Cans

I’d expected more of our gear to get trashed during SciCast workshops, but it seems old Sony DVCAMs are made of sterner stuff. One PD100 has a dodgy focus switch, the PD150 menu dial is skipping, and the tripods are a bit more dodgy than when they fell off that particular lorry, but everything’s basically intact. I’ve had cables fray on a couple of battery chargers and we’ve lost microphone clips: which leaves the main casualty as my headphones. Which got sat on.

Which is fine, really, because they were rubbish – Sennheiser 210s. Closed-back, which was occasionally useful for noise rejection, but they were uncomfortable to wear and their sound quality was pretty rubbish. It’s now very rubbish, in that there’s a knackered-connection crackle superimposed. Nice. Fixable, but only to return to ‘pretty rubbish,’ and did I mention they got sat on? Right.

They were £50. I’m also using £30 Sennheiser PX100 which are flimsy and have too short a cable, but sound great – however, I’d like another closed-back set to replace the 210s. I’m leaning towards the Sennheiser HD25SP at about £90 – they’re the cheapskate version of the already-bottom-of-the-range HD25 ENG headphones, but cheapskate sounds about right for the likes of me.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Heroes ‘Volume 2’

Vexing me for some time: working out what to say about series 2 of Heroes without ruining it for those of you who won’t see if for months. While I’ve been meandering my way around to the position of ‘honestly not caring,’ I find that Mark Pursey has found the right words:

The writers of second season of Heroes are so incompetent that they have managed to make me retrospectively hate the first season, which I had originally quite enjoyed.

I still think the detail script editing has been brilliant, but really – did nobody look at the end-point of volume 2 and notice how close they’d come to resetting the whole continuity? Didn’t they care? Worse: did they think they were being clever?

Years ago, I had a concept of a constriction through which one forced ‘stuff’ – matter, geometry, organisational planning, screenplays, etc. Doing so required effort, but at the conclusion of the process all the ‘stuff’ was right back where it started. I dubbed this constriction a ‘Klein Bottleneck.’

Current evidence points to the Heroes storyline as being in a tight orbit through one. Ugh.

Always two there are: a master, and an apprentice

Perhaps that line wasn’t so much about Sith – who, after all, have the disadvantage of being fictional – but about English-language online geek humourists.

Consider: in late 2006 we had Ze Frank, clearly a Master of his craft, and xkcd was underway but not really in its stride.

Now, in late 2006, Ze has moved on to a higher plane of existence (or ‘Los Angeles’ as we like to call it), and xkcd has risen to become the undisputed honesty mirror of the new geek republic.

So… who is the new apprentice?

Where are my Leopard apps?

Waiting for Leopard was bad enough – oh, the six-month delay: the horror, the horror – but now we have all these whizzy new developer features one has to ask: where are the whizzy applications? Hmm?

There’s Anxiety, an ultra-simple front-end to the new system-wide Tasks store. Great. Anything else? Not so much.

I get the distinct impression that across the planet, thousands of Cocoa developers are staring at their monitors, lost in the awesome majesty of CoreAnimation. “It’s so pretty! Ooooooh!” they intone, as they cycle in and out of TimeMachine like moths flickering around a particularly beautiful streetlight.

Sahara budget

Absolutely amazing story at the LA Times analysing the budget of Sahara, one of the most costly flops in Hollywood history. Reasonable success at the box office has been swamped by production costs around the $160m mark.

The LA Times’ story is confusingly laid out, but there are some real eye-openers in there. Movies are big business, but some of this spend seems astonishing. And the culprit for the doubling of budgeted cost? Blamed on ‘failure to lock down a script,’ it seems. Ah, that old chestnut. It seems the entire industry is mired in the inability to actually make decisions.

And yes, I realise I wasn’t exactly a paragon of producorial decision-making. It’s simply impossible, even on a small production, to make every decision that someone believes is necessary – I sometimes think that the judgmental skill lies not in making correct decisions, but rather in choosing the right things on which to decide.

And hey, my productions came in on budget, so I wasn’t that bad.

Comments working again

Comments are working again. I’d tweaked the server to talk to quernstone.com rather than www.quernstone.com, which was upsetting one of Movable Type’s scripts. Fixed. Of course, you might still get a 500 server error – if so, go back and post again after a couple of minutes. This is related to an application timeout with FastCGI on Dreamhost, for anyone who really cares.

Oh, and feeds are still serving raw Markdown, sorry. Will sort shortly.

….aaaaaaan archives are still one huge mess. Darn.

BA name change.

According to one of my entertaining conversations this evening (with a lady I last met at the BA in about 1993), the venerable British Association for the Advancement of Science (founded 1831) is changing its name. ‘BA’ is evidently synonymous with British Airways, so they’re changing to ‘BSA.’

…which is synonymous with motorbikes, via British Small Arms, obviously.

Umm… what?

Scientific Edge

On my way back from the Richmond schools’ science film festival, a fantastic event opened by the Mayor with awards presented by none other than Sir David Attenborough. Loads of massively excited kids, some terrific films, and a night’s celebration of creativity in a science context. Excellent.

The whole thing started only a few weeks ago with an Institute of Physics SciCast poster, and a chap from the National Physical Laboratory running with the idea. Result: 9 schools took part, entering 25 films, and I spent the evening with teachers and education authority staff telling me how wonderful the whole thing was.

A terrific effort by all involved (particularly Andrew Hanson of the NPL), and for me, an excellent vindication of the ideas behind SciCast: the rules and licensing stuff were directly lifted, which was exactly the sort of thing I’d hoped might happen.

You know, this might all just work.

Future of children’s factual programmes

The short version (since I’m mobbloging): parents are very concerned about factual programmes, but in truth there is no future. It’s clear that even if one gave broadcasters something like How2 for free, they wouldn’t put it out.

No, the future of factual children’s media looks less like tv, and more like the thing I’m off to now: a showing of a couple of dozen SciCast-type films, made by children and facilitated by the National Physical Laboratory.

Science is in a unique position to make this happen more widely. I’m quite excited.