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You mean things happen before 5pm?

Byrichard
Reading Time: < 1 minute

If you’ve ever worked with students or you’ve ever had a few good nights in a row there’s a rule everyone lives by. That rule is that nothing shall be done before 5am, whether it’s consuming a good meal, putting on clothing other than pyjamas or other. It’s a time when everyone rests. Especially on a sunday.

I was out by 930 today because I had to travel across London for a shoot with some students for the rag week. I don’t know much about the thing but it seems typical of pre 1970’s universities where they are bound by an extended legacy. My uni seems to lack this unfortunatly.

I don’t often shoot and edit a piece on the same day. I usually take my time and eventually get round to it. At least today was different.

It’s been a good weekend.

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Nick Broomfield

Byrichard

Yesterday I bought a series of six of Broomfield’s documentaries and I watched one of them today. Chicken Ranch is interesting because Broomfield lets the camera appear in shot, through mirrors and more. He also allows himself to appear, although only fleetingly, at least in this documentary.

He makes observational documentaries and allows the viewer to come to his own conclusions. This is a style of documentary where the action happens in front of the camera, with no use of voice over. Intertitles are enough, similarly to people like Vertov.

They are interesting documentaries because you can see that they have not been scripted. they document life, becoming more biographical and reflective of reality.

They do not strive to tell you what to think but rather encourage you to see and intuit from them.

How many documentaries do you watch that breath, that do not tell you what to think? Most attempt to say “he believes that” whilst “they believe that”. This is a more mature form of documentary making, one where the characters are the story.

I still have another five documentaries to watch and we’ll see what else I learn through watching them.

I found another documentary book today. It’s got many interviews with a variety of directors and I really hope that they help me understand the question that I want to ask and research without it being too broad.

On a night at Swankey’s

Byrichard

Having the dissertation hanging over me is unpleasant. I often spend a few hours a day doing research which is divided between books and documentary films. Over time I organised all these ideas and I’m ready to start writing. I want to finish the first draft by Saturday. i.e. the day before april fool’s

On Saturday I went out to four parties. The first party was a nice mauritian buffet to celebrate a friend turning 25 and joining the generation old club. I was there for two or three hours before moving on.

The second party was a small affair although the participants were not university students therefore I left for the next venue.

It was the SU bar, busy on a Saturday night, something which is not that normal. It’s usually deserted but due to a person having their birthday there it was better.

The fourth party was the best part. Everyone from the bar got into 7-10 taxies and headed down to a house party. The house is in the middle of the suburbs, has two living rooms although one of these is half kitchen/half living room. Maybe it’d be called a dining room.

Many friends were there and there was a live dj to add to the ambiance. At the beginning there was no sound because they were lacking a cable or two to plug the speakers in. The issue was quickly resolved and sound began.

The party would involve the taking of 100 pictures, chatting to many people about many things. One of these people was glad to practice her french. Others shared drinks and such.

Saturday started around 7pm and ended 12hrs later with me walking a road I had walked many many times in the past. It was a really good night and I hope to have more like it.

Last night was tame in contrast

Farming In Switzerland

Farming In Switzerland

Byrichard

The Pandemic is alive and well and I am still walking around in circles. I would go for bigger, more interesting adventures but no one is publicising those events until after the fact. During a pandemic it helps to be misinformed, an alcoholic and a festival goer.


If you like real sports, like climbing, cycling, group hikes etc then you have to wait for months, or at this point, probably years, for the pandemic to end. Last year when the government made the mistake of opening too early you could believe they were silly. By making the same “mistake” again it starts to look like government policy. That leads to the obvious conclusion that at the current level of incompetence the pandemic will never end.


A tractor tending to a field with the alps in the background.


The way that countries around the world are making the same mistakes, in the same way, at the same time, is leading people to discuss whether eugenics is being experimented with. I prefer to think of it as incompetence, rather than deliberate.


Israel, England and the United States are clear indicators of what Switzerland can expect from the pandemic and yet they fail to take the lessons and warnings on board. Instead they let the situation degrade and get worse. We are now at 20+ percent of ICU beds taken up by COVID patients, out of 79 percent occupancy, according to the RTS.


The Swiss have a strange threshhold limit. They prefer for it to reach a certain critical limit. I’m impatient for the next soft lockdown, as that is when the numbers will decrease again.

Learning About Service Workers

Learning About Service Workers

Byrichard

I am currently learning about Working With Service Workers. Service workers allow you to make a website faster, for those who visit a website more often, or offline, in situations where connectivity may be unreliable. Some of the code used can be found on my github page. MDN Web Docs also have useful information about working with service workers.


With service workers you can web first, retrieve from cache and stale while refresh:


  1. With the first option you visit a website and the cache is generated in case the connection is dropped
  2. With the Retrieve from cache it will access the files in the cache, before looking towards the web for content
  3. In the last case the website will load the content it has but will check for new content in the background.


With these three approaches, and with some experimenting you can speed up static websites, and make others available offline if needed.


Aside from helping you to save content locally service workers can also clean up after themselves. If your website is updated or changes you can give a new archive version number and tell it to delete all the others, for your own web page. I have played with static content and will explore more.


I took some time to practice the new skills I learned in this course on my own website, on the local machine. It will take some time to learn the intricacies of how to get this to work correctly. For now I am on a learning curve.


In the process of learning about service workers I also learned about manifest.json and web app manifests. “PWAs can be downloaded in advance and can work offline, as well as use regular Web APIs.”

Noise and Liveable Flats

Byrichard

It’s only 130am therefore it’s not that late but I want to sleep and there is something that has been hindering this effort particularly strongly for the past three nights. Drunken people with no pitch or tone control when singing using their lungs and voice projection to full pelt.

It’s not that I’m against partying but I do believe in making noise during the day or away from habitations during the day. I would love to see the same thing happen in London as in Switzerland.

Laws that forbid noise after 10pm.

On a second note here are ways future halls and student accomodation may be improved to make a full night of sleep possible.

  1. Cupboards that don’t slam. When you’re living by a kitchen one of the most annoying sounds is hearing others close cupboards

  2. Solid doors that don’t bang. The main door to the complex is loud. Every time it closes you hear it. The doors to the flat make noise when you open them.

  3. Silent locks. The sound of a key pulling the latch is loud when background sounds are inexistent

  4. Soundproofed walls. being able to hear what’s going on next door is not always pleasant.

  5. Proper windows. When you’ve got idiots outside yelling at other idiots you’ll hear the entire conversation. That’s not what you want.

  6. A system of fines rather than bans. People get far more annoyed and take far more seriously a financial loss than a ban.  With a ban you may end up in a nice house or flat where you live in better conditions.

  7. Smart fire alarms. You’ve got security so if a fire is activated check the area with a heat camera. If there’s nothing out of the ordinary just go and clear the alarm after a visual check

  8. Free high quality headphones. Rather than have loud music blearing from every room why not provide students with nice headphones which they can use to hear their music in dolby digital surround sound…

  9. A noise fuse. The idea behind this device is simple. If you exceed a certain noise level all power is cut to the area where the noise levels are too high. In so doing disturbances would be far more limited.

10.  Quiet furniture. When you’ve got a concrete floor with no padding and chairs with no padding any shift of the furniture results in a lot of noise. Provide a quiet surface and life may be livable.

I’m tired of other people’s noise. I’d love for them to become reasonable and start being quiet. Once every two weeks is fine, but not every single day. Not all of us enjoy drinking at night and doing nothing during the day. Not all of us appreciate bad singing either.

Anyway worst case scenario I have another two weeks without sleep.

Best case scenario. New flat within a few days.

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