janeandrichard.co.uk yak

Festival so far

2008-05-07T22:15:00.003Z

It's festival time, and although we're not doing much in the Brighton Festival itself, we have a punishing schedule in the Brighton Festival Fringe—which, I'm told, is the "England's largest arts event, and the 2008 Fringe is the second largest Fringe Festival in the world". Citation needed, indeed.

So far we've been to...

X-Files Improv with Dean Haglund, who turns out to be the long haired blond geeky one in the X-Files. A small turn out (30 people?), but a huge amount of fun. Essentially, an X-Files episode is created using audience suggestions, and it worked really well. A top act.
We spent an hour or so of a boiling hot day in The Last South: Pursuit of the Pole. Yes, there were initial technical issues with the sound, and yes the venue suffered from being on a roundabout on bank holiday Monday with motorcycles roaring passed, but this didn't distract from a great play. It was Scott and Amundsen on stage, writing their journals, in step with each other, but with very different experiences. Touching, funny, etc.
Up to the university we dropped in on a professorial lecture, namely "Alcohol: a simple molecule with complex consequences for emotion and behaviour". We learned about the experiments on memory and behaviour under the effects of booze, and it was eye-opening. I didn't know, for example, that drinking enhances your memory (but only for events before the drinking starts). Naturally, there was a wine reception after.
And tonight we went to see Mike Leigh in conversation with Amy Raphael, discussing his films and watching bits of some of them. We headed back home to sign up to LoveFilm to get his back catalog.

One negative: the £1 per ticket booking fees are evil, especially as the booking system isn't finished and the web sites are frustrating to use. And on top of that "internet booking fees" should be made illegal. But, there's no competition, so we pay. I'd rather have to pay than not have it at all, is what it comes down to.

Old Bailey

2008-05-06T22:23:00.002Z

Transcripts from the Old Bailey (from 1674 to 1913) are now online, which has generated plenty of press.

As I suspect many others have, I went searching for references to my family name and I've found a few...

In 1796, a 19 year old George Dallaway wandered into a warehouse and told the clerk that he wanted "half a hundred weight of sheathing nails", but didn't have the paperwork. The clerk gave him the goods, and thus a fraud was committed. Geroge was "respited to go for a sailor or soldier" which we take to mean he was given the opportunity to fight, but a few months later he's in the proceedings as having a year in jail and a public whipping.
Matthew Dallaway stole 12 spoons in 1769 and was transported. Nice touch in that he took them while the victim's house was on fire. And he would have got away with it had it not been for the pesky pawnbroker grassing him up. His defense: "I was very much in liquor", a phrase I plan to use whenever the situation merits it.

It's worth having a dig around the site for some of the history to the publication. For example, the Proceedings were popular ("...in the opinion of many people one of the most diverting things a man can read in London") until the rise of newspapers, and even carried advertising for a while.

Science 'Open Notebook'

2008-04-24T22:18:00.001Z

One to file under "wish I'd thought of that", from Slashdot:

Under [the] radically transparent 'open notebook' approach, everything goes online: experimental protocols, successful outcomes, failed attempts, even discussions of papers being prepared for publication... The time stamps on every entry not only establish priority but allow anyone to track the contributions of every person, even in a large collaboration.

Lunch Atop a Skyscraper

2008-04-22T20:36:00.006Z

Lunch Atop a Skyscraper
Originally uploaded by Balakov

One of a whole series of reconstructions of classic photos using Lego

Lovely!

Found via photojojo

A history of snowboarding in 2 minutes

2008-04-21T12:53:00.005Z

Warning: This moves pretty quickly. Hang on to your hats!

Found via Nollie.

That looks about right

2008-04-16T05:07:00.003Z

Is it meme o'clock already? Well, if you really must know...


toto:~ richard$  history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
  130 cd
  110 ls
   50 ssh
   20 exit
   15 scp
   14 cp
   11 svn
   11 sudo
   11 openssl
   11 java

I'm surprised there's not some find, grep and mate in there.

Glenn on the history of his company

2008-04-10T08:46:00.004Z

Tuesday, at £5 App, Glenn gave his personal view of the history of his company: The idea, name, table football, money, cake and the culture. The most interesting parts for me were his description of using scale to escape the for hire rollercoster (if you're working as an agency), the importance of having a shared set of values, and using money as a tool.

Interesting stuff. It'll take a while for it to sink in for me, but as Ribot caught the talk on video (part 1) (and part 2) you can judge for yourself.

[Disclaimer: Glenn is Jane's employer]

i360

2008-03-30T14:10:00.002Z

The BBC say "work will start on the i360 tower during the summer". Of course, they said it'd start last June, so who knows...

Mr Ouch

2008-03-26T06:54:00.002Z

Evil electricity could shoot a small child
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

I took this photo in the grounds of the Morning Star Lodge near the Silver Mountain Gondola station in Kellogg, Idaho with the sole intention of posting it to the Stick Figures in Peril group. This I duly did and someone added a tag of Mr Ouch. I was curious about this and so looked at all photos tagged with Mr Ouch and discovered that they are all the same peril picture but with different text, instructions and warnings - a sub domain of stick figures in peril.

I will now be on the lookout for other Mr Ouch warning signs to add to the collection.

TED iTunes Feed

2008-03-24T21:42:00.003Z

We all love TED, and have all probably lost days digging through the video archive. So hurrah for the feed they set up a while back allowing me to just get a constant update of TED videos.

I was going to write a quick pipe to filter out the old stuff and just take 2007 onwards. But I first thought I'd have a look at some of the olders stuff and...oh my gosh, its wonderful.

For example, take a look at Nicholas Negroponte talking about input devices (amongst other things) in 1984. The striking thing, aside from the use of laser discs, is how he describes touch input, including the rolling behaviour for fine input which we now see in the iPhone. And remember the talk was given 23 years before the iPhone was in stores.

(Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised, as that's what the kind of thing he was paid to think about, and the kind of thinking that a year later lead to the opening of the Media lab.)

So I won't be filtering out the older TED talks. I'll watch it all, which, now I think about it, is what I knew I'd end up doing anyway.

A month at The Werks

2008-02-15T17:55:00.003Z

I've mentioned I've been working out of the Werks. Well... it's been a month now [over a month, but this blog post has been sitting around whilst I was away] and in that time I've visited the Werks ten times or so. I'm not sure exactly how often, but long enough and frequently enough for the coffee shop to know what my order is.

Unexpectedly I've ended up having about three times the number of meetings I'd normally have—the good kind of meeting, mind you. That's down to being able to say "just drop by" rather than having to actually arrange anything. An example: Danny popping round the other day and we had the space to spread out his Post-Its® and discuss a bunch of ideas.

I get the sense that there's a good chance of chance happenings happening—especially once more of the space is used. I'd expect more people to be showing up once we're out of the dismal months.

A few times I find it better to work from the home office, for instance if I need the printer, make tricky phone calls, or just absolutely need guaranteed quiet. But mostly I've noticed that I may be getting more done when I do go to the Werks. As odd as it might seem, having to plan the day around what you need (that file? that external drive?) and then having to head out, seems to set the tone for the day. Prevents thrashing. Create focus. Something like that.

Our cabin in the woods

2008-02-13T19:59:00.001Z

Our cabin in the woods
Originally uploaded by d6y

Today is our last day in Oregon after a great week staying in this lovely log cabin in Brightwood, Oregon.

So far we've visited 2 ski resorts - Timberline and Mount Hood Meadows and plan to head up to Mount Hood Ski Bowl this afternoon.

Sierra Nevada Laguina Lift

2008-02-05T22:47:00.000Z

For a while I've been meaning to record an entire lift run at a ski resort. On a trip to Sierra Nevada last March, Jane decided to make the recording -- presumably because she was bored of me mentioning it and forgetting to do it.

Unfortunately she picked the longest lift run at the resort. The original video sequence was a finger chilling 10min 11sec, but you'll be glad to know it's been sped up here to just 2:10. There's no sound on this clip, in case you were wondering if your sound was turned all the way down.

The only feature of interest here is that there's a radio telescope at the top of a hill. When riding with that in the background, you half expect James Bond bad guys with automatic weapons to start chasing you on skidoos. Well, I do.

New gadgets

2008-02-03T19:00:00.000Z

Over the past few months I've gained some nice new gadgets, which I've reviewed over at one or other of my other blogs. But, this was originally the home of gadget reviews, so here's an overview with links to my other musings.

Nokia 6110 Navigator - I got this phone on Vodafone in August time and its the first phone that I've made use of as a general device rather than just a phone. I use the mobile internet on it quite a lot to keep up with google reader and twitter (mainly). I make use of the GPS tracking via the Nokia Research project SportsTracker and have uploaded some tracks to their new beta community site as well as listing them all in our maps section. This has taken over from the combined SportsDo on an old Sony P900 connection to an external bluetooth GPS. The major advantage of the 6110 Navigator is that the routes can be saved directly from the memory card, with SportsDo they had to be uploaded over mobile internet to the SportsDo site before then allowing them to be downloaded in google maps format. The 6110 Navigator also comes with Route 66 software with which I've had a few battles but am now getting on fine with.

iPod Touch - I got this as a Christmas present and I love it. I got a rubberised case for it as part of my Christmas gift but also bought a screen protector for it (after I'd managed to give it a small scratch). Since getting this I've started watching a lot more video podcasts, especially to do with photography. I purchased the $20 January upgrade and am finding the mail application really great to use.

Braun PixelBank - As I wind up taking more and more photographs with my beautiful Nikon D80 the ability to recycle my SD cards quickly enough is getting to be more of a challenge, especially when I am without my laptop. So, I decided it was time to buy a portable storage unit that could read from SD and xD (for my little Olympus fe130). It has 60GB of storage all held on a 2.5 inch replaceable hard disk and can be charged via USB and uses USB 2 for transfers.

3 different gadgets, all so far being enjoyed...

Collective Nouns

2008-01-30T16:17:00.000Z

I was having a conversation with Alex earlier, and we started talking about collective nouns. My personal favourite is still an "ostentation of peacocks". We found various online resources (Animal Groups, and of course Wikipedia has something to offer) to ponder and discussed how much some of these words really had anything to do with the object being collected - an "aurora of polar bears" for instance.

Wikipedia also offers collective nouns for job types as well, offering among others a sulk of developers. We'd already been thinking of terms for developers, designers, project managers and the other disciplines we have here at work and came up with a "creation of designers", "list of project managers" and the fairly obvious "Victory of Madgexians" (paying homage to the Madgex Arms of course).

Any suggestions to offer? If so, leave a comment and I'll try and collate them.

Rubbish

2008-01-27T15:21:00.000Z

The Communal Bin Consultation has started in the little bit of Brighton we live in. Potentially a good idea, but I think one to reject. If you're not sure if you're affected take a look at the map of the proposed and existing bin locations (PDF).

We're told: "The containers will be emptied regularly to prevent them from overflowing. Where we currently have bins we do not have any problems." Ah come off it... no problems at all? I've seen over-flowing bins, and a good percentage of the one's I've seen are broken (as in the photo above).

But anyway... a dull topic... and one that's been discussed for a while, and rejected by many. It's just one of the usual issues.

BTW: there's a surprising number of photos of Brighton bins knocking around.

Windy Day Brighton Cycle - 16:9, Final Cut Express, iDVD experiment

2008-01-19T16:02:00.000Z

This is a test movie I put together so I could discover how to use the 16:9 setting on the camera, to see how to edit with 16:9, and how to export it. I also wanted to see how I'd get on hand-holding the camera on a cycle.

It turned out to be a great lesson, but unfortunately a terrible piece of video. Sorry about that. Here's what I've learned...

In the first half of the film I was cycling with the camera resting on the handlebars, using my right hand to press the camera onto the handle bars. This is bad for two reason: first, I couldn't signal in traffic to turn right; second, the vibrations from the road through the camera has crippling effects on the recording.

Later I was cycling essentially one handed, which produced smoother film. It also allowed me to try out changing the filming angle.

Other stuff: cycling against a strong wind, while filming, resulting in me wheezing. Combined with the occasional loud sniff makes for some horrible sound. Gah. But it was a good exercise for me in blending and offsetting the sound from different clips---more so later in the sequence than earlier. Oh, and I learned that I need to oil my cycle: some of the squeaks and rattling sounds are embarrassing :-)

But that aside the 16:9 part kind of works. I had to jump through a few hoops to export the movie into iDVD. Although the 16:9 export from FCE has the right aspect ratio in QuickTime player, it imports to iDVD as 3:4. I don't have QuickTime Pro, so I couldn't use the official Apple workaround for this, or Anamorphicizer, so to get round it I had to pull the movie into iMovie08 and then export from that. It works.

Initially I was deeply unhappy with the output, especially when viewed on TV. Then I found the "Deinterlace Source Video" checkbox in the size option box from "File/Export QuickTime Conversion..." (which is where I also picked "PAL 720x576 16:9" for the dimensions). Lots of jaggies in the original, all gone when deinterlaced.

The version here is a result of exporting from iMovie08 using the "Share/Export Movie" menu, and picking the "medium" format.

Duration: 4min 19sec

Camera: Sony DCR-PC4E (MiniDV)

Recorded: 13 Jan 2008

Editing software: Final Cut Express HD 3.5

The Werks

2008-01-14T15:17:00.001Z

Today is my third day, or part day, working out of The Werks.

I'm used to spending most of my week working in my own space, to shouting down the phone as loud as I like, laughing out-loud in video chats, playing music, or having complete silence... all that stuff. So why am I trying out a more open space?

The short answer is, I don't know. The longer answer is that I have a hunch that there's something special about a bunch of people in a room. Serendipity is the word I'm looking for and it's a good match to The Werks: "Werkshop is a new concept which aims to provide a supportive environment for new ideas."

So it's going to take me a while to adjust, which is why I'm determined to make the effort to get down to The Werks as regularly as I can in January. Only then will I be in a position to judge the merits of being out there.... although, in part, it depends on who else shows up.

In terms of facilities, I can't see anything missing: internet, electricity, lighting, desks, chairs, coffee, water, doors, windows, cycle parking... it's all there, it's been thought about, it all works, it's all good. It's not the centre of Brighton, but actually the location is great.

It's exactly the kind of space a few of us have been talking about for a while, so I'm delighted it exists and is working so well.

Each Friday in January is open to anyone. I thought the first one worked out really well: I certainly enjoyed it. Look for the event on Upcoming and try it out.

Serre Chevalier - New Year 07/08

2008-01-13T16:37:00.001Z

It's either Richard or the Stig's little brother!
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

As we have done in recent years, we headed of for some snowboarding over New Year. Our destination this year was Serre Chevalier, mainly chosen due to a) it being a couple of hours drive from Turin and Grenoble, b) having hotels willing to have guests for a few days rather than a full week and c) World Snowboard Guide giving it a 10/10 rating.

We stayed in Monetier les Bains, also referred to as Serre Chevalier 1500, the highest of the villages, in the Hotel Le Rif Blanc. The hotel was on a half board basis with a continental buffet style breakfast and a 3 or 4 course dinner. Our room was small, (for only 4 nights this didn't bother us) but clean and warm. Monetier was a lovely village, and wasn't built up and as touristy as other resorts we've been to over the past few years. It had a supermarket, butchers, bakers, several bars and restaurants as well as ski and snowboard rental places.

Serre Chevalier as a resort is pretty large, with access along the valley floor by bus to different starting off points, and along the slopes via a series of interconnecting lifts and pistes. There are a lot of drag lifts around Serre Chevalier, but we managed 3.5 days on the slopes without having to go near one without compromising on our coverage of the mountain. The pistes are well marked, like the marker Richard is standing next to in the picture, with a count down from the top of the run to the bottom, and coloured according to the colour of the run - this is the same as the system used in Avoriaz and the Portes Du Soleil.

We'll probably return to Serre Chevalier sometime, and will again try and base ourselves at Monetier.

More Snowboarding at New Year photos.

GPS tracks:
New Years Day
New Years Eve
30th December
29th December

NaVloPoMo 2007 Screening

2008-01-12T19:24:00.001Z

This afternoon we spent a couple of hours at The Werks watching the highlights of the NaVloPoMo 2007 project. Some of the films were funny, some were sad, a lot were well thought out with a story to tell.

I used the video feature on my phone and recorded snippets of the afternoon, which I've edited in iMovie as a tribute.

I don't think I should give up the photography and switch to video any time soon . Having said that Node 101 is a skill swap style idea to help people learn how to produce video, so if it gets off the ground in Brighton, maybe I should head along.

Big Food

2008-01-06T21:28:00.000Z

A brilliant weekend. First, we find huge parsnips:

Second, Neela and Ash visit Brighton (which is superb in itself) we end up at Bill's where we find huge cake:

Hurrah.

Switching to Final Cut

2008-01-06T20:42:00.000Z

I've been noodling around in iMovie for a few years, but there was plenty just bugging me and slowing me down with it. Mostly I found that going back and editing a sequence could really screw up the timing of the whole movie. So the logical thing to do was to move on, and I decided to move on to Final Cut Express (version 3.5 when I bought it).

Here's what happens: you install Final Cut and all the tools it comes with, fire it up all excited, and... panic. Then get frustrated that you're doing less than you could in iMovie. Then get depressed. What I did, pretty much the same day I installed Final Cut, was go out and get a copy of Final Cut Express HD 3.5 Editing. I found the book exactly what I needed, with a DVD containing sample projects I could work through to check I was getting the right end product, and a section on moving from iMovie to FCE. Recommended.

I've also found a couple of vodcasts that were helpful: Creative COW Final Cut Pro Podcast and Final Cut Help Podcast.

Turns out it's not so daunting after all, but of course I always knew I could just phone Ray...

Economist Audio Edition

2008-01-06T20:25:00.000Z

For six months or so I've been grabbing the audio edition of The Economist. It's superb in terms of quality and mad in terms of size. Each week they churn out about 6 hours of word-for-word reading of the week's articles (the christmas edition was over 9 hours). That's a lot of stuff, and they manage to get this out by the end of Friday every week.

It's not a substitute for the newspaper for a couple of reasons. First, the download is a ZIP of MP3 files (which is fine), but you have to guess if you want to listen to a story based on a rather short file name. I find I can make better decisions on what I want to read by flipping through the print edition. The second reason you don't want to rely on the audio is that the print and web editions include graphics, which are often excellent. Check out the free daily charts web site if you don't believe me.

Vintage ToonCast

2008-01-03T13:33:00.001Z

Casper the friendly ghost
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

I'm now a happy owner of a lovely iPod Touch and so headed off to the iTunes podcast directory in search of good video podcasts to make the most of my lovely new screen. I've no idea how I stumbled upon the Vintage ToonCast but I'm happy I did.

The image is from Casper the friendly ghost, a sentimental cartoon that really appealed to me.

If anyone has any other recommendations for good video podcasts, then please let me know.

Happy Christmas

2007-12-26T15:55:00.001Z

Gifts
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

Richard and I have spent the last couple of days with his folks in Margate. We've taken a couple of walks with the dog, watched 2 excited great-nephews open their own body weight in presents and munched our way through turkey, sausages, bacon, roast potatoes and plenty of vegetables. Lovely!