Last night, as I finished dinner I noticed that others were out so I joined them within twenty minutes or so. That wasn’t fast enough. They had decided to call it a night. As this impacted my mental health I decided to go for a run.
Often you see people are out, and you know they might call it a night by the time you get there. I had that thought. My decision was “If they have called it a night, by the time I get there, then at least I will have had a second walk.”
An interesting talk about thankless jobs and how to make them more rewarding.
My editing machine has a minimum of things installed on it. Final Cut Pro and related software, nothing else. The point is that when I am editing I am dedicated to that single task. I take breaks when it is rendering or when I need time to digest the edit so far. When I was editing over a decade ago I would mark 10 in and out points and then go and drink some ice tea while the machine assembled the footage. Later when I moved to desktop editing I would let the computer render and take a break. Today with the current system taking breaks is based on scene completion. That’s how a friend and I worked on our fiction film over a period of weeks. Right now the rough cut is ready. We need to add music, improve the sound, colour correct and more but at least a big step was taken. Post inspiration.
Earlier today I was at Chindrieux, a lake side village looking out over the Lac du Bourget lake in France. It is a nice lake with good visibility. The dive site where my friends and I usually dive is a wall. You swim out for 300 meters before heading down the bank to a little gap in the cliff. At 9 meters depth you start going west along the wall. On this wall you can find lots of shells and the occasional fish hiding in one crack or other. There are overhangs and scree fields. The bottom of the wall is at 65m. From there it slopes gently off to 110m. So far my dives have only taken me to 40 meters on this wall. Diving in this part of the world takes a certain character type. The water at depth is at a stable 5°-6°c but the water column varies from 21°c at the surface in Summer zo 6°c at the surface in winter. In summer you go from warm water to cold, and then you get back to warm. You’re sweating in your dry suit and to cool down is welcome. In winter the opposite is true. You’re cold. You’re happy to put your dry suit on, and gloves, and hood. The drawback is that you go from cold air to cold water and back. Friends of mine and I have come out of the water shivering in winter, unable to use our fingers anymore. This is all part of the fun. Today for a change I went with my video camera. I am currently working on a diving documentary and I want to get footage of the surface as well as down below. The vista are nice. You can see parapentistes, the occasional boat, trains passing by and in the distance snow covered mountains. They serve as a backdrop to Aix Les Bains. I will keep you informed about how this project progresses.
PAF is not just the way you discribe something hitting something else. It is also used to define a portable application file. These are self contained executables that you can use for mobile versions of your favourite browser. 
One of my personal favourites at the moment is Chrome, it’s fast, light, and behaves the way I want it to. Better still it incorporates flash into the code. This means that I can view flash content without it being installed on the computer I’m using. Get it here
is twitter changing your blogging habits? (original post) Yes and no. Twitter is replacing instant messaging and chatrooms. It’s an open method by which for people to communicate instantly with others. It’s also about the overheard conversation although that term has dissapeared. What does “overheard†mean? Well simply that whenever two people discuss a topic hundreds of people are following this conversation and when they decide they have an opinion they can cut in. They do have that 140 character limit though, so they need to get to the point is efficiently as possible. When that isn’t possible then they can do the next best thing. Write a comment in a blog post or even write a blog entry of their own where the conversation that took place on twitter is synthesised into a more digestible chunk of information. As a result twitter is changing people’s habits but the question is why people want to chat publicly rather than in an enclosed space. Today people like transparency.
I think social discovery is one of the most fascinating parts of the new media lifecycle because we are so early in determining the most efficient way of social discovery. Search has now been dominated by Google and while new companies attempt to attack what is increasingly becoming a monopoly, most companies have realized that the space of social discovery has yet to declare a winner.
Source The question we as content creators must ask is where we get our information from. Where do we go to find the media content that we ingest. Do we rely on a social network like twitter, scanning through the timeline for interesting events. Are we out with friends in town noticing the signs and billboards. Are we in an English pub where we see all the promotions? The point is that the way I consume media has left the printed page behind. It’s also left live broadcasting of pre-recorded shows behind. I’m in an on demand world. Everything I consume is through word of mouth and general browsing. The web is a giant book shop and I want to enjoy as much of the material as I can. I’m also generating content, and so are my friends. At the lake parade I was streaming whilst another friend was taking slow motion videos. More friends were on twitter, friendfeed and facebook. Every time a friend has a gig or a party we see it appear on facebook. I didn’t bother going to a flashmob (water fight) because of the weather but within a few hours the photographs were on facebook. That’s because as much as people consume the media they also create it. That’s where the social dimension comes in. Many of you know that I was filming interviews of people like Katie Melua, Dionysos, Patrice, Mademoiselle K, Travis, Yael Naim, Camille and The Kills to name but a few. All of that content was only available in France at first but there’s a website now. Musicorama.tv. That’s where you can find man of the interviews I’ve filmed recently. When the Paleo is on there should be quite a few more interviews appearing that I’ll make you aware of.
mousewords - Jun 5, 2008
Cool! Looks like it was fun! :-)
Hey, of course, was fun being at the events. Glad you liked them.
Because every day is not the same this one has been quite normal. At eleven in the morning I found out that the motherboard for the macbook pro needed replacing and this should be accomplished by Tuesday. In second the day of work was a good one so I was energetic enough to drop by the caribana for a second night, meeting a few friends. It was also an opportunity to do some live streaming of concerts by Alanis Morisette, Stereophonics and last but not least (so far at the festival) Manic Street preachers. Here is a collection of the streams. If you tolerate this your children will be next Something to do with Autumn You all know this one: Your love is not enough. Stereophonics, Dakota Stereophonics, crowd having fun. Alanis Morisette, broke but happy
When’s the last time you visited a wap site? Have you thought of how content displays on mobile phones other than the Iphone? I hadn’t until quite recently. Recently I moved back to Switzerland and have started to work for Allthecontent / Toutlecontenu.com and they provide multiplatform content for devices ranging from televisions to mobile phones and more. As a result of reading too much American press I lost interest in what Nokia were doing until it was mentioned that the iphone is not true mobile web use. At first that statement didn’t make much sense but since then I’ve bought a Nokia N95 8 gig model and I’ve been playing with vodafone live, seeing how content is presented. It’s very simple, quick and to the point. Images are small and sparse but text is heavy. Naviguate from one menu to another and you eventually get to content that’s paying. That’s where it becomes interesting. There are quite a few topics, from sports to entertainment to adult content. Some of this content is in video form, some in MMS form and yet some more comes as text. As a result content is easily accessible from most media handsets. Then there’s the question of data packages. Look at Swisscom. For 18 swiss Francs you receive a hundred megabytes of data transfer. That’s not much when considering the 3 gigs a day of transfers via my laptop. Mobile is different. I read that not more than fifty megabytes a month are downloaded over the air. Take a look at Iphone optimised pages in contrast. They’re graphic intensive, slow to load and designed for one specific screen resolution. As a result of this that content is not accessible on most data plans or mobile devices. Iphones have a good part of the market but they’re excluding many users. You can’t download content on the iphone. You’re losing revenue right there. What I think will be interesting over the coming months is to see how the European Vs. US mentality of mobile delivered content will affect telephone operators in these markets.