Eight things you didn’t know about me – Tagged by Nik and Neil

Byrichard

Both Nik and Neil have tagged me to talk about eight random things about myself and since I have some time tonight I’ll work on this.

1) I reached competition level as a skier in France after progressing through all the levels but have never bothered to compete. I love the sport and the sensations rather than comparing myself to others. It’s a year after I reached competition level that I moved on to learning snowboarding.

2) I studied film theory, montage theory and created shot lists long before I ever had access to an edit suite. As a result I had a very good theoretical background to editing and shooting before I did any work.For two to three years I would film every theatre production at school as a way to perfect my shooting style. It’s demanding when every minute you shoot must be of the highest qualities.

3) In 2003 when I applied to go back to University I was accepted for every course and university I applied to in England. That meant I had a real choice. It’s a great feeling. I knew where I wanted to go anyway.

4) In one year I went to Germany, Italy (twice) Poland, England and Switzerland both for pleasure and studies. I love to travel and have been to over 20 countries on three continents by now. It’s not much compared to some but it’s fun nonetheless.

5) Working at Geneva airport was a really fun job for two reasons. Firstly because it’s physically and secondly because it taught me about real teamwork. When you’re kneeling in an aircraft hold lifting 20 kilo suitcases 50-70 times within 25 minutes you soon develop physical strength. If someone appears lazy they will be made to work twice as hard. Occasionally those with experience would tell me to work at a slower pace.

I’m glad it’s not my career but I’m happy I had the experience

6) I dived the English channel in November when the air temperature was hovering around 11°C. For the first dive I felt like an idiot and was scared. The visibility was no more than 30 seconds and the water was freezing. I shivered for  at least three hours after the dives. A few months later I dived the same waters and I used a third of a tank in the time it took others to use two thirds 🙂

7) I have had content online since late 1996-97. I started by writing about the Romans and putting the content on iprolink, then geocities before finally putting it on main-vision.com. My extended essay was about information technology in a global society back pre 2000. I have always been among the early adopters because I enjoy new technology so much.

8) I hate when people use the word mate because of all the Natural history documentaries I’ve watched. When you hear about animals mating for a decade or more and people start calling you mate it just feels wrong, especially when it’s guys ;-). 8 years in England doesn’t make me feel any more comfortable with the term.

Now that I’ve done this I’m tagging the following 8 people:

Phil Campbell

Maggie

Amanda Gravel

Kosso

Shanzan

Marlooz

Foulbastard

Dacort 

Now I can get on with something else.

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The Nokia N95 and some fun to be had.

Byrichard

Seesmic’ favourite phone at the moment appears to be the Nokia N95 and after months of thinking about whether to get the Iphone or the Nokia I turned to the Nokia because of everything it allows you to do. It’s a GPS, web streaming camera, time lapse camera, e-mail and web browser among other things. It’s also easy to use with services like Jaiku.

Streaming

Video stremaing from computers is becoming commonplace and as a result we’re growing tired of that piece to camera straight from people’s desk. That’s where Bambuser, Qik and seesmic come into play.

Bambuser is still in alpha and has an intuitive easy to use streaming interface giving you an easy selection between the main camera and the front camera. It’s very simple to use and I’ve played quite a bit with it but there are lag issues where the stream doesn’t keep up.

The settings can be adjusted quite specifically by the user allowing for quite a bit of experimentation.

A second service is Qik. This one has a nice user interface and has in built buffering. This means that as you stream the application buffers and indicates the delay between what you are seeing on the phone and what is being seen.

This service has too main options. Optimised for quality or optimised for creating a reliable stream.

Seesmic has already been discussed but it’s a good video sharing website. It allows for conversations to take via video similarly to instant messaging. The Seesmic application still needs some work but if you’re using shozu you can record your seesmic posts and FTP the files to the site for others to enjoy. I’ve done a few posts from the car once I’ve arrived at work and the results are good, except for a loss of synchronisation… but that’s in camera rather than seesmic.

 Jaiku

Jaiku was developed by people who worked for Nokia and it’s similar to twitter but with a better front end mobile wise. The application automatically displays where you are, whether you’re free or busy to answer calls and you can follow conversations.

Photo Camera 

One interestig feature of the camera that I haven’t used is the ability to take a picture every ten seconds. In other words to create time lapses that last as long as you would like. I haven’t tried the option but the idea is interesting.

GPS 

I haven’t played with the GPS so far but so far it looks nice enough, I’ll write more once I know more.

So far I’m happy with the N95 because of all it can do and I’m looking forward to using it extensively in the near future. As I learn more about the phone and what it can do I’ll write most posts.