Category: Uncategorized

Futurelab – which used to be ‘NESTA Futurelab,’ so this is all a bit incestuous still – have a nice article up about my next project, SciCast. It’s a decent summary of where we’ve got to, and also of what’s still left to do, since there remain some pretty glaring holes in the plan. All of which can be overcome, of course, but we’re not quite there yet.

In particular, right now I can’t see us making our (self-imposed) ‘mid-March’ launch date. Even if we hear about additional funding this coming week, as we’re hoping, I think it’s too late to nail down all the remaining details. We’ll see.

Also: I really must get them to mention something other than Mechannibals when describing me. BAFTA-nominated or not, it was hardly my proudest moment. They could at least spell it right, anyway. Grumble grumble.

Charlie Courtauld is a charmingly eccentric producer of heavyweight political television. He’s also filmed his kids reading a story written by their grandmother, for her birthday tomorrow.

You can watch the story, in four parts, on YouTube: 1, 2, 3, 4. Charlie’s keen for as many people flung as far as possible should see the piece, and – if so moved – return a message to his mother on her birthday.

Leave a comment here and I’ll make sure it gets to Charlie.

Today: two edit suites running, two shoots underway, one presenter, four actors, three directors. Graphics suite running. Digitise decks running. Call sheets flying around for a UK shoot departing tomorrow, returning Friday; we’re shooting between two and five items next week, too.

Back at Scope mission control, we’ve been discussing the possibility of acquiring a production rock; something large and light and cuddly, that could sit in a corner of the production office. We could take turns crawling under it to hide for a while. Why don’t Firebox sell something like this?

The Wildwalk and IMAX bits of @Bristol are closing, as soon as April this year. Apparently their initial millennium funding package is finished, and they don’t have alternative sources of income. So they have to make do with ticket sales on the door. Yow.

The science centre movement in the UK is on rather odd footing; there’s no ongoing central funding (cf. arts centres), with the result that despite many centres trying their darndest, it’s all still a bit amateur/people doing ‘their bit’/volunteers, etc. Full-time staff – often with serious amounts of experience and expertise – are too often paid a pittance, with the obvious knock-on effect that things like touring shows and the like are seriously underpriced. For the stuff I’m doing this year I’m going to try charging a low-end consultancy fee, but I don’t think I’ll get any bookings even at that price – and that’s with all the equipment and some of my time being subsidised by other sources.

So far as I can tell, most people who ‘make a living’ in this game actually do it for the love of it, and it’s their partners who are the real breadwinners. This is the dirty secret of the science communication industry, frankly. You’d think people would be on similar pay scales to teachers, but… no.

Without a culture of sponsorship in the name of corporate responsibility, it’s not clear to me what drives the industry. Goodwill, I think. Yikes.

Rather amusing rant from Brooker appropriately titled ‘I hate Macs,’ at the Guardian. Followed by hundreds of screenfuls of mostly kneejerk protests, in all directions. [sigh]. Come on people, it’s humour!

For what it’s worth, though, I think The Doctor uses Linux, on (most likely) some old bastard of a HP PA-RISC workstation with a boatload of emacs macros. With a custom controller made mostly of string and gaffer tape.

(Oh, and: the new UK PC/Mac ads: isn’t there some UK law against ‘knocking copy’ – that is, advertising negatives about competitors rather than positives about your own product. Isn’t it really dodgy? What gives?)

If you read stories in the press on Monday about a disturbance in a Dublin pub caused by a rowdy Welsh girl cheering her team in the Wales/Ireland Six Nations opener… that’ll be Flossie.

Any references to English casualties… that’d be me.

ulp<

(If anyone reading this happens to be in Dublin on Sunday: we’ll be in the Waterloo on Baggot Street. Come and join us. Particularly if you can out-shout a Valleys girl, and help hide a random Englishman. Kick-off at 3pm.)

Tomorrow, we’re filming a sports challenge programme that British readers of a certain age will recognise as a close relation to ‘Superstars.’ Only without Brian Jacks. Nor, indeed, anybody else. Or so we thought at 10am this morning.

“I’ve a bit of a problem,” said the poor sports science chap who had set things up for us. “I’ve one athlete called to Stuttgart at zero notice, one with a groin strain injury, one taken to her bed with flu, one with a spot exam dropped on her, and one who appears to have dropped off the face of the Earth.”

That left one. This wasn’t looking good.

Several hundred phone calls ensue. Predominantly lovely people field our desperate plea, sympathise, and do what they can. They make us feel pathetic and whiney, and profoundly grateful. But they don’t find us people for tomorrow.

A crisis meeting is held, at which we conclude – after much angst – that a preferable option to punting the filming on is to revert to the original idea for the programme, shoot with our presenters only, and plan to patch the show up with another item if we have to. Fine.

And then… then the original chap calls back. He’s spent the day miserable as sin because (a.) he started by spending an hour being attacked by his dentist, and (b.) he thinks he’d screwed everything up. Then at the last minute he miraculously pulls three more athletes out of the bag. Hurray! The shoot is on.

So: back to plan A. I sit down with the script, to start reading it through and making changes, as I’d intended to do at 10am. Only, it’s 7pm.

Some days are like that.

Oh, how I love this: a spoof of geek video blogger Robert Scoble, in the manner of Fake Steve. Scoble’s overlong, unedited, wobblycam videos have been ripe for parody since before he left Microsoft – it’s not that they’re entirely bad, it’s more that Scoble appears to willfully, even gleefully, ignore a century of cinematography knowledge. He’d post a whole lot less if he edited out the dull bits, and as Kevin Marks said, “editing shows respect for your audience.” It’s plain rude not to.

So, anyway, the Scoobie blog runs thus:

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend among the A-list blogs. Very few of them linked to my exclusive four-hour video tour of Intel’s new chip plant, preferring instead to briefly mention that Intel has invented a new type of chip.

Admittedly my video wasn’t very interesting at first, but if you look closely at the 2:13 mark, you can see a man in one of those bunny suits (think Intel ads rather than Donnie Darko!!!) walk past the window carrying some kind of high-tech tool. It’s not that clear because I dripped sweat on the lens again, but it’s there.

Further down the page:

This is just the highlights – the full video is 49:43 long and I’ll put it up shortly. You can’t really make out what anyone’s saying but I’m very excited!!!

Quite. And again, a story ripped almost verbatim from Gruber.

There’s a new bit of web tech that’s cropping up in more and more places, and it’s driving me up the bleedin’ wall. ‘Snap Preview Anywhere‘ pops up a preview of a linked page when you hover your pointer over the link text. Which is great, right?

Er… no. The preview’s too small to see anything much, and there’s no hover delay beyond loading time, so in densely-linked text these previews pop up like whack-a-mole puppets. The most stupid bit, to my mind, is that they usually pop up above the link text, obliterating the thing I’m trying to read. Plus, they somehow knacker the text that appears in the bottom bar of my browser, telling me to where the link points. Gaaaah!

Some people appear to like these things, and there are some ringing endorsements from influential people listed at the link above. To my mind, however, this is the sort of crap that should be done as a browser plug-in, not as a site-wide JavaScript doohicky. It’s interface, not content.

Anyway – if they’re pissing you off as much as they are me, go to Snap’s FAQ here, scroll down to the second question, and click the link to set a cookie. Annoying that you have to hold a cookie to opt out, but there we go.

Please, site owners – just pack it in. It’s not big, and it’s not clever.

(link via John Gruber, bless his minimalist grey background patterns)

[update: There’s an options linky in the corner of each pop-up, and from there you can turn the damned things off. I know this, because the above method doesn’t appear to have worked for me. Neither, for that matter, does the option thingy. I think because my browser is paranoid about cookies from servers that aren’t delivering the main page, which is usually a good thing.]

Footage of an amazing but decidedly ill-looking weird shark thing (technical terms): at CNN.