Luxembourg teaser

I had a great time in Luxembourg this weekend and met some fantastic people. I’m hoping I made a few real friends as I know I want to work with some of them too.

You can get a little tired of the echo chamber here in London so it was great to relax with a few like-minded folk who come at things with a slightly different outlook and European direction. Seesmic and Twitter are great for breaking down barriers and connecting people, but my own inability to learn another language (I figure I need to finish butchering this one before I move on to a new one) means I navigate towards English speakers first. Thankfully every person in Europe is way smarter than me and forgives me my ignorance. This means I already have a nice little European social group to turn to online.

However, nothing beats sitting down in a hotel that was once a fortress to chew the fat (and Toblerone) together.

I was incredibly impressed with everything I saw in Luxembourg, but what stirred me the most were the people. I travel a fair bit, but it takes more than history and postcard pretty scenery to get me fired up about a place. I was bored to tears in the jungles of Mexico because the pyramids are just mausoleums. Impressive, yes, but it’s not like the ancient Mayans have contributed much lately (unless you count the Mel Gibson movie with the face chewing) and a hundred years from now someone taking the same trip as me will see pretty much the same thing. Mexico City, however, rocked…

Jess drags me to a lot of OLD places that are quite happy to look backwards for the next century and concentrate on diverging tourists from their cash by wearing silly costumes and treating their whole nation as a museum. Dead places, dead ideas.

Everyone I met in Luxembourg was well aware of the perceived shortcomings of such a small country, but crucially they were all committed to moving forward and changing those perceptions by being as progressive as possible. The people won me over first and then it was easy to sit back and enjoy the view.

Anyway, I’m going to break my posts about the trip up with my usual stuff here and also try and keep things short and snappy. Just sorting out all the video I shot will take a week plus I’m learning how to handle a new camera and a new editing suite at the same time. But more on that later too…

Right now here’s some footage as a teaser that I almost deleted and then shoved into iMovie 08 as a quick refresher:

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Another 3.30am

I Can Has HG10?

My new HG10 is here:

Canon kindly sent me one as part of their Canon Camera Buzz sponsorship. It’s been pottering around in the post for almost a week, but I finally got my hands on it:

Now to point it at things…

The Tank

I kept forgetting to post this video on my own blog (some vlogger I am), but now it’s up on Londonist I guess I should give it a home here:

A couple of things bug me about this now that it’s out in the wild. I’ve since found out more stuff about the tank that I’d liked to have included, but if I get enough I’ll do a follow up later in the year. The editing is awful, but that’s ok because I’m learning as I go along and I put it together at 4am. The ‘titles’ are too long and already piss me off. I have a lot of musical friends so ripping off L7 should stop at some point…

There’s a lot I like about the video too. It frees me from the pressure of coming up for a ’show’ for Blip and Viddler and all the other services out there. By piecing this thing together for Semanal (more about that in the next post) it gives me the perfect excuse to focus on a show type format while I use smaller vids to pepper the site with no real agenda. The title ‘Visible Monsters’ of course was just an extension of this blog’s title, but now people expect a series of similar London based stories. That’s no problem as I have a bunch and it’s also kind of fun.

One man’s monster is another man’s hero so there’s plenty of scope there.

Right, now I should talk about WHY I’n vlogging which is more interesting… stay tuned.

Something new

Click To Play