The Trouble With Thankless Jobs
An interesting talk about thankless jobs and how to make them more rewarding.
Last time I went to the cinema I was in Paris and my name was in the credits. This time I was at the 20th Century Fox offices on Soho Square in London as a guest, along with Loudmouthman, Suzymiller, Danacea, Rupert Howe, Sizemore and many other social media participants.
We were invited to preview the film Juno, which will be out in British cinemas around the 8th of February 2008. It’s nice to be two months ahead of the crowd. It’s also nice to be in a private cinema. I enjoyed the leather seats along with the press package and the fact that when you lean back the seat tilts back at the same time.
It was also amusing to see all these faces. It’s a funny thing to be part of the social media mainly because you recognise and feel that people are familiar although you’ve never met them in real life. What makes this particularly appealing is the fact that it’s not someone saying “oh I’ve heard something about you”. They’ve actually looked at, and appreciated your work, or at least we hope so.
I enjoyed the film and so did the rest of the crowd. Frequent laughter could be heard from around the room quite frequently. I did enjoy quite a bit of the dialogue and the story is a nice one although the end is typical of American films.
Aside from the film and the crowds we did get to interview the organisers of the event as well as Danacea of Forbidden planet, Rupert Howe, vlogger and Robert… whose last name eludes me. It’s 1am and I’m tired.
The Twittervox video should be up by tomorrow evening at the latest. More concise information on those interviewed will of course, appear accordingly
From the 6th to the 13th of August 2016 The International Alpine Film Festival, FIFAD, is taking place in the Alpine town of Les Diablerets. This is a week long festival of Alpine films covering the environment, extreme sports, adventure and more.
Alpland is a photo exhibit outside of images of Alpine life in black and white. The images were taken by Romano Riedo
The image gallery below shows the Flying Frenchies arrive at the film festival. The drummer flew with his drum kit, the guitarist flew with a guitar and amp and the saxophonist arrived with his instrument. They played their instruments while up in the air. Watching this in person is interesting.
Baraka Films and the Flying Frenchies worked together for this fun and entertaining film. This film looks at the Flying Frenchies coming together to combine slack-lining, parapentes and other extreme sports with musicians. The Flying Frenchies arrived at the event on parapentes.The film metronomic shows cliff based stunts. It combines acrobatics on a cliff face with slack-lining and rope based stunts. At one point the guitarist, the drummer and the Saxophonist are swinging in space and playing at the same time.
The evening was dedicated to freeride sports, mainly extreme skiing and a discussion with the Falquet brothers and Jérémie Heitz. One of the images that really marked me was the climb up to a pyramidal peak so that they could ski back down. The reason they climb rather than use a helicopter is to assess how good the snow is and whether it is safe to sky down. Some of these films had some impressive images, including at least one unsuccessful descent.
The films on this day showed the beauty of extreme sports both with skiing slopes that are over 50° as well as with flying musicians. As people get habituated to certain sports so the scope for diversity and creativity expands.
Last night I went to the Kendra event not knowing what to expect from the event. It started at 6pm and ended by 9pm and i had the opportunity to meet with a few people of which Brendon Kenny of VK media and the Jummp project.
A large amount of metadata is currently being discarded without understanding its value! JuMMp aims to promote interoperability for metadata and signalling information exchange. This will enable contextual navigation within live and recorded content for users of digital devices such as PVRs, games consoles, mobile phones and computers – providing value to end users and to all stakeholders in the content chain.
It’s an interesting project and you can participate in the conversaton and learn more through their facebook group. It’s an interesting project with some very interesting backers so I look forward to seeing how they implement this in the wild.
Other people I met with are Mark and Alex of Astream – a streaming service provider, Darren of Ioda, an independent online distribution Alliance and Dennis of zzizzlfilm – short film distribution for filmmakers by filmmakers. I was also introduced to Nick, product development Director for Bsky and a few more people.
It was a good event with many interesting people to meet and whenever the next event is organised I will make sure to turn up.
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(Facebook as of this morning)
Reliability is the single most important thing for a website. If, as they suggest, facebook is down for a few hours then that is demonstrating one of the key reasons why my web presence is spread across so many different sites on the World Wide Web. The Internet (network of networks) was built for redundancy therefore any form of downtime is unacceptable.
In other news I’m back in London with the need to do more looking for work. Whilst in Switzerland I listened to a group of people working within the industry give advice to another person and in so doing there are a few recommediations I should make sure to apply them to my own efforts.
This yodelling video is currently the number one trending video on youtube. I am unclear on whether it is for Switzerland or a bigger region. A small tractor is driving up a Swiss Alpine road with a group of yodelers sitting in a trailer. A car with Ma Cherie playing on the radio overtakes and the yodelers start to yodel the song. This video is on the Canton de Valais Youtube account.
Sixty percent of the of hydroelectric power produced in Switzerland comes from Valais with its 26 dams of which La Grande Dixence is one. They have French, English and German versions of this video.
To keep the theme of renewable energy we have another project, to cross the lake in a solar powered Pedalo. It’s in French. I thought it was a project with an environmental goal at first.
Continuing with the theme of environmentally friendly activities Parapente is another. It’s a nice way to see such a pleasant landscape, especially if you find ascending air currents that prolong the flight.
A few weeks ago after the Via Ferrata de la Farinetta near Saillon, I posted an image or two to Instagram and RealFly Sion liked the image. They’re the first indoor Sky diving simulator in Switzerland. It provides people with the opportunity to try skydiving without freefalling thousands of metres. This is an experience I would eventually like to try. I’m used to having the sensation of flying in a similar position underwater so trying it in a strong current of air would be fun.
“If you were young and healthy and if they needed labour then you were selected as slave labour. You would have suffered a slow death rather than a fast one”. This soundbite is 13 minutes in.
In this documentary a concentration camp survivor takes two girls who are the age she was when she arrived through the camp and tells them about her experiences.
We owe it to future generations to keep re-sharing these accounts and documentaries to prevent such actions from ever happening again.
I have just finished watching the documentary and I feel almost shell shocked. I have been to the camp and I have read about the topic. I have also watched a number of topics on this topic. What makes this the most poignant documentary is that this woman, this grandmother of eight is making sure that future generations are aware of what Auschwitz life was like. She tells us about survival.