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At one time a website called mp3.com existed to facilitate the sharing of music. I enjoyed this website and downloaded quite a lot of music from there. At the time the idea was to share music for free. It was in the days before myspace grew in popularity. The site is http://amiestreet.com/ There is one slight difference: All songs on Amie Street start FREE and can rise to 98 cents. We’re about discovery, not raiding your wallet. That’s perfect. If it’s good they make money, helping to fund the website and the artists and if it’s not that popular yet then lot’s of people getting it for free means more advertising. It’s an interesting idea

Last night I went to a hat party and I enjoyed it. I found it amusing to look at all the hats, from pink cowboy to chimney sweep, snowboarding and even motorcycle helmets. The more excentric the hat the more amusing the person. House parties are interesting because it’s a familiar event. We already know everyone that’s there so there’s no time wasted in trying to meet everyone for the first time. A simple hello will suffice in some cases and in others great conversations will fly off like water drops descending from Angel falls into a fine spray. That spray is the culmination of a hundred conversation. As it hits the plunge pool all of them merge into the pile of consumed conversations. Some wash up on a stone and will come back into our conscience but most will vanish. Photographs of parties are great. If you’re in a bad mood, feel tired or are down then it shows and you’re dissapointed. When you’re smiling, relaxed and enjoying yourself though they’re great. Some of these are “stolen”, taken by a photographer who prefers spontaneity to the posed image. Occasionaly posed images are good too. Two weekends, two very different events, one in a London nightclub, the other a few minutes walk from home. Both will leave enjoyable memories. Tonight I shall rest, content with the way Friday night progressed.

I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts rather than radio and one of the weekly podcasts I enjoy most is This Week in Media, where some people discuss what’s going on in the media landscape, from how they will only sit in five or six seats out of the cinema, how they’re early adopters and how they’d love to have cameras capable of 1080p The reason I mention this podcast is that recently they mentioned a trilogy of books of which snow crash is the first. Two or three weeks earlier they had mentioned how people should go and watch Blood Diamond and as I enjoyed the film I decided to read the first of the three books. So far I’m enjoying it and it’s keeping me entertained. Some UCL students decided to put on a silent rave tonight but as I went through the list of people I saw that it was almost only students from that uni which was slightly disappointing. I went there and although the idea is amusing it seemed to lack the energy from the silent disco I had been too a few weeks ago. Within four or five minutes security was already asking them to leave.

Yesterday I handed in my penultimate essay. There are two main assignments remaining. the first of these is a tech case study which should be fun to do. I already have an idea of a topic that I know fairly well. with the second it’s the dissertation and I should really spend a few hours progressing with that. I had one of those classic nights on Saturday. You begin with the idea that you’re simply going to drop into the cinema and watch a film before going home and watching the lunar eclipse from the relatively low light pollution of the area around the halls. This plan disintegrated as a friend encouraged me to stay out and go out clubbing instead. I knew I had the penultimate essay to finish. Most people hate the night bus because it’s so full of weird people, some are just drunk, others are in worse states and finally some are amusing. On occasion you’ll enter the bus and a girl will offer you some crisps and you won’t say know, to which someone next to you asks whether you’re really going to accept them. Later on you understand that it’s the brother joking around. In other cases you’ll find that it’s like a plane cabin. If you’ve ever flown easyjet and got up to go to the front of the cabin you’ll know the sight. it’s that of two hundred people having a nap. It’s a soothing sight to see so many relaxed people. Occasionaly some people get cold so you lend them their jacket and you walk them home before rushing home to finish your essay rather than taking the time to get to know more about them. There are a lot of people that hate the stop at Sudbury but having lived there last year I know a little secret. That there’s a 24 hour shop where you can buy jaffa cakes and lipton ice tea for the second part of the journey. What I enjoyed most about saturday was the people I met on the bus journey home.

In less than twenty four hours there will be a total eclipse of the sun that will give us a red moon and this should be interesting to see. Back in 1999 I was in Salzburg for the total eclipse of the sun by the moon. I was almost within the area of totality. It was over 99%. There is nothing like a total eclipse of the sun. At the start you see hundreds of people go into the square and look up at the sky. You see the moon eating up the sun. Over time you see that more than half is eaten. Then you see three quarters and you approach totality. At the time I wasen’t spending too much time looking at the process as I was looking for shots for the video. I climbed up the road to the castle and turned around. As I did so I saw all the birds fly away and I saw a grey shadow racing across the landscape. Hundreds of flashes started going off and people started to make noise in excitement. Totality was here. The light was grey, with no depth, then it was night. As it was night I looked up and saw the corona that forms, where the solar flares are twelve kilometers long, visible because the sun’s main mass is blocked by the moon. Totality is over within a few seconds and day comes back. Many people have enjoyed this event. It’ll be another century for most people to see the next one. That’s why I want to see the red moon, that’s why I’d prefer seeing a silver ball turn reddish. That red is formed by the refraction of sun in the earth’s atmosphere being sent to the moon and bouncing back to give us a splendid sight, as long as there are no clouds

Whilst doing my work last week in Geneva I was told that I had to include footage from the Film “Henry Dunant - Du Rouge sur la croix”. I didn’t get to watch the film until today but I enjoyed it. it’s an interesting film for anyone who has been brought up in Geneva to watch. There are two cities in the World that have the United Nations, New York in the US and Geneva in Switzerland. Both these locations are important but Geneva is seen by some as the capital of Human rights. Henry Dunant is an important figure in the history of International Human Rights (DIH) because when in Solferino after seeing the ravages of war he wanted to help anyone affected by conflict, no matter the nationality, religion or ethnic background. In effect for him they were “brothers in arms” to quote the film. The film itself is well shot, has a good rythm and a good pacing. It tells the story without getting bogged down in details and serves as a taster for those who would like to do more research on the subject. The acting is good and it’s amusing to see the old town of Geneva in a film, especially since those are the streets around which I have spent many hours on a number of weekend evenings. I love the international aspect of Geneva. I’ve done work for the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Labour Organisation, I’ve been accredited to the United Nations on three seperate occasions, each one for over a month and I’ve done work for the World Health Organisation. I have been through Two International Labour Conferences, the first ever General Staff meeting of UNAIDS and on the lighter side I’ve been to two Student League of Nations as a precursor. This is part of the reason for which I see Globalisation not as a form of corportage agrandisement but rather as a coming together of the world’s population, living according to specic rules and guidelines which means that we are compassionate about ethnic diversity and co-habitation. Where are you from is not to find out what village or town you’re from but what country. This is because we follow world news and international politics. We are aware of every continent and aspects of many cultures. That’s why we watch BBC World when we have the chance and read the international newspapers. If you have the opportunity of seeing Henry Dunant then do so, it’s worth it.

dommy - Apr 4, 2007

yeah i got one today, i didn’t know who it was, so didn’t pick up, but put the number into google and came up with what you lot have said..nice 1 for letting me know who this was..if i want to change my phone i will go to my network provider direct..

yh we got the call not long ago on my old phone but we rejected it cuse we got to the phone to late!

I have a deep and sincere hate for spammers, whether in forum comments, spam e-mails, spam websites or sales phone calls. It’s only 950GMT and already I’ve received a phone call from 02920368792 trying to get me to change from one phone network to another. The problem is that there’s no proof that the person is who they claim they are. They call from a noisy room and they’re disturbing my peace and quiet. If anyone sees this number reject the phone call. If I want to upgrade my contract, if I want to change provider, if I want to improve something then I’ve got the world wide web and all the phone network websites several hundredths of a second away so why would I want some salesperson calling me. No way am I going to accept anything that someone attempts to sell by phone.

I am greartly pained and sadened to see that Al Gore won the oscar for best documentary for “An Inconvenient truth”. I find that this is absolute lunacy and there is reasoning behind this statement. In the United Kingdom you’ve got the British Broadcasting Corporation working on some beautiful documentary. Just look at Deep Blue, The Blue Planet and more recently the Planet Earth Series. Those are beautiful documentaries showing the world in such a good light. Those documentaries were produced over a period of three years or more using the world as a backdrop. The cinematography is amazing and they had 6 million people watching when they were first aired. They are beautiful peices of work. Al Gore’s documentary is awful in comparison. For the voice over and script they did nothing more than film him giving a speech whilst throwing in the occasional related shot. I tried watching that piece of crap and got bored. Why are so many people making such a fuss about something that’s been mentioned in hundreds of documentaries before this one. If you turn on any of the discovery channels there’s a good chance that you’ll find some beautifully produced documentary with higher production values exploring the subject in a far more esthetic and effective manner. Is it getting an oscar simply because it’s by Al Gore? If that’s the case then all the negative comments that people have made about the oscars are justified. That’s not a documentary. It’s someone giving a speech which have a few shots inserted to give the illusion of the documentary tradition. Where are the interviews? Where are the experts? If the Oscar’s judges consider that oscar worthy then I will think twice about watching oscar awarded documentaries mockumentaries. Previous Best Documentary award winner so I suppose it’s not that bad overall

When you fly a lot you get used to the antics of airport security. Sometimes you see people get angry and flustered by their stuff being searched. Sometimes I’ve felt that way as well. Today was amusing. My bag went through the x ray machine and since it was so full of books dvd and more they wanted to look inside. No one else was passing through at the time so I joked about how they had to keep busy. One of them joked about having to find something to confiscate to keep himself entertained. Shame I had nothing of interest. I chatted about the DVD in my bag and about a series related to the first one and it was generaly quite friendly. Hey, when you’ve flown five times in two months you’re bound to be more relaxed about certain aspects, especially when you’re in no rush because you gave yourself enough time.