The Daily Grind

Amongst the 140+ items of junk mail I’ve received in the last 24 hours (a marked reduction on recent history – catch-alls really are bad news, in case there was any doubt), the very latest bears the line:

Subject: Rascally freight train

I rather like the idea of a freight train that’s a bit of a lad. A little bit whoa, a little bit wahey. Sneaking up on sidings and cheekily dumping 400 tonnes of aggregate on them, or progressing insouciantly slowly up a gradient with a train full of commuters champing at the bit behind it.

The junk mail is, of course, something to do with enlarging one’s penis. But at least the random generator threw up a pleasing subject line for once.

Nice article about Evel Knievel. Where are the crazy ones, today?

Aha! Emailing a chum, I’ve found a new, stark way of describing SciCast. I think this may be the new elevator pitch:

Five years ago, the UK spent about £1m a year on science video aimed primarily at children. The bulk of that money was spent by me, on two television series, The Big Bang, and How2. They were good shows; lots of people watched them; they came back year after year. However:

Today, we spend – nothing at all.

I think we can achieve similar impact for about 10% of the spend initially, rising to 20% through a five-year expansion plan. That plan is called ‘SciCast.’

The big issue is: that original million quid came from ITV, who were essentially forced into spending it by the government (public service TV, blah blah). So nobody else has ever had to face up to whose responsibility it might be to do this.

My generation talks about Johnny Ball and his shows. The generation of ten years ago won’t talk about my shows in quite the same way – we didn’t have a ‘face’, and what we were doing wasn’t as radical a departure – but they’ll still talk about the shows I made.

What will the current generation of kids talk about?

That’s what SciCast is for.

I like Howtoons, despite the name being perilously similar to a series I loved even more. I like their artwork style. Things I like less:

1. What can I do with their downloads? Duplicate and hand them out in a school workshop? Come on gang, CC licenses, please!
2. There’s even more work in doing this than there is in making video. At this rate, they’ll be retreading very familiar ground for months to come. What’s the plan to avoid that?

Update: poking around the site more, the nearest they come to a copyright page is this, which asserts (by omission) all rights reserved. Merde. But that makes sense when they’re apparently preparing a book.

Ah, well. It’s another children’s cartoon science book. An unusually thoughtful and pretty one, but a book nonetheless.

Great new video from Junior Senior, using quick cuts of clips sent to them by fans. Like the reverse of a YouTube lip-sync video; very clever, and saccharine fun.

Chatting with The Gupta, we had a genius idea. Remember those dancing prisoners in the Philippines?

Superbowl halftime show.

Watching Merlin Mann’s ‘Inbox Zero’ Google TechTalk, it occurs to me that I’ve forgotten to post sage advice here. Speaking as someone who’s video recorded his fair share of conference presentations[1] involving PowerPoint or Keynote slideshows, I have a recommendation for speakers:

Please please please use a light-text-on-dark-background theme for your presentation. It makes camera exposures so much easier, and completely eliminates the pathological case where the slides are burned out and the speaker is still invisibly dark.

There’s a good reason the giant screen at Steve Jobs keynotes is predominantly black; if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be able to see him on camera. I think this is one of the reasons the director of Mann’s talk sits on the slides so much.

Thank you. That is all. Now I’m going back to finding out how to wrangle my email deluge.

[1] Hnngh? The ‘official’ OpenTech recordings page doesn’t (and as far as I can tell never did) link the videos. Oh, that’s just peachy. Note to self: sort out a proper links page for this stuff.

Bowers & Wilkins have launched a new 600 series of hifi speakers. I was always rather a fan of the 601; audiophile chum Matt rated the 603/4 floorstanders very highly too. With this new range, one suspects the older stuff is being flogged off by dealers.

Dang.

I shall have to console myself with the idea that what I should really do is move the my old gear into the office, and do something new and surround-soundy in the lounge. Which, of course, is a sufficiently significant process to require further consideration.

Nothing to do with feeling skint. Oh, no.

[Since comments are still down, here’s a pre-emptive one from Patrick: “I’ve got a pair of those!” Thanks, Patrick.]

Yay! I finally managed to work out enough of the back-end on which SciCast is built to publish one of the backlog of films we’re building up. And I must say, what with it being all black and red and white and all, it looks terribly dashing on the site. Lovely smoke ring action here.

Home again, after an excellent BIG Event: people even attended my session on copyright law, which shows what a snappy title can achieve. Over the weekend we met Flossie’s 98 year-old grandmother – who cooked us lemon meringue pie, which I think means she like me – and took some video of Barry bay from an altitude of about 50 feet.

Yes, the kite aerial video project has finally happened. A few days too late to make it as an entry in the BIG Best Demo Competition, but not to worry. It was rather good fun, and something that will be repeated fairly soon. Watch out for the video, ‘coming soon’, as they say.