Channel 4 Giant Glass Knob canopy entrance
January 30, 2007
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the giant glass knob as seen from the 3rd floor of 124 Horseferry road. That Richard Rogers is a cheeky chappy, the effect is that come 6ish when all the staff are ’streaming’ out of the building to go home we look like pee/ejaculate. Arrf!
50 years of the Sky at Night
January 7, 2007
Congratulations Sir Patrick Moore and the Sky at Night team on 50 years of the show. I saw Sir Patrick once when he did a live chat at the BBC back in 2003. He walks with two sticks these days “Thanks the Nazi’s for that” we heard him say. The news piece on him had him complaining at the schedulers, but I think he should rest assured that most people interested in astronomy will watch it online. Still, a 30-min ‘best of’ with some proper pundits talking about it would have been good.
With today’s loss of Magnus Magnuson, I’m concerned who’s going to take over when Sir Pat has to stand down. There’s only one name in the frame… It’s gotta be the astronomer Brian May CBE, (sign this to petition his Knighthood) Sure Chris Lintott can ramp up the ‘here comes the science bit’, but Brian would be a great front man. With Queen he did the theme for Flash Gordon, so why not just mash it up with The Sky at Night, with Sir Pat on Xylaphone…
(Thumping xyla baseline: Dum, dum, dum…) “Sky ……..At Night!” “You’re window on the universe!” (Brian’s guitar: Doo doo do do-dow!)
I reckon the book Bang! was a first his first toe in the water, come on Brian, you know you want too.
BBC NEWS | Magazine | The meaning of ‘lite’
September 7, 2006
Link: The meaning of ‘lite’.
hahahah, the irony - talk about the errosion of the quality of language. This must be one of the worst written articles on bbc.co.uk. Paragraphy 12 is a direct copy of paragraphy 5! and ““Lite” has been around for years but has had a resurgence in popularity in recent years,” uses the word years to near each other. “Not that long ago words [sic] such words would have been viewed as too American for any of the group’s titles, now they are making it into names.” doesn’t make any sense either.
It appears to be written in ‘Metro English’, short choppy sentences you can read on a hurtling tube train, where points D,E and F are rehashes of A,B and C and simple facts are stretched out.
“Pot to Kettle, requesting colour check, over” But eyedropper, your spelling and grammar are crap too? Sure are/i but then I ain’t no jouro.
Great British Beer Festival Bog Queue
August 8, 2006
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Must have been around 150m long… unbelievable. Cue a coupel of girls shreeking with laughter and shouting at me ‘take a photo, take a photo, this never happens to guys! Now you know how we feel!’
Earls Court being more of a gig venue, has something like 66% female toilets. A beer festival by it’s very nature has something like 80% guys attending…
In the end folks were going in the sinks (when you gotta go, you gotta go) and they had to ‘convert’ some of the ladies into gents. All of the ladies had a steward on the door as apprently the day before there’d been an ‘incident’ as a load of lads gate crashed the ladies loos.
To be honest I much prefer it when it’s at Olympia, the ceiling’s higher and it feels cooler, lighter and most….. well. British.
Laptop from yesteryear
August 3, 2006
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That’s right, it’s not a laptop, it’s a ‘mains portable’ Toshiba T3200 complete with orange and black screen, carry case, all the manuals, and DOS 3.1 on floppy disk. Weighs a TON, from the manual “Weighing only 19 pounds…” And you can run Linux on it www.ailis.de/~k/docs/t3200sxc/
But best/oddest of all. You know how old books have a woodish, dampish old smell. Well old computers have a sort of old warm plasticy smell.
CEEFAX Shuttle Infographic 1981
July 20, 2006
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A lot of people are getting misty eyed about Ceefax. Compare the above to This.
We never had a telly good enough in our ‘ouse to have Ceefax, we didn’t even have a remote until we got our first video recorder in 1990s and had to use that. Maybe that’s why I’ve never really been that impressed with Ceefax/Teletext. Though it did give the world Mr Biffo.
It’s Wimbledon time!
June 28, 2006
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..and here’s a choice image from yesteryear borrowed from the BBC archive. Ahhh wooden racquets, Fred Perry…
And here’s some wimbledon homepages from
2000 and 2001
I liked this page (The Brits), in a ‘where are they now’ stylee
Pettit’s butchers window
April 24, 2006
Pettit’s butchers window,originally uploaded by eyedropper.co.uk. There’s a line in Dracula that goes “You think to baffle me, you with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher’s.”… Well, no sheep in this butchers window, just a mighty fine display of local lamb and beef.And no crappy plastic grass too. Look at that beautiful bit of pork with all the cherries and kiwi round it. Retro.The butchers is Pettit’s in Grimsby, they also do very fine sausages I’m told. www.world-of-sausage.com
BBC News & Sport Festival 2006
January 19, 2006
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So today is the last day of the BBC News and Sport Festival.
Yesterday I attended ‘Are we all reporters now?’ which looked at the role of citizen journalism and user generated content. The only real outcome was that journalists thought citizens couldn’t be journalists, and that now one really liked the phrase User Generated Content. Parts of the BBC, mainly Newsnight, and the interactive team, really get UCG, other parts of the organisation arn’t as up to speed on how and indeed why to use it.
The second thing I went to yesteday was JOhn Simpson interviewing Jack Straw. Here’s what Ariel (the BBC’s internal newspaper) had to say on the exchange
Jack Straw said that he hoped the ‘fractured relationship’ between the BBC and the government was improving, although he admitted there were still ‘high levels of suspicion on both sides’. John Simpson introduced the Foreign Secretary at the News Festival yesterday as someone who ‘has been a good friend to the BBC over the years’ but quipped that the minister was ‘among friends, but not entirely’.
Straw also suggested that the biggest mistake the BBC ever made was deciding to move political news from BH to TVC - a ‘monumental error’ which had led to politicians becoming more detached from broadcasters. ‘I used to go to Broadcasting House for Today - I can count on the fingers on one hand the number of times I’ve been here. ‘It’s dead easy to get here and impossible to get back’, he said.
And that’s with the luxury of a state owned jag! He should try it on the Central line.
This morning kicked off with News Interactive Editor and all round nice guy Pete Clifton giving his thoughts on blogs/wiki’s/podcasts/wotsit’s. He talked us through some of the new features and services news are planning to offer in the coming months, as well as explaining to some of the less tech savvy folk in the room what things like RSS are.
The second panel talk I went to this after lunch was ‘Gloating American Haters?’ which saw Matt Frei (who reminded my a lot of Orson Wells), Beth Poisson (newly appointed to US Embassy here in the UK, not quite CJ Craig) and Charles Glass all giving their thinking on does the BBC have an anti-American, or more specifically, anti-Bush stance? Topics we touched upon were Hurricane Katrina coverage, religion, the Iraq war, race, and how the US media reports the UK (very badly it seems).
Finally I’ve just finished watching Sven Goran Eriksson in conversation with John Motson, very interesting, but we’re not allowed to comment on what he said.
diary of a piano novice #1
January 4, 2006
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As I said in the previous post, mrs e got me a keyboard for Christmas.. You know that bit at the start of ‘Young Sherlock Holmes’ where he says to Watson something like, “I’ve had this violin three days now, I should have mastered it” and goes to smash it before Watson stops him? Well I feel a bit like that, guitar, I’m ok at, my problem is switching that round, I can’t get my left hand to do rhythm and right to do lead,.
As for this afternoon, my head’s swimming so I content myself with listening to the demo tunes in between bouts of coughing up brown goo (I’m off ill).
