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Tuesday is not the most productive of days

Byrichard

One of the best nights to go out on at the moment is Monday night because that’s the night when most friends are out in the same place. Last night I was at the student yet again and I took 73 pictures of which one I’m afraid I’d prefer never to look at.

Some of those pictures are really amusing and the expressions are great. I’m going to keep those private, simply for my friends to view. They’re on my phone, Facebook, and my iPod. They’re a collection of memories for when university is finished and that what remains are memories.

What made last night interesting as:

1) lollipops, two girls I know had a lollipop fight, a sticky affair

2)Many photographs of friends

3) Many conversations

4) the cold

Of course, the night had started differently. It started when I went to watch some friends act in the show Howard Katz. A friend was in the play from the first to last scene, that’s 110 pages. There were some great moments and the principal actor has great stage presence and projects his voice well.

I enjoyed the play because I allowed myself to be transported into the moment. It’s a shame that it’s the last play I go to, produced by this university.

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Why It’s Great To Be A Student

Byrichard

One of the best things about being a student is that you can work on projects without having to feel bad about not making any money. In particular, I’m thinking of the dissertation. It’s a point where you’ve got ten thousand words to write about subjects you love.

As you’ve got to do so much research you’ve got a reason to buy tens of books and DVDs and watch them, enjoying every minute and taking the occasional note.

As you progress and you start writing you’re there, being your own boss. You develop your structure and you see what you’ve achieved. You think about what is already said and what else must be written. You write it down, re-write it. You find there’s some information missing so you’ve got an excuse to get sidetrack to look for some in-depth material about that.

You come back to the original text and you’ve just added 200 words. paf. Done, great. My project has progressed ;).

Of course, the more time you give yourself the more fun the project will be. If you give yourself ten weeks then you’ve got lots of time so it’ll be lots of fun because you can sidetrack all the time. if you’ve got 6 weeks you’re under pressure but not quite in the same way. If you’ve got four weeks you may have to be very disciplined. If you’ve got two weeks then forget about sleep, about friends, about sunshine and everything else. You’ve got to plod along and distractions will destroy your chances.

Anyway, I want to get the writing part done by the beginning of April so that I have four weeks to edit. Editing can be quite amusing when you’ve got time.

Enough procrastinating, time to go back for five minutes before the next distraction comes along

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Digital television in the UK

Byrichard

1.1 The three months to the end of December 2006 (Q4) saw over 1,000,000 net household conversions to digital television (DTV) in the UK, following on from 800,000 additions in the previous Q3. Growth was driven by another strong quarter for digital terrestrial television (DTT), with total sales of DTT equipment reaching 2.4 million.

1.2 The digital cable and satellite platforms also added over 300,000 households between them during the quarter. This means that 77.2% of households now receive digital television services on their primary set, up 3.9 percentage points from the previous quarter.

1.3 With a further 1.4% of households subscribing to analogue cable, the total number of homes receiving multi-channel television at the end of Q4 2006 stood at 78.6%.

Source

What this means is that narrowcasting is no longer within the grasp of early adopters but slowly getting into the hands of the everyday public. As more people have more choice so their viewing habits and choices will be different.

At the same time television is getting a lot of competition from online resources, especially for programs that are aired in territory months earlier than in others.

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We are living through the media’s golden age.

Byrichard

When I started using comptuers they were nothing more than ega displays with the large floppy disks and games were text based. As I grew older so the games grew to be more complex, from 2d to 3d and then the quality improved.

The television of my youth was limited to five channels and by the 90’s had expanded to twenty plus channels. By 2000 the number had exploded to several hundred channels and that’s just counting the English ones.

The media have progressed. I am in constant contact with everyone by mobile phone for over a decade. I have had minidisk players, i’ve had phones and I’ve had a television in my room.

Now the mobile phone I have replaces all these devices if I so wish. The ipod replaces the radio and the television, the phone replaces the laptop, the minitel and the fax machine.

I have access to the world’s media within two clicks of a mouse, which is no more than a trackpad on an ibook.

Video editing is far simpler. When I wanted to learn to edit I remember that you’d need to get two player/recorders and a third device to control the two machines. We bought Adobe Premiere and the Miro dc30+ and there it was. I spent a weekend learning to edit with pictures of the Mer des Glaces, a glacier in the French Alpes.

Since then I upgraded through the years and my laptop can do all this seamlessly.

We discussed video on demand years ago and that idea was novel, was something which would be hard to implement. Today video on demand is so easy it’s syndicated via RSS feeds. I get my televisual experience via downloaded streams on a daily basis. Radio on demand is certainly here and doing well.

In this week in media one of the presenters said that in the near future media content would become more valuable than oil. It’s an interesting idea.

Are media studies a mickey mouse course when you’ve got free newspapers, you can watch television whilst commuting to and from work? When you share your pictures with friends around the world and computing is no longer the realm of the computer geek I think we’re in the Golden age of media studies and that it may have been one of the most interesting topics to study with the exponential growth of media outlets.

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Why You Should Use Twitter

Byrichard

Twitter is a short message that are only 140 characters long. It can be used in three ways. The first is by instant messenger, the second is by text messaging to your mobile phone and the third is via the web interface.

It’s referred to as microblogging, although not by me. I see it as being something more powerful.

The BBC, Google, and other companies have already used it for showing people what the latest news is. Of course, with such a medium you have to be careful not to send too many messages or people will give up.

Where it would come into its element is traffic info, radio schedules, or even event notifications. Imagine that you knew about this before rag week and that many of your friends were members. You could tell them “just finished ragging, on my way back to uni” or “only 20 tickets left for an event”. In other words, you can let people know what an organisation is doing quite easily.

Another way to enhance this is when you’ve got quite a lot of friends and they’re all members. “Hey, just handed in my assignment, going to sit in the grass outside halls, welcome to join” and many people who might have been bored now know where to find you.

Of course, you’re paying the price of SMS (text messaging) if you’re away from the computer but it’s at a local tariff to the best of my understanding. It’s an interesting development, similar to the status bar in many of the current messengers and on Facebook.

Reading versus Videos

Byrichard

When I’m online I love reading. I read articles everyday. I see what people are doing. I see what’s happening in the world through text. When I see some information that may be of interest to me in video form I’m lazy. I hardly ever bother watching that video. I’d much prefer to have the text version.

I’ve often watched mobuzztv and Iused to enjoy watching the videos but recently I find myself watching them less and less, probably in part due to bandwidth constraints.

I especially avoid watching certain types of interviews because they’re dull. The interviewer has a bad technique and there’s no editing. I don’t want to hear someone talk for three minutes for something that can be summarised into one sentence. It’s a shame that video bloggers have not yet learned how to conduct proper interviews.

An interview should be well researched, both material wise, knowing what the person knows about the topic and then charisma wise. Get an interesting subject but unresearched and the questions won’t give good information. Get a poor speaker and there’s a good chance the audience will lose interest and stop listening.

get some cut aways and illustrate what the person is saying. Talking heads are boring.

Finally avoid being arrogant, don’t gloat because you’ve got an interview with someone most people have never heard of or care about.

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Friends and Those Who Fool Me

Byrichard

Yesterday afternoon I received a phone call from some post grad students asking whether I could go and film the football game they were covering. It was between westminster uni city FC and another club whose name I don’t think I heard.

It’s the first football game I cover so it was an experience. It was in a smallish club an the crowd was quite small. I set up in the home and away section of the stands and filmed people running from one end to the other many times over.

It’s a shame I didn’t have one of the better cameras to use because the video footage would have been better. Still it was an experience. This summer had meant that I saw a lot of football matches. It meant I knew what shots to frame up. What actions to look for. The award ceremony was the more interesting bit to film because it saw me on the field with the teams making sure to get the shot of people receiving their awards.

Too bad our team was not the victorious one.

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University politics are amusing

Byrichard

There is a rumour that the person that is running should not be doing so and as a result, there are bits of information coming out about this. It’s interesting because I did not want the person to become SU president due to her canceling an interview for a live Multicam I was producing in my second year.

There is information that leads us to conclude that she should not be running for her position and I find this is amusing. It’s student politics at their best.

I spent at least six hours last night chatting to many friends, both on campus and within the SU bar and it’s been a really good afternoon-Evening-Night-Morning.

If only all days were like that, full of conversations.

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People love photographs

Byrichard

Video is one of those mediums that is great because it captures several moments and amalgamates them into a sequence. Those moments are with the voices and sounds, the excitement, and more. It’s too much information for most and that’s why video is a hard medium to use at parties.

The more impersonal a video the better it works, within the realms of you being at the event with your friends.

In contrast, photography is far better accepted. People have been using for photographs since before they comprehended what that box with a big piece of glass actually does. As a result, they were desensitized to being photographed. There are no objections and by the time they realize you’ve taken their picture objection is futile.

With video, you point the camera and watch from a distance. It’s not because you’re a stalker or a voyeur but rather because that is the nature of cinéma verité – Kino Glaz.

How can someone be comfortable when they know that what you’re doing is getting a precise recording of both their conversation and expressions. It makes them uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable.

That’s why the camera points up as soon as people realise they are being filmed. it’s my signal that I know that they don’t want to be filmed anymore and I move on. Over time people are desensitised to this “invasion” of privacy and there are occasional video lovers. Theatrical people are one example.

During the last two years of High school every night, I would go down and shoot their theatre performances and they’d buy the tape from me. of course, I almost got in trouble with their lecturer but I was not breaching copyright. I was providing them with a visual record of their activities.

Performers also enjoy having copies of their work. Ingyama a few years ago, Anarachic hand and of course last year’s first-year music students. It’s a way for them to show the world what they have produced. Sometimes it’s not good so they prefer to forget about it but when it’s good they’re happy and post it on their websites, whether myspace or specific domain names.

The World Wide Web and the network of networks are not ready for the proper sharing of video at the moment. It’s fine for three or four-minute segments but any longer and you’ll find your audience disappearing. That’s because internet service providers aren’t always giving their customers enough bandwidth. In other cases, it’s just that it’s boring.

The Silent Disco was really well received within a small community in part because it’s anonymous but also because it’s made up of good memories for them. it’s good memories for me too by the way.

My collection of undercroft pictures ended in October and I want it to continue. we’re in March now.

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An ode to lost votes

Byrichard

One girl lost my vote a year ago when not turning up to a live interview she was meant to attend, deciding an hour before to cancel

Another lost my vote for not having the strength of character to campaign for herself through a medium like facebook or Myspace.

One lost my vote for her slogan, which I do not appreciate.

Which people are we talking about? We’re all equal. Some have the luxury of misbehaving around uni before going home to their parents to recuperate. Others don’t.

I will vote for those individuals I know. I will those whom I have seen work as a team and those whose friends I know. I will vote for those whom have attempted to make themselves visible or known to me whether in person or online by their own steam.

In retrospect the campaign has been surprisingly dissapointing. Where’s the student newspaper with the candidate’s applications. Where were the flyers for the people running. Where’s the presence of the UWSU elections anywhere within smoke media.

You’ve got voting starting yet do we know any of the candidates outside our circle of influence and friends?