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Before waking up

Byrichard

Before waking up I found myself catching a plane to an airport before catching a small private plane to somewhere in the mountains where I went skiing. I was going home but for some reason I was late.

I was telling myself that I had to get back to one place to get my luggage before going home before realising that I didn’t. I decided to rush for the plane, dropped by my room, and threw a cursive look before running back to the small private plane, asking whether I was on the first flight before the plane took off.

For some reason, it had to taxi along some mountain roads and almost hit some bowling balls on the tarmac. Quite a confusing dream to have had.

I usually have strange dreams as summer starts trying to get in through the curtains. It’ss the fourth or fifth day of sunshine in sunny London.

Another day of sitting in the sun whilst waiting for night to fall to continue working on the dissertation.

Last night I spent at least an hour going through some of my notes. Highlighting relevant bits and thinking about how to structure the introduction.  Now it’s another 15 days of such effort or more.

The deadline is still over a month away but it’s better to do as much as possible now to relax afterward… or at least not panic.

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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?

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Unreasonably low – a rant against a certain ISP

Byrichard

Dear Victim,

Yesterday you exceeded the daily usage limit of 500MB as referred to in our Terms and Conditions.   This type of activity could have a detrimental effect on our network and therefore we cannot allow this to continue.   Should you continue to exceed the daily download limit we will, unfortunately, be forced to downgrade your service to a throughput limit of 56Kbs dial-up speed, for a period of 5 days.

If you exceed these limits on a regular basis, we may be forced to suspend your account.

For users of Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications such as BearShare, Warez, Morpheus, BitTorrent, iMesh and KaZaA note the following:
Most P2P applications you install will usually be configured so other users can access your hard drive and share your files all of the time. This constant file transfer can degrade your computer’s performance and generate heavy traffic loads on the network, making it difficult for other users of the network to work well. The network is a shared resource and we all must use it responsibly.

Network bandwidth consumption is monitored. If your users could possibly impact the overall performance of the network, your computer may be blocked until the situation can be discussed.

Should you have any queries regarding this email, please contact Customer Services

Regards

Appallingly crappy ISP

I’m a third-year media student who has spent the past decade online practically every day. I know where to find content. I understand the nature of the medium. I’m not your garden variety fifty-five-second user.

I’m the type of user that would wake up every morning and download a gigabyte or more a day when at home. I go to the uni network and I’ve downloaded 600 megs within about ten minutes and my daily allowance is a pathetic 500 megs.

Five hundred megs is not even one full copy of Linux. Some video podcasts are over a hundred megs each. Podcasts can be up to 100 megabytes in size.

I hate their false advertising and promises. I have no choice though, I’m not the one selecting the ISP.

afterthought

Where did Yahoo go wrong with their implementation of advertising along the same lines as google? They took two years longer than they should have to implement what belonged to them. I hope they go bankrupt.

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Hat Parties and the Events Therein

Byrichard

Last night I went to a hat party and I enjoyed it. I found it amusing to look at all the hats, from pink cowboy to chimney sweep, snowboarding and even motorcycle helmets. The more excentric the hat the more amusing the person.

House parties are interesting because it’s a familiar event. We already know everyone that’s there so there’s no time wasted in trying to meet everyone for the first time. A simple hello will suffice in some cases and in others great conversations will fly off like water drops descending from Angel falls into a fine spray. That spray is the culmination of a hundred conversation.

As it hits the plunge pool all of them merge into the pile of consumed conversations. Some wash up on a stone and will come back into our conscience but most will vanish.

Photographs of parties are great. If you’re in a bad mood, feel tired or are down then it shows and you’re dissapointed. When you’re smiling, relaxed and enjoying yourself though they’re great. Some of these are “stolen”, taken by a photographer who prefers spontaneity to the posed image. Occasionaly posed images are good too.

Two weekends, two very different events, one in a London nightclub, the other a few minutes walk from home. Both will leave enjoyable memories.

Tonight I shall rest, content with the way Friday night progressed.

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All that is left from three years is one essay and one dissertation

Byrichard

Yesterday I handed in my penultimate essay.

There are two main assignments remaining. the first of these is a tech case study which should be fun to do. I already have an idea of a topic that I know fairly well. with the second it’s the dissertation and I should really spend a few hours progressing with that.

I had one of those classic nights on Saturday. You begin with the idea that you’re simply going to drop into the cinema and watch a film before going home and watching the lunar eclipse from the relatively low light pollution of the area around the halls.

This plan disintegrated as a friend encouraged me to stay out and go out clubbing instead. I knew I had the penultimate essay to finish. Most people hate the night bus because it’s so full of weird people, some are just drunk, others are in worse states and finally some are amusing.

On occasion you’ll enter the bus and a girl will offer you some crisps and you won’t say know, to which someone next to you asks whether you’re really going to accept them. Later on you understand that it’s the brother joking around.

In other cases you’ll find that it’s like a plane cabin. If you’ve ever flown easyjet and got up to go to the front of the cabin you’ll know the sight. it’s that of two hundred people having a nap. It’s a soothing sight to see so many relaxed people.

Occasionaly some people get cold so you lend them their jacket and you walk them home before rushing home to finish your essay rather than taking the time to get to know more about them.

There are a lot of people that hate the stop at Sudbury but having lived there last year I know a little secret. That there’s a 24 hour shop where you can buy jaffa cakes and lipton ice tea for the second part of the journey.

What I enjoyed most about saturday was the people I met on the bus journey home.

On Al Gore winning the Oscar for best documentary

Byrichard

I am greartly pained and sadened to see that Al Gore won the oscar for best documentary for “An Inconvenient truth”. I find that this is absolute lunacy and there is reasoning behind this statement.

In the United Kingdom you’ve got the British Broadcasting Corporation working on some beautiful documentary. Just look at Deep Blue, The Blue Planet and more recently the Planet Earth Series. Those are beautiful documentaries showing the world in such a good light. Those documentaries were produced over a period of three years or more using the world as a backdrop. The cinematography is amazing and they had 6 million people watching when they were first aired. They are beautiful peices of work.

Al Gore’s documentary is awful in comparison. For the voice over and script they did nothing more than film him giving a speech whilst throwing in the occasional related shot. I tried watching that piece of crap and got bored.

Why are so many people making such a fuss about something that’s been mentioned in hundreds of documentaries before this one. If you turn on any of the discovery channels there’s a good chance that you’ll find some beautifully produced documentary with higher production values exploring the subject in a far more esthetic and effective manner.

Is it getting an oscar simply because it’s by Al Gore? If that’s the case then all the negative comments that people have made about the oscars are justified. That’s not a documentary. It’s someone giving a speech which have a few shots inserted to give the illusion of the documentary tradition.

Where are the interviews? Where are the experts?

If the Oscar’s judges consider that oscar worthy then I will think twice about watching oscar awarded documentaries mockumentaries.

Previous Best Documentary award winner so I suppose it’s not that bad overall

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Delegation and working to deadlines

Byrichard

I love working on my own projects, where I rely on no one but myself but occasionally I’m lucky enough to have no choice but to work with other people. It’s at these moments that I learn more. I learn about team scheduling and teamwork. I also learn about delegation.

I’m not that good at it yet but I’m learning. Anyone working as a producer or director needs to learn that job and some are better than others. The recent myspace and Magician audition projects I worked on saw some good producers in charge. As a result, the project was good.

Recently I’ve had to be a co-producer with someone else and I was asked what jobs still had to be done and I had to think about it before I could delegate the responsibility. I finally found some methods of delegating responsibility, therefore, I’ll have more material to choose from when it comes to editing.

The project has to be finished by Monday because Tuesday I’ll be back in London with a three thousand word essay on technological determinism to hand in. On the Monday following that I have a presentation on digital content. I’ve been thinking about that concept and I think I’ll be able to produce a good product.

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Over 400 views of the Sandstorm video

Byrichard

I’ve just checked the number of hits on the Silent disco hits and it’s now up to over four hundred views. That’s a nice amount. I’m quite happy with this number because it’s from my website rather than another source.

I’ve been posting videos on the web for many years and I’ve seen many projects start and fail and others expand. It used to be that websites would have just 5 megabytes and websites would be html based. We’re in web 2.0 now and it’s normal for me to download over a gig of data per day when I’m at home.

Some people say that video on the web is going to cause problems, that there are bottle necks and that’s it’s not built for live video. That’s because they’re new to the web and think they’re gurus after just two years of daily use. I remember when it was the 56k modems and use was paid per minute. I remember when short text pages would take a while to load.

I remember when chatrooms did not require you to create a profile which everyone could see. Where everything was fleeting, as bars are. You’d see hundreds of people but you had to converse with them. ASL used to be a popular question

Today there’s no need. Just click on the username and you find out everything about them that they want you to know, age, sex location, websites, groups they like and more.

For the past few weeks I’ve become really familiar with facebook and how powerfull a tool it is. I love it. It’s great because when you’re out meeting people you often get to meet up to 20 people in one night sometimes and there’s no way you’re going to remember them. Ragweek is an example of them. Too many faces. Not enough personal detail for the name to stick in my mind. Facebook means that I go online and I can review the night, see pictures of new friends and learn a little more about them.

When I was at the silent disco there are a few people I notice in quite a few shots and by posting pictures online they’ve presented their identity. They are no longer nameless faces that shall remain irrelevant to my life. They seek each other out and tag themselves in video frames I’ve posted. In so doing their friends can see them.

They enjoy it. It’s not a stalker medium. it’s about the McLuhanist global village. It’s about the extension and enhancment of social interaction. I was doing some research for an essay about technological determinism yesterday which explains the use of such terms.

When McLuhan talked about the medium as the message he talked about the media as a thing which acts as an extension. Imagine you go out and meet someone and you get their name and phone number. The phone number is great because you can talk to them live with no difficulty. A facebook account is greater because it allows you to understand their personality, their likes and dislikes and more. It’s a way for people to embelish on spontaneous meetings.

It’s the global village that McLuhanits have examined and studied. Since everyone knows everyone else facebook is the village taverna. It’s where you speak to your friends about other friends and a community forms. If you interact with enough groups then that village, that medium (facebook) becomes a family. There is nothing sinister about it for the simple reason that you do not remain anonymous. Everyone whose interest you have summoned will be able to feed their curiosity and the next time they go to an event they will invite you.

I love it.

When I was living in a small village in Switzerland I was afraid that technology was a great isolationist tool but that view has changed. What is isolationist about going online and sharing your interests with others. i created one group and 56 people became members. Those members are all fans of the Paleo Festival.

Events are shared and talked about. I may not spend every day around those at King’s but this does not mean that I have not been invited to their events. I was invited in person to the clavicle challenge but did not participate. I’ve been invited to parties via sms, bulletins on myspace and event notifications on Facebook. People invite other friends and you’ll see how many people are planning on going and next time you meet them you’ll be able to discuss that.

In other cases, as with the silent disco I was able to see an event and participate. Once the event was over I was able to share the content with many people. They come, they participate. They take pictures and upload them. I upload some as well. The event was only an hour long but the bond formed through the event is enhanced and perpetuated through Facebook.

There is a night at the SU bar tonight involving tequilla shots. Many people will meet but how many friendships will last beyond a night. There’s one girl who I chatted to at the beginning of the year but now she doesn’t recognise me. Similar things happen every year and it’s tiring.

Facebook has become the new social hub. I see how everyone is doing and they see how I’m doing. They post pictures and I’m reminded of how much fun was had at those events. It’s perpetual, a cycle of positive feedback.

Does technology determin how people interact? Yes because it helps them get to where they want to get and affects the comfort level but no because human nature is human. In other words the fundamental principles remain the same although the means by which certain things are done affects the interaction.

Why study the media? Because by studying the media you are studying communication between individuals, whether it’s the type of chair they’re sitting on or the type of alcohol they’re drinking. It encompasses our daily lives to such an extent that it’s considered a mickey mouse course. Why spend 30hrs in a library reading books that were written thirty years ago when the media changes at the speed of thought. I’ve seen the media landscape change so much within the past 10 years that every day I form new opinions and philosophies about communication.

Media studies are within every book about film, every photograph, every song, every bag. We’re saturated by the media around us therefore we discredit those who study the media. I don’t me we as in I but rather the metaphorical We of society as a whole.