Heading out to San Francisco soon.
Archive for February, 2008
2.30am and I just got out of bed. Spent the last hour trying to trick my brain into thinking I was tired while staring at the bedroom ceiling. This has been a good week. Started a handful of new projects and am in talks with a bunch of interesting people that should see me busy for the next couple of months. The problem is that I keep thinking of NEW STUFF when I should be having my recurring dream about plane crashes.
The plan right now is to get some of these ideas squirreled away before they dim and then share them with the right people later in the week. I see a fresh batch of NDAs in the immediate future.
Tomorrow/today/you-know-what-I-mean looks like I’ll be working through until around 9pm so I need to get on with this stuff and then get my head down for a few hours.
Which is why I’m blogging about it instead.
I’m not the sharpest knife in the neck sometimes…
Since getting a cease and desist from Playboy (never a dull moment around here) and Flickr rapping my knuckles with a first and final warning, I’ve been slow to start uploading photographs again. Pretty much all the photos Flickred in January where thrown there by Jess. Some of them I haven’t even looked at yet. This isn’t simply a reluctance to use Flickr - it remains one of the few services that changed the way I use the Internet - but because I’ve been messing around with video more and more since I got back from NYC my regular camera has gotten kinda dusty.
But the warning from Flickr and in particular the line “further action that may include termination without warning” has given me pause for thought. A lot of the content of my Flickr stream are the only copies I have. We’re talking memories here - not only in the sentimental sense, but also in the ‘I’m an old old man and can’t remember where I’ve been’ sense.
Finding an easy way to back up almost 8,000 photos, the vast majority of which were indeed taken by us, in case another copyright infringement leads to account deletion has proven to be a bit of a headache. One thing I should mention is that the Playboy photos were put up on Flickr in order to find out where they originated from. I was curious as to how such a grim little war movie ended up with a promo shoot involving Michael Caine, Denholm Elliott and a bevy of naked ladies.
Playboy let me know in no uncertain terms that the photos belonged to them. Mystery solved.
So as long as I don’t do anything similar within Flickr I’m OK, right? Well this is still a concern as I get sent promotional photos from movies all the time and rather than get them hotlinked from my own server I stick em up on Flickr and change the copyright to the rights holder. All it takes is one over efficient Flickr/Yahoo employee to put a red flag over one of these photos and there go all our photos.
I should also add I have no problem with Flickr regarding this. In fact I’m involved in two upcoming events with them. But seeing as there isn’t a single elegant back up solution I’m now looking at going into my Flickr stream and relocating all the screencaps and promotional crap from the account. Tiresome to say the least.
I really need to replace all these external drives and towering stacks of DVDs with something tidy (but huge) then I can keep on top of archiving my own photographs and videos. And then there are the boxes of actual photographs that we want to digitise…
The last time I was ‘home’ I found a neglected photo album and saved as many of the photos as I could.
A lot of these are old Polaroid shots of me as a kid - wearing an A Team jumper, Ghostbusters shirt, playing with Lorne Greene action figures(?!), leaning on dinosaurs - so I was a little saddened to read the other day that Polaroid are now abandoning the film business. My favourite camera was always a Polaroid, but the expensive film made sure it was used sparingly over the years. Watching the photograph develop before your eyes was part of the charm of course and it’s a shame to think of that process as now almost obsolete. That said I won’t be heading to eBay to find a ‘new’ camera and the final stocks of film. There’ll be enough geeks doing just that right now.
I did stumble across this video though…
Maybe I’ll have a quick look on eBay.
Yet another plug for the ever awesome Snowmail from Channel Four news here in the UK. Here’s some interesting news on the news that I got last week from Kylie Morris:
I’m going to let you into a small secret today, but an interesting one. This is a milestone in modern television news production. We have moved into half a new newsroom with completely new technology. There’s no paper, there’s no tangible video or film. Everything is digital. And those of us who were mad in the analogue age are now completely crazy in the digital follow-up.
Perhaps I should have made that a singular observation. The potential is fantastic - instant everything and instantly edited everything (perhaps I exaggerate a little). But the human capacity to keep up with it all and to ensure that the journalism does too - that is the real issue. You won’t notice any difference - well, not unless the entire thing blows up and blue smoke starts coming out of my ears. But we certainly hope that we will be able to provide you with an even better Channel 4 News than heretofore. The whole process of change will not be completed until well into April.
This is very cool. Keeping abreast of technology if you’re old media is certainly essential, but so far only The Guardian seem to really grasp what’s going on. This is a great move for Ch4 and I hope their websites now get the chance to step up a notch too.
And just to prove it’s not all high tech sci fi over there, John Snow signed off with this just a few days ago:
Oh, and by the way, if you can’t catch us at seven, why don’t you check your Freeview menu and find Channel 4 Plus One, because we pitch up there at eight. And you could have the soggy Yorkshire pud and the overdone roast beef on your knee, watching it.
And speaking of soggy Yorkshire pudding I’m finding the BBC’s iPlayer horribly underdone:
January was pretty much the entrails of 2007 for me. Thank fuck that’s over with.
February is already feeling like the new year. Lots of plans afoot that actually look like they’re leading places. Very exciting.
I’ve been on a roll since the Luxembourg trip and again am working into the small hours, but everything I’m doing now has a nice positive ring to it. So fuck sleep.
The other night I met Gia and Lee at the Coach & Horses to start hatching plans and we bumped into Claire and her friend Bruce just before Annie Mole ran into us too. I should probably mention that Charlie Brooker also joined us although I can’t repeat any of that conversation. Fuck me though, that was a fun filled night.
So it’s just gone 5am now which means I’ll be having my first meeting of the day in less than four hours before joining yet another group of London’s finest for breakfast and discussion. Then I’ll probably want to go to bed, but I have meeting number 3 at noon, then some new kit to buy before a 4pm meeting.
Then I’ll probably sleep in a doorway for a while.
Right, I should probably get some more Luxembourg footage up now that I’ve broken the blog up a little with words for a change…
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