Category: Uncategorized

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.

Last night, I labeled up all the tapes we’ve shot for SciCast, from March 2006 to the Dorchester workshops at the beginning of the month. By my count there are about 125 tapes, covering roughly 90 short films. For comparison, this is equivalent to a series of The Big Bang, which used to run to about that many tapes and items. That was a half-million-quid broadcast series, with usually two edit suites running and a total post-production staff of nine. SciCast has one tank of a G4 Mac running Final Cut, and me.

Mercifully the shooting ratio is rather lower and there are already (mostly) rough cuts, but it’s still going to take a while to clear the backlog. Particularly since I’m off to the BIG Event tomorrow, and will doubtless be shooting a couple more films there. Including – weather permitting – one or two with the large and dashing Cody box kite that just arrived. Oooh, exciting.

I’ve been feeling a little swamped by the scale of the job ahead, and I know it must be frustrating for the schools involved not to be able to see their work. But labeling everything last night and being reminded of the films, and of how terrific some of them are, then laying the tapes in these serried ranks – that’s got me all excited again.

Roll on next week: editing, and… jury service. Great timing, huh?

I like strong coffee. While I will occasionally succumb to the allure of a layer of froth, I mostly take coffee black, without sugar, and most certainly not instant.

I’ve drunk ristretto overlooking the Jet d’Eau in Geneva. I’ve drunk kopi luwak, the coffee made with the… er… ‘assistance’ of civets. But the coffee I’ve made just now is different. It’s not merely strong, it’s exerting a discernible gravitational pull. The mug containing it looks slightly odd, almost as if it had…

This isn’t just coffee. It’s Event Horizon coffee.

Drat. That first submitted SciCast film isn’t going to make it up to the website this week, I fear. I now have the DVD, and the film’s great… but it’s got a Red Hot Chili Peppers track mixed in with the sync sound. Oops. No can do, sorry.

Fingers crossed the makers can unpick the audio and resubmit the film. It’s fun.

Terrific web documentary about the growing menace of minstrelism: The Lute and the Fury. Beautifully done.

[via Flossie]

Pantone mugs! From the London Graphic Centre.

Quite possibly the perfectly-constructed blog post; the right sort of length, human and personal, wonderfully phrased, and with a drop-dead fabulous closing line that effortlessly merges ‘geeky’ with ‘heart-warming’ and ‘social observation’.

Or maybe it just made me laugh.