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Human Clock . Photo’s from around the world… made into a clock.
Archive for January, 2005
Newsnight turns 25 at the end of this week, and to celebrate there’s reports from some of it’s previous editors. One of the most interesting was by Ron Neil, who nominated Peter Snow’s studio based coverage of the
Falklands war in ’81-’82.
The most startling bit in the report is the drawing of the Harrier jump jets attacking the Argentine Canberra planes, complete with ‘dakka dakka dakka’ bullet lines! It looks like something from an Eagle comic! The thing is, it’s probably just as made up as the CGi graphics news use today.
..And there’s a great bloopers page. yuk yuk yuk!
Link: BBC – Cult Presents: Sherlock Holmes.
This week saw the launch of the “jpeg rotorvator”. A wonderful small chunk of javascript that lets me rotate jpeg’s within the promo space on bbc.co.uk. It’s maiden voyage was for Cults sherlock Holmes page. They’d got five authors to write new stories and had five artists render them. Cult are a great team, and I’m said to see them the brunt of cost cuts and scale backs. Personally I think they produce great stuff, sure it’s geeky and a bit spoddy, but the way they do it makes it accessible. Their recent look into British Comics was fantastic. Now that’s UK focused public service in my book. Ok, so they cover Angel and Buffy, like a 100 other sites and maybe they should scale that back, but in there is still great unseen British content.
Anyway, a dynamic image within the promo space was something that we originally explored back in 2002, in the Glass Wall[6meg PDF on how we built the homepage]. (get it’s while it’s here kids! I’m like the ice cream van outside your school.) Well it finally happened. What this esentially means is that we can stack promo’s, potentially with each image and link going to a different place. So for example we could have a weekend round up; image1:the water-cooler TV subjects – Image2: footie results – image3:clubs/gigs – image4:monday blues.
This represents a paradigm shift in the way we approach promo subjects. It enables us to stack topics together, and illustrate each one, offering diverse subjects grouped under one promo. Other uses include, ‘Glasto round up’ or ‘today at the Olympics’ allowing us to focus on multiple subjects and events means I’m not tied down to picking something that tries to represent all the football shown that day, or making a montage of all the Glasto line up. Ahhh freedom. There’s a lot of new stuff coming in that space this year, I faced January looking down the barrel of amiplan, and basically repeating the same events and stuff as last year. Nope, we’ve got to work smarter, better, and harder. with a greater emphasis on development rather than production, all with no extra money or resources, in fact less… nice challenge.
Martin Belam is unwell. (I’m sure he’ll see the funny side to this)
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BBC NEWS | UK | Harry urged to say sorry publicly
Isn’t it amazing what you can find in a trunk at grannies house eh? Honestly, a gaff worthy of his Grandfather…
Thing is the party invite specified “colonial and native” Where does his costume fit in?! And his brother went as a lion! Yes he’s a been a bit daft, I reckon the media are slighty out for him though as a: he’s had a run in with one of them, a photographer, and b: the tsunami story’s been going for ages, as has Blair V Brown; So aside form Big BRo, we’ve not had a good celeb story for ages… It could have been so much worse though, he could have been captured doing a Nazi salute, or worse, blacked up and gone as a Zulu or something… We’ve all made mistakes, I once went to a fancy dress party as the Statue of Liberty, (the closest I got to cross dressing)
For a German perspective on the story, and other links about Anglo-German relations, try this German-British Ties Good, but Still Faulty
On a more serious note, the BNP allegedly contacted the BBC and asked to use the Dad’s army opening credits in a party political broadcast… I suspect we politely declined.
10:55pm A great programme from Newsnight this evening [watch it]-[website]. following the Prince Harry costume ‘error’, with lots of reference to the holocaust and Auschwitz, there then followed an item about Pax Warrior, a simulation to teach children about the Genocide in Rwanda in 1994 in which more people were killed that the holocaust, and right now in Sudan, there is a holocaust taking place.
The righteous attitude of the thing just makes me mad.. The Sun of all papers is first to bash the Hun were England playing Germany at football. Just look at some of these jingoistic headlines from the tabloids when England beat Germany 6-1 in 2001. The News-Night guest from the Goethe Institute rightly made the point that most people don’t know anything about the modern Germany, and with this sort of coverage in the popular press and national conscience it’s no wonder.
Link: Slashdot | iPod Shuffle, Mac Mini, iLife ’05, iWork.
Man what a day… Today was a pulp fiction sort of day, ok I didn’t fake a boxing match result, run from my gangster boss and end up escaping a ‘crooked’ cop called Zed. Today I was susposed to have a mate come round after work, run me down to homebase, buy a can of Crown ‘Sail White’ and step ladder, and come home to a quiet night of painting and decorating. Fate it seemed had much more in store than that…
The mate in question rang to say that his wife had been at a friends this afternoon with their baby, and whilst sat in chatting, someone had tried to break in the front door.. The wife was staying with the friend, (who’s also a mother) to comfort her. He consequently might not be able to make it, no drama I say… I leave work, get the 6:35 train from Victoria, which grinds to a halt outside Clapham junction. The lights go off, and we all sit there for 5 mins. Eventually the driver comes over the PA. “This is your driver speaking, we’re being held her due to someone falling under the train infront” They’d turn off the main power so they could get down on the track. We sat there for an hour, in the darkness, every other train rushing by while we waited… and waited… and waited. Eventually he comes back on to say the person died, but we should now be on ouor way… Then even the emergency lighting went out and we were in total darkness for another 10 mins. Eventually it all came on and we started, I got home at 8:30, two hours late. Painting was out, a beer was in.
So I walked up the hill to Thresher to find the rozzers there arresting someone. They’d run amok and smashed up the front door of the shop! Stoping briefly for a ‘what’s the Country coming too!’ moment, I then had to head to Costcutter for beers. Am now settled in, watching the leader do the Mac Keynote…. ahhh…
so ipod shuffle – I counted 16 pairs of white headphones on my commute today, I think that might go up now. Now there’s no reason not to have one.
Mac mini – brilliant, riding the back of that ipod wave, I hope they get snapped up in droves, then eventually that old beige box under the desk will be thrown out, stripped of it’s keyboard, mouse and monitor, and people (like me mum) will have a computer that just works.
other stuff – great too.
Who’d have thought you could get a mac and and ‘ipod’ for £410 before today eh? Right, more beer and Stevie
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My mate Nick took this photo in a northern chip shop over Xmas…. makes you wonder what happened? And also, how would the owner know if you were a solicitor?
From the BBC search monthly newsletter, (i’m sure they won’t mind)
What our users have been asking us
Some searchers still type natural language queries into the search box, rather than selecting a few keywords. While this may not always bring the searcher the best results, it does provide some amusement when reading through our search logs.
Here’s a small selection of the best user queries in 2004, unedited:
- what is a dog?
- How do I structure a French letter?
- how do i spell onamatapier?
- what is the biggest collection of naval fluff?
- what is the best way to get what teacher is saying when he is lecturing?
- how do you say basketball?
- what do buddhism eat?
- what does a baby were when it is baptism?
- what are conglumarets?
- i am searching for my family history all i know that i have an aunty doreen before her marriage she was known as huet living in plymouth devon
- what is better one long vacation each year or several short vactions throughout the year?
- what is so special about the swiss?
- what do you do when the person you love tells you he loves some one else?
- what are the contemporary issue in nurses?
- how do you say unperfuct in spanish?
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | Springer protests pour in to BBC. Been a rough ol’ time for Rich ‘n’ Gary, bbc.co.uk’s feedback and complaints double act. And the points of view message boards are aflame with polarised postings…
In amongst the ‘ABSOLUTE DISGRACE’ brigade there’s some really nice opinions and arguments. At least some people have worked out that it can’t contain 8000 swear words (For a two-hour show, that works out at around one expletive every 0.9 seconds) (except this guy! Ahh bless)
Here’s some other good stats.
a: by it being on at the National Theatre your state taxes have already paid for it, for two years!
b: two tickets to see it at the theatre plus two G&T’s in the interval would set you back a whole year’s licence fee,
and c: Total Licence fee per person per year: £121…Per month: £10.08…Of which goes towards BBC2 programming: £1.51* …BBC2 per day: 4.8pence …Per hour: 0.2pence. So a ball park figure costing is 0.4p for those two hours.
It’s crazy to think that this show’s been on in the West End for two years, and only now is there a fuss by the suburban net curtain twitchers! This has become about religion, at least on the message boards, and the whole thing’s got right out of context. There’s actually a couple of Christians who’ve said that they’ve seen it and it’s not that bad, but yes, it’s adult theme, but ultimately a piece of fiction. What’s really bad is there’s been cases of lobby groups in the America phoning up the switchboard and complaining, and they don’t even pay the licence fee! Gits
Here’s what the show’s creator said about it anyroad.
Because if we’re not carful, we end up with this.
*official BBC predicted spend 2004/05 based on 2003/04 spend.
You wold have thought that for once, just once, the Daily Star could have knocked the norks of the front page? The Independent’s done a lot of these sort of framed editorial things recently, on Ken Bigley, Margaret Hassan and other Iraq-tastrophes.
Newsnight asked some interesting questions last night, [watch here] about what could be called ‘grief event horizon’. Guest Frank Furedi made some good points too, that the public gets swept up in these events, Dunblaine, Soham, Diana etc, by the media. He went on ‘..To be a moral responsible individual you have to give more money than someone else… there’s a sense of competitiveness as we face moral confusion… the only time we come together as a people are when we’re facing tragedy, a tragic death or disaster..’ Food for thought indeed. So maybe it’s because so many of us have been to Thailand on holiday, that it’s sort of ‘second world’ and that the disaster was sudden and unstoppable, and that there seems an easy way out, rebuilding and such, rather than having to face a disaster caused by 20 years of civil war and that’ll take 20 years to put right…
The report focused on previous appeals. Stats quoted: emergency appeal for Chechnya raised $40 a head. The floods in Mozambique was only 15% met, raising 40 Cents a head. In contrast the money pledge so far, some 2 billion dollars, means $400 a head for the 5 million people affected in Asia. Another worry now is that the tsunami will take the focus off Africa. On the plus side the other guest said British people give 7.6 billion to charities a year, and that 10% of that goes overseas.
So perhaps this would be a best outcome; If the International Community and people of the World can respond this quickly and with this much will, determination and aid to this disaster, why not keep the momentum going and focus on some of the other problems around the World?
BBC postpones disaster docu-drama about a volcano. The BBC said in light of the recent tragedies in Asia it would “be inappropriate” to screen it. Still went ahead with Changing Rooms Goes to Boscastle on Boxing day though! Caused a bit of a stink too. Commented on here and feaeture in the Daily Mirror’s exclusive TV makeover team ‘did a botch job in Boscastle’. A few damp walls and ruined Axminsters kind of pales into insignificance now the true scale of the Asian Tsunami come to light…
