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A fun and useful day yesterday on the fringe of the Scottish Learning Festival: Channel 4’s In The Wild event, and Teachmeet ’07.

Meanwhile, I have new specs. From the outside looking in, these are just like the last ones only black rather than tortoiseshell green; from the inside out, it’s like seeing the world through a real-time unsharp mask filter. Which is slightly disturbingly William Gibson, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Oh, and I’ve just placed an order for what will become Quern V.

But I’ve no time to chat, I need to get back to Final Cut Pro.

Not quite Inbox Zero, but I’m halfway towards it. Which means my email inbox is showing 1426 messages, 92 unread. Yow. Busy day.

Good news: my gigabit ethernet switch arrived today.

Bad news: the network card in my old G4 doesn’t support jumbo frames. D’oh!

The switch is a Netgear GS108, by the way. I can’t remember why I plumped for this rather than the ‘domestic’ model (per-port something or other, or maybe the jumbo frame thing, or… something); very cheap at Amazon right now.

Meanwhile, working in front of this many pixels is a joy. Everyone should have two good LCD panels.

The pixels have landed. Bits of the SciCast publishing system only work with Internet Explorer on Windows, so for the last couple of months I’ve had a horrid dilemma: run Final Cut with a single monitor, or keep scrurrying around beneath the desk to replug the ‘second’ monitor between the Mac and the PC (yes, geek fans, I tried VNC – not quick enough for what I needed).

This week I succumbed to the inevitable, and bought my first new monitor in about five years. It’s a Samsung 206BW, and so far it seems lovely. I’m going to have to keep futzing around with colour profiles with it, and it’s damned bright (I’m now running it at around 40%, to avoid burning my retinas), but it’s looking pretty good.

The scary part is that if I tot all this up, I’m looking at rather more than 4 million pixels. If I open the MacBook it hits 5 million.

Reading the news today, something odd struck me. Colin Moses, chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, is quoted as saying:

“When Gordon Brown puts his 81,000 prisoners in prison, he puts them into the hands of my members, who have to put up with eight assaults a day.”

Compare and contrast with this piece about assistance calls from bus drivers, discussing statistics obtained by Tories in the London Assembly:

The statistics also show the incidents of code red calls — when the driver has to stop the bus and call for outside help — due to anti-social behaviour increased from 465 cases in September 2005 to 697 cases in October 2006.

It’s hard to compare the two sets of data, but on the face of it prisons are a safer work environment than London buses. Of course, even one assault is too many, but still… what?

For the last day or so I’ve been slaving over a clipsreel for SciCast — it’s finally up on the site. It’s not perfect, but I’m unreasonably proud of it.

Play it loud!

Technorati Tags: science, scicast, video

Media Guardian’s Organ Grinder has a nice wrap-up of the unFestival, quoting a bunch of people including yours truly. My own reflections:

I’m not remotely surprised by the lack of TV people present. They’ve paid good money to attend the TV Festival, and it’s a considerable risk. Plus, TV is this huge behemoth with hundreds of millions of pounds somewhere, which of course everyone is chasing. Digital media is a completely different world and it doesn’t work in anything like the same way.

Accordingly, I personally no longer expect the Big Ideas to come from TV. Perhaps TV people might be involved, but if you’re in the business of being good at TV that doesn’t necessarily extend to the web. We don’t expect book publishers to come up with great TV shows on the side — though in rare circumstances that does happen.

Hence, we need to stop looking to the TV people for creative, content-based leadership. They’re not a likely source.

However, the idea of growing the unFestival in the direction of something like SXSW is extremely good, in my book; there’s plenty of boundary-challenging work being done that’s exhibited in Edinburgh, so let’s see how broad an unconference we can foster.

Roll on 2008, I say.

Technorati Tags: tvunfestival, tvunfestival07

Something that came up today in discussion with Vinay: Freemasonry is Facebook 1.0.

I’m not sure how seriously I meant that.

[addendum: Vinay’s essentially the top Google hit for ‘Vinay Gupta,’ which is one heck of an achievement. In the future, when one’s income is index-linked to one’s PageRank, he’ll be loaded.]

Technorati Tags: observations, social software