City Cat Sitting.
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City Cat Sitting.

Byrichard

For the first time in my life I am cat sitting. I’m used to village cats and this is a city cat so I don’t know how much time I need to spend with the cat, how much I need to play and more.


When I look after toddlers I know that I have to be attentive to them from the moment they wake up to the moment they nap or sleep. It’s a challenge to have that level of endurance.


I’ve started the first 24hr day of looking after a cat and so far it seems that I’m more attentive than I need to be. I feel like I should keep the window open and keep the cat entertained but this is a cat we’re talking about. They entertain themselves.


If we were in the middle of summer I would go for three to five-hour rides taking advantage of the new starting and endpoint. As we’re in the middle of winter I’m waiting for a film festival to start. As soon as it starts I will have something to do in Geneva. For now, I’ve been walking around and playing Ingress.


It’s nice to be so close to the centre of Geneva. I can walk everywhere within half an hour to an hour. Geneva is a small city when you know it. There is no need for buses, trams, taxis etc. Usually, something like going to the Apple store would be an expedition because it takes a 20-minute walk, a train, and then another 20-minute walk. Today I could do the walk within 20 minutes.


We will see how my impressions change over the coming days.

Environmentalism and Traffic Lights
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Environmentalism and Traffic Lights

Byrichard

When you’re driving from Nyon to the airport without traffic the journey takes about twenty minutes. If you decide to drive into the city of Geneva that journey time is doubled thanks in main part to traffic lights. It once took me over one hour when scuba diving in Hermance to drive from Place des Nations to the other side of the Mont Blanc Bridge. That’s over one hour for less than two kilometres. That idea cooled down my motivation to dive in Hermance. At the time I was driving a petrol rather than a diesel car.

Yesterday I was driving from the foot of the Jura to Cornavin and the drive from the foot of the Jura to Geneva was fast. It’s when you drive from the motorway to the centre that you lose time. 23 minutes to drive 3.8km. I don’t have a start/stop car so when I’m spending 23 minutes at traffic lights the engine is running and polluting the air for nothing. There is no gain from blocking traffic lights.

It was even worse when I was on Rue Montbrillant. The GPS indicated 15 minutes to travel about 750 metres. Can you imagine the carbon footprint of traffic lights? That’s 15 minutes of nitrous oxide that had no need to be sent into the air. Imagine the health impact of keeping vehicles trapped at traffic lights. Within 30 seconds I went right and parked at Place des Nations and walked the last 750 metres. I wasn’t going to waste 15 minutes because “environmentalists” decided that the best way to discourage people from driving was for them to sit in traffic and pollute the air.

When I was working on Rue Montbrillant I was taking the train to and from Geneva every day and I used an abonnement de route to reduce cost. It works well until you’re reliant on bus schedules. Some routes have one bus an hour. This means that a 30-40 minute drive becomes a one and a half hour public transport route. If you finish your day at 1800 you’d arrive home by around 1930-2000. This means that although you’re taking the environmentally friendly option you’re spending two and a half hours a day to commute. During warmer months and drier days, the scooter was a good alternative. Within minutes you’re on the train to Geneva.

That’s the paradox of environmentalism. You want people to be environmentally conscious and you want them to minimise car use but rather than provide them with time efficient solutions to encourage them to take public transport you trap them at traffic lights.

Waze, Tomtom and other GPS manufacturers should take the heat maps we generate with our mobile devices every time we drive and design public transport infrastructures to replace the need for cars. This data is already available. Below are two heat maps of cycling around London and Switzerland. If you used the same type of data from cars you could design a system that replaces the need for cars.

When you live in a city you see two kilometres as a big distance to drive but when you’re in the countryside 2km is nothing. London on a bike feels tiny after walking and taking public transport. In Geneva it’s not that you have much traffic. It’s that the traffic lights give the illusion of traffic. Most of the side streets are empty of traffic most of the time.

This week I wanted to cycle in to Geneva for my lunch time meetings but chose not to because the bike ride is energetic enough without the weight of a 15inch laptop on your back. I did buy a bluetooth keyboard for the mobile phone as a mac book air replacement. That should make cycling more pleasant. I also have spare tires in case I get a puncture.

Geneva’s traffic light policy did work on me. Several years ago I became so tired of waiting at traffic lights when driving into and out of Geneva that I stopped going. Instead of meeting people in Geneva I drove to various lakes to scuba dive and to the mountains to climb, hike, cycle and do other more environmentally friendly activities. This is especially true when we drive other participants. When I climb Fort L’écluse I meet people at CERN and when I meet people to go to Swiss VF I meet them at the Nyon train station, Fourmi metro stations or even the Lavaux motorway stop.

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On twestival

Byrichard

The first tweetup I went to saw a crowd of no more than sixty people. The twestival had many more. Enough to fill the Doon club. So many new faces but not many new people to follow. It’s fun to see how big the London twitter community has become.

The usual people were there, sizemore, loudmouthman, documentally, danacea weaverluke and a few new faces like digitalmaverick, amandita, Poppyd and a few more people. Some video was shot of the event but I’m not sure by when they’ll go up. There was no wifi so no opportunity to do some live streaming.

At the same time I’m thinking it’s time for a plurk up of the same scale, since for the moment there are so few people.

Now it’s time for Tuttle.

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Twitter as a way of life

Byrichard

Twitter is not a social network, rather it’s a way of life. The more you use Twitter the further it gets into your way of life. It allows you to follow current affairs, geek out about social media and keep in touch with friends that uses the social network. What’s more it’s a network that does not require any specific device.

At first it’s a confusing place. Look at the public timeline and it’s a torrent of junk and sifting through it will take hours a day. As you spend more time on twitter though you find people of interest to follow. In some cases it’s friends from the physical world, in other cases friends from other websites on the web and then more.

In reality what makes twitter interesting, and part of what makes people use it is how efficient it is at getting a message across. You’ve got 140 characters to express yourself. In Paris I was told I speak in 140 characters or less. That’s not a bad thing. In fact it’s good. It’s about the continual flow of information.

Imagine you’re swimming down a river but everytime you move to stay afloat you have to close your eyes. That’s what article and blog reading is. As you focus on one task so your ability to focus on anything else dissapears. That’s fine in the old media where pages are static and where airwaves are limited.

In the modern world though it is necessary to absorb many sources of information at once. How many of you have your ipod, laptop and mobile phone with you at the time you’re reading this post? I’m sure most. How many of you have more podcasts than you can view or listen to? How many of you have more programs recorded on PVR than you can watch?

That’s why twitter is a lifestyle. It’s about constantly looking for information and building an understanding of current affairs through constantly taking in little bits of information. Stop talking about the social media on twitter, rather start talking about the good old fashioned time efficient soundbyte. Want to be heard. Don’t take people’s time. Encourage interest instead.

Many people are complaining about the decentralised conversation, the notion that blogs are no longer the center of attention, that twitter, friendfeed, facebook and others are killing the conversation. In fact quite the opposite is true. If you’re in New York you’ve got one set of people, if you’re in London you’ve got another. if you’re in Geneva you don’t have much… To have a decentralised conversation means that many ideas can be explored at once and as pillars of the online community meet at various events so the conversations can once more converge.

Don’t worry about comments on a blog, think about the conversations and the people you’re having them with. That’s where the fun is to be had.

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The drive home – My 400th post

Byrichard

Last night’s drive was amazing. It’s just the type of drive you want to have. It starts in the middle of the afternoon as a friend helps you load the car and you set off for a 900 kilometer drive. At the beginning you have to deal with London traffic/congestion. After this you’ve got part of the m20 that’s closed so you need to take a slip road. As I got into France I was welcomed by a lot of snow coming straight at me, like the windows screensaver from a decade ago. That meant I couldn’t really drive as fast as I wanted. Still made good time. For most of the journey the road was fine.The part I really loved is when I got off the motorway to go via the Jura. At this point it wasn’t snowing too much but as I progressed up the slopes and let the Garmin Nuvi 250 guide me along the path so I saw a little snow, and it started to stick. As I drove I had to stay awake and battle with the ever present threat of loss of adherence. That was the fun part of the drive. The road was covered in a thin layer of snow and people were driving more slowly. At moments I was chasing a snowplow across the mountains as it was salting the roads.At other moments there was no snow plow and I lost traction two or three times but kept the car in control. I occasionaly thought that I wouldn’t make it up the hills but I did, and I loved the view. The trees were covered in snow and they were lit by the grand phare. It’s memories from childhood. I’m glad I’ve spent so much time playing in car parks covered in snow to learn how the car behaved.At five in the morning the last thing you want to learn is how to drive in snow. Luckily I do.It made a nice transition from the student life I’ve been living over the past three years and the job seeking following that. I wanted the drive to be a transition from one phase in my life to the next. Now I’m  an employed graduate who’s working in Switzerland as of next Monday. This next chapter of my life should be fun.  

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the tapeless workflow – Videoforum

Byrichard

The tapeless workflow is a term used to describe video production without the use of tapes. That is to say that from the point the material is recorded in camera to the point it is distributed it never changes from being data. In other words television production has become a profession of data managment as some would say.

A few production companies came to give demonstrations of their tapeless workflow system, at least in broad terms. Red Bee and Virgin Media showed how they have collaboratively brought the post production process to being a tapeless one. In order to do this good networking capability is needed and so is storage. They had to digitise over 40,000 tapes as well as face many more challenges.

Some of these challenges have to do with meta data. Everyone is used to dealing with tapes. you shoot your material, you label it for post production and then store them for later use. When dealing with data though the mentality is different. Some productions have shot straight to P2 cards, backed up the day’s shoots to external P2 hard drives before sending them from China to London for example. Of course when doing this everyhting must be planned ahead.

Part of this planning has to do with the compatibility between recording format and editing. If you get this wrong then you either don’t get the quality you were looking for or you slow down the process. That was part of a case study between Panasonic and two of it’s camera’s during a shoot in China.

The second example was between Red Bee Media and Virgin Media in relation to the creative Village. The idea is that when the material is ingested by Red Bee media it’s saved to a central server from which it can be accessed by a number of workstations, from transcribing to tapelogging, editing and producer’s work stations. it also has to be available in two buildings.

There are a number of advantages to this workflow. The first is that the work is available to the producers when they have the time to check the material rather than when everyone has ten free minutes. As a result the editor can edit a rough cut and a number of producers at up to two hundred workstations may check the edit and say whether they like it. If they don’t then it’s quick to make any changes that are required. It also means that there’s far less mess and expensive equipment is not tied up.

When you’re working on post production dubbing to tape used to take a lot of time, real time and with DVD it’s quickly a messy affair. Files in an edit folder are far easier to deal with.

I really like the idea o the tapeless workflow and i’m going to work on that for my own work, first with affordable equipment and then work my way towards more fun alternatives. It’s what we expect. No more ingestion time, no more dubbing time, just straight editing, agreement and finally output to a number of formats. Of course that’s not as easy as it sounds but post production companies are working on making this a smoother process.

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The Tricaster – Videoforum

Byrichard

The Tricaster is a Multimedia portable switcher. In other words it’s an OB van in a box. It’s a vision mixing deck on the light. They range from having two sources to six depending on your needs. Rather than have racks and racks of expensive gear to lug around for low budget shoots you get this gadget, plug in a few external sources and get your laptop plugged in. You can mix between a number of sources, do chroma key, play videotapes and even record onto internal drives.

It’s not a bad alternative to think about when working on smaller scale multicamera productions

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The Social Media Morning

Byrichard

I went to the Social Media Coffee event this morning and met quite a few of the usual people including Deek, Sizemore, Londonfilmgeek and others. I got to know a few more twitter users a little better and that’s where I stayed for part of the morning.

I’ve been networking a lot over the past few days and I think i need some time to think about all the new options. It’s good to get to these events and talk to people. Quite a few people are interested in twitter and because I’m edging so close to the 15,000 tweet mark they’re quite curious to know my thoughts on the topic. People are actually interested both in what twitter is and how twitter works. Over the months I have acquired a respectable amount of knowledge and people are starting to seek it which is great.

That’s just one aspect of the Social Media cafe I saw today but there is one thing that’s going to change.

If no one objects to it I will begin to record the conversations as they go on and edit a summary to make available both via the London Social Media Cafe website for people to consult and keep up to date. I am in discussion with Jeff Pulver of PulverTV to see about covering the London side of Social media so if you know of any events that may be of interest let me know so that I may organise coverage if it’s relevant.