rashbre.tv - fischerspooner emerge

This short video showcases Fischerspooner during a studio performance of 'Emerge'. It's a techno dance piece and uses interplay between the movie making and the performance. Some intense moments.

rashbre.tv: HD London

This is a very short video about London, but its been filmed in High Definition, so it takes a lot of bandwidth. 20Mb for 30 seconds of video. Dont try this unless you have broadband!

taking comfort obsessively

A recent study discussed on Radio Four said that peak 'book reading time' for many people occurs in their teenage years. Something to do with set texts at school, I suppose. Later, I guess people divide into those who read books and those who don't with special categories for non-fiction, historical, autobiography and sports.

I'm one of the people who does read and usually have one of those untidy piles of partly finished books. Two recent ones to be added are both blog influenced - Improbable by Adam Fawer (recommended by utenzi's blog) and Taking Comfort by Roger Morris (who writes a blog and has some amusing reflections on getting the book published).

I decided to read the Roger Morris book as soon as it arrived from Amazon and here's a few comments:

The story starts when our main character, Rob, sees a Japanese student with a 'Hello Kitty' binder throw herself in front of a tube train. Rob retrieves the folder and hides it in his briefcase, on the way to his new marketing job. At this point I was expecting a conventional mystery, but we see instead a nascent compulsive behaviour progressing in Rob and the way he views those around him.

Rob lands in a fairly typically described London City office, with the trappings of expensive desk furniture and a role which is not entirely obvious to the reader, or to Rob, it would seem. But that is incidental to the main emergence of his compulsive behaviour, which centres around collecting artifacts from misfortune. The Japanese folder is the first of a series of items he acquires in increasingly bizarre ways.

Interspersed with this are product analyses of everyday (and not so everyday) items, which are examined in minute detail, usually from a marketing perspective, sometimes by specification, and sometimes by benefit or functionality. This has a link to Rob's professional world, but the same analysis transfers to other actions and situations in the story. This varies from making a cup of tea (an almost Haruki Murukami level of description here) to feature-listing velcro adjustable concealable police body armour.

So this becomes a story about human edginess and obsession as much as about a series of events. There's a deadening of perspective (like in a madness) between the view of a fountain pen, a hand-gun and a claw hammer - all of which have important places in the plotline.

The situations accelerate in the last section of the book. Some unfinished business creates a situation where Rob's obsessions become exposed. I won't say more, in the interests of plot integrity, but there are some neat links to earlier parts of the book.

The author, Roger Morris, uses a style for the book which appears deliberately experimental and somewhat stylised. For example, there's no speech marks in the text and this adds a sense of transference to the interpretations of character motive. Is the character really thinking the way described, or is it the perception of this state from inside of Rob's head? I found myself thinking of Nikolai Gogol's Diary of a Madman in places, where the sliding perspective appears rational when considered from within the head of the person describing it.

And in places there are references to idiom (how an American can 'verbify' most nouns) and a few other linguistic tricks to create a smile.

I found this an intense book to read. I found myself inside Rob's head and the compulsive obsessive behaviour and a lowered sense of reality are distrubing traits, more so when they are blended with much other reality descriptions.

This is an interesting example of New Writing, I hope Roger does well from this experience and additionally continues his entertaining blog about the experience of writing.

And I feel I should also comment on the experience of the book itself. A hardback, 215 pages, weight, 0.315kg, Macmillan New Writing imprint, Heronwood Press Typesetting and Printed in China. You'll know why I'm saying this if you read the book.

rashbre.tv - venice grand canal

This is really still an experiment in packaging video for the internet. A trip along the grand canal in venice accompanied by one of the recent Christina Nott tracks. Enjoy the sights!

And by tomorrow, I'll start to post about some other things again!

rocketboom

Amanda's rocketboom flies high in the vlogosphere - so here is an episode - they are three minutes per day and well worth a visit.

I'm really practicing ways to package my own content at the moment and thinking about a graphic (like the TV set) as a way to highlight any vlog type entries. Oh yes, I started with a square blue television and then gradually photoshop took over.

movie mogul

I've been watching Freevlog to understand how to broadcast an internet video channel from this blog. Their great site walks you through the process of creating your own videoblog using free internet tools. They don't cover making the movie, but once its edited, freevlog shows you what to do to get it loaded and accessible on internet video channels.

If you click on the videoclip above or here, then you can see my short version of Ryan and Michael's introduction to vlogging. Do check out their freevlog site too!

The basics:
1 create the video
2 compress it to a size suitable for web streaming.
3 load it to a site (eg archive.org) as a .mov or similar format.
4 make a reference to the video from within the blog in the same ways as referencing a picture
5 configure your blog to create a feedburner RSS 2.0 feed (ie set up a feedburner feed as if you want to podcast)
6 add a feed icon button to your blog to allow people to select the feed
7 and yippee you have an internet video channel

Then tell some of the aggregators (like fireant.tv and vlogmap.org) that you are in the movie business!

Go on, click my feed!

Tag: video, vlog, podcast, feedburner, fireant, rss

fireant, mad science and music

I've posted a few video extracts here over the last few months and think it will be fun to consolidate them into a fireant.tv channel.

My most recent attempt was the little video clip I added for Christina and Jenny's 'Hey DJ' song (They're called 'the cj'). The full version of the song is across on Christina's site. I'm posting the cut down video here as well, as a way to get some initial content for the tv channel (if I can eventually get it working).

I like the idea of FireAnt, which delivers video through a simple viewer which displays content without having to worry about which format.

And Yay! its up and running. Click the fireant.tv picture above to get fireant tv and the rashbre central channel! There's only one video on it at the moment, but give me time!

Here's the video...looks like I'm on the way to becoming a Vlogger (!)


Tag: video, vlog, podcast, feedburner, fireant, rss

parallel universe

I've been using my iMac with the Intel inside for a few weeks and have not re-booted it since it came out of the box. Until today when I installed the clever software called parallels workstation, which allows me to run the iMac with slave environment(s) of any version of Windows underneath Mac OS X.

Now don't get me wrong, I use Mac OS X for just about everything in my non work world, and with the Apple software that comes with the iMac it does most of the useful things straight out of the packet.


But having a Windows environment which can be simply booted like another browser session is quite useful for the times I need access to a piece of Windows world. And this brilliant utility lets me do it. Its far better than Apple's 'Boot Camp' because it works without rebooting, and lets the Windows session run 'inside' the Mac OS X environment. Its also fast because the Windows is running natively on the intel chippery.

I emphasise that I use Apple's standard Safari as my browser and iLife for lots of things like photography and making DVDs and iWork for word processing and similar.

And for the record I've rebooted Windows twice whilst I was writing this (installing updates etc), but of course MAC OS X didn't even blink.

If you are keen on Bootcamp itself, there's a handy little article about it here

Tag: iMac, windows, Apple, boot camp, parallels workstation, windows on mac, Macbook Pro, dual core, OS X

look out

The Smithy Code Solution

The Da Vinci Code carries on getting publicity - now we have the film with Tom Hanks, but also the coded message the Judge embedded in his 'no plagiarism' judgement. He set some of the letters in the judgement to be italic. The secret text reads as:

smithycodeJaeiextostgpsacgreamqwfkadpmqzv

Justice Peter Smith has dropped hints that the cryptographic methods in the books concerned (The Da Vinci Code and Holy Blood, Holy Grail) have been used. Options: substitution? number series? decoder? keyword? I'll keep an eye open for someone solving this - I think it has something to do with his entry in Who's Who. If you want to see the full (surprisingly readable) trial judgement (printed with the strange italics), its here

Tag: Da Vinci Code, Smithy Code, Justice Peter Smith, Tom Hanks, code, cypher

UPDATE 28 Apr 06:

The excellent solution, via Tom, is here and the answer would seen to be about Admiral John "Jackie" Fisher and the battleship Dreadnought.

Justice Smith's interests (as I originally commented, they are listed in Who's Who) include the history of Jackie Fisher, noting him as an admiral who modernized the British Navy.

loco roco?

metaatem

Now this is just fun to do, via metaatem and using flickr photostreams.