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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 720×576 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.
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.
