Random

There are many things I have done in the past but having a barbeque at five am whilst the birds are tweeting and the sun is rising is not within my normal realm of experiences. It was nice, felt more like the end of a festival night than anything else. The party took place at a friend’s place along the Metropolitan line. We arrived at about 7 pm and that moment everything about the party was normal, all the usual features, barbeques, people, drinks and more. Not that many people ate much at the beginning of the night, preferring to socialise instead. At the end of the night when most people were responsibly going to bed we decided to have a barbeque. It was a mission at first. We had to find out how to open the garden door. It had been locked therefore we could not go out through one door and had to get another one. After this, we had to struggle to find the fire lighting blocks. Finally, we lit the blocks and now it was time to wait for the fire to be warm enough. By this point, the birds were tweeting more and more excitedly as the sun was rising. As the blue of the sky started to appear our fire was warm enough for the steaks. It took a little time to cook with improvised tools. The food was finally ready and those steaks were good. It doesn’t end there A popular phrase was “there’s plenty of meat left in the fridge”, resulting in some turkey being fetched and cooked. The pieces were thicker so aluminium helped speed up the cooking process Once we had eaten this it was time for bed for my friends whilst I decided to go home on the tube. There was just one problem, the tube station was closed and there was no indication of when it’d open. You can imagine my joy at the thought of waiting for them to open. It didn’t matter though, I walked back. It was actually a nice walk. No one in the streets except the occasional post worker. The air was nice, felt like a proper summer morning. Finally, I was home, having no special need to go to sleep quite yet I stayed up for a little longer. By around 8 am I was asleep. It had been an interesting night.

When you’re s student normal clocks no longer have any relevance to the way you live your life. Sometimes you go to sleep three hours after the sun rose and other times you have a nap at three in the afternoon. Occasionally you sleep from ten at night till 6 am. That’s extra ordinarily rare. When you’re in halls this is particularly true. You’ve got an entire ethnic group in university that takes the university to be the same as school. They come in at 8 am and leave on the dot at 1900 hrs. That’s because they’re still at home and they live according to their parent’s cooking schedule. They love to play during the day. Most of the people I know are of the night disposition. They will party all night and pull all-nighters to get work done rather than get up early in the morning to do things the way non-students do. It’s a great way of life. You might not see the sun in winter but in Summer there’s a chance you’ll be sitting in the sun soaking in the rays whilst office workers are slaving away. It doesn’t matter, in three to four years most students will experience the same so it’s only a question of time. Anyway, the point of this post is that I was leaving the library after doing some work on my dissertation when I spotted an orange fox lurking around. it was looking for food and that’s not hard to find where students have been. I thought that I should scare it off by hissing and stamping my foot but it remained oblivious. I decided to walk up the stairs and turned around. It was heading towards the turnstiles to get into university. Did I meet one of the rare academic foxes in North West London? Let’s see whether I see it at my graduation. How many of you have had such encounters with nocturnal creatures?

Twitter is a global short messaging system that allows people to post what they are doing 140 characters at a time. For the moment it is a relatively new phenomenon therefore it’s not too hard to keep track of the conversations going on. They are also geo logged. As you’re watching people’s messages you can see China say that they’re getting ready for the night ahead whilst in Europe people are going out to lunch. In the US people are complaining about having to wake up early in order to catch their planes, go for walks or in certain cases go to bed. It’s amusing and it’s reminiscent of ten years ago when I spent 13hrs in a chatroom at a time when spending ten minutes online was expensive. it’s cyclical. One thing is popular, then is replaced by something else before becoming popular again. One difference this time is the technology used. Google maps show where in the world people are tweeting from whilst the twitter site simply shows what people have written. It’s amusing to watch the world and what people are doing in it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.