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For the last few months, I’ve been writing a column for a newsletter called Planet Science, covering activities and demonstrations and the like. Yet another way of milking the old Big Bang and How2 back catalogue, basically.

This morning I was contacted, via Planet Science, by a production company in London. Now, I’m not terribly well connected, and such things don’t happen very often, so I was mildly surprised that they’d track me down via that route. All became clearer, however, when they asked how much experience I had of live television. ‘Not much,’ I replied. ‘Some of the Christmas Lectures were live, but by that time I was asleep under my desk in the production office, so to be honest I’ve no idea how they went.’

There was a pause.

‘No,’ said the terribly polite but now rapidly back-tracking AP, ‘I meant… on the other side of the camera.’

Realisation dawned at both ends of the phone. Mis-reading ‘producer’ as ‘presenter’ is something we’ve all done, typically when one is trying to find the latter and can only find the former. Now, I’ve stumbled in front of the lens a few times, and not all of those hit the cutting-room floor. But really, I’m no presenter. And I’m certainly not up to the job of co-anchoring a live (NB. live) show based around a zero-anaesthetic operation. Not unless they’re really desperate. Or mad.

Tee-hee.

My brother-in-law is staying with me for a couple of nights this week, as he’s doing a part-time Masters course at Glasgow Uni. He’s been up a couple of times before, and it’s good to see him, but I’m starting to worry that I’m a poor host.

See, I don’t really have a spare bedroom, since it’s an office. And while I did recently tidy up considerably, there’s still not quite enough room to put down the futon. So poor Matty has to sleep in the lounge, with its draughty bay window.

Then there’s the futon itself. Which is… well, it’s old. And somewhat compacted. It has, in fact, been compared to foldable concrete, though the ‘foldable’ part is moot.

It’s so notorious that my dear brother-in-law last night confessed that he’s booked a session with the osteopath for the day he returns to Leeds.

in the interests of fair and reasonable balance, after my little snigger the other day, this article from ExtremeTech detailing why Windows Vista won’t suck. And you know, Mac fan-boy as I am, I’m inclined to agree with them. There’s lots of stuff in Vista that we’ve had in OS X for years, but that doesn’t make it any less welcome in Windows. And there is stuff in Vista that I could see myself using and appreciating.

Sure, there’s other stuff that’s a hideous mess (that blurring-translucent overlay thing for window titlebars? Neat trick, chaps, but there’s a reason OS X toned down most of its original translucency effects – it’s just plain hard to read). Also, we really don’t know what’s going to be in Mac OS X 10.5, which should appear around the same time. But still, Vista could and should be a significant improvement over XP. And hey, my crash-prone PC just about meets the minimum specs.

So, the delightful little Mac mini has gone to Intel processors, with the following changes:

• It’s a whole lot less anemic and should actually be able to encode video overnight, rather than over-the-weekend. I still haven’t seen good benchmarks for MPEG4 compression performance with the Core Solo/Duo processors, however; my G4s absolutely thrash my AMD box for this.
• Gigabit ethernet is long, long overdue – finally you can move video on and off it at sensible speeds. Albeit with a slow hard drive
• Wirelessy stuff is no longer optional. Hurrah!
• The video chipset is integrated (boo!), but supposedly pretty good at hardware video scaling and H264 decoding (yay!).
• Stuffing it to the gills with RAM now means 2Gb, not 1. This is a Good Thing.
• It’s more expensive to start with.

See, it’s that last point that’s rather the fly in the ointment. By the time you add a keyboard and mouse, you’ve not got a huge chunk of change sloshing around for a monitor before you might as well buy an iMac. Which is significantly quicker, if only in hard drive and video performance. Don’t get me wrong, I think the mini is now a cracking little box (whereas previously it always struck me as a bit marginal, performance-wise), but it’s mildly surprising to see just how much more Apple must be paying for the Intel processors over the G4.

However, if anyone’s really pessimistic about Apple, just go back and read Thread 500 – fanboys’ initial reaction to the iPod, all those years ago. The mini is still a decent little box… but the old stripped-out base model was really really cheap.

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!