sony V1 at the moment, but cameras are a tough call. I hear a lot of talk that the 720p JVCs are particularly lovely, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s actually seen one, let alone used the things. Z1s are all well and good, but I’ve always thought they felt like a ‘v1.0’ product; the XL-H1 is allegedly wonderful but rather large for my purposes, particularly with the rear-mounted überbattery to balance it up; Panasonic’s P2 system strikes me as hideously expensive still; which leaves the V1 and the little Canons. Hmm…
• A lottery win. Tot up the above and I don’t reckon there’s much change out of £15,000. Oops.

I’m a complete sucker for well-made Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson/Fischli & Weiss machines, even if they’re made by marketing people. My favourites are still the elegant little mechanisms used on Japanese children’s TV show Pitagora Suiichi, but this one is impressive for its length, ambition, and variety. Well worth a watch – some ideas there I haven’t seen before.

[via the Disgruntled Chemist at Nice Shoes, Wanna Fock?]

You can make hot air balloons using steam rather than… er… hot air. Here’s a link. Amazing.

(from a discussion started on a mailing list this morning by Bryson Gore)

“Dear Newsnight team: you’re fabulous at what you do, really terrific journalists (though that guy Paxman gets on my nerves occasionally). Here’s a comedy drama series I’d like you to make. Thanks. Yours, The Commissioner.”

You’d never see a memo like that. Obviously. Current affairs journalism is clearly a different specialism to, say, drama script editing. An individual might happen to be good at both, but one’s expectation is otherwise. Even technical staff will be different; a studio camera operator is a long way from a drama Director of Photography.

Yet, many of us still approach the web like this. We assume that we can ask anyone who ‘knows about websites’ to build us any type of site. Newsflash: those days are over. I suspect they never really existed, we were just all rubbish at building all types of site, which flattened out the differences. We still don’t really have the language to describe the specialisms, and we’re a long way from an appreciation of each others’ values. Communication is hard, bordering on impossible.

This is why the SciCast site doesn’t have an RSS feed. In my world – the bit of the web in which I move – building a site in 2007 without things like comment counts, pervasive RSS, metadata tagging, view counts, and so on, is completely bizarre. Incomprehensible to the point of being inconceivable.

The people who’ve built the site, however, aren’t in that world. They do different sorts of websites, for different sorts of people, that are run in different sorts of ways. I’ve lots of reasons to believe they’re very good at it, too – but from what I know, and where I stand, I simply don’t understand what they do. There’s no connection to the web in which I move. In return, they don’t understand my obsession with feeds, and with community, and with dynamism.

They’re not wrong, they just see a different world. And the site they’ve build isn’t bad, it’s simply different. For teachers – who are, often, quite a long way behind the technology curve – their implementation might be more appropriate than mine.

But it’s an interestingly stark lesson to have learned. And I’m profoundly thankful they aren’t Flash developers.

My chum Martin is standing in the Scottish Parliament elections tomorrow, in Glasgow Kelvin, for the Scottish Green Party. Here he is at a site that really should have been built by the MySociety folks.

Anyway: only 4.7? He’s far better-looking than that, curse him.