poll poll variance question

Around the City today as well as creating some presentations.

The PowerPoint also needs some numbers so there's been some spreadsheeting worked in for good measure.

Strangely, Excel has forgotten how to add up. The little Sigma control isn't working, so when I'm trying to add up certain rows of numbers, it keeps returning a value of zero.

I've restarted Excel and rebooted the PC but to no avail. As this is a primary function of spreadsheets, its a trifle annoying.

It's as if the spreadsheet has decided to not tell me the answer. Its probably like the various election related opinion polls being published at the moment.

Since the 11th of March I can spot about 6 or 7. The results generally show a Conservative lead, but it varies from a 13 point lead in on on the 11th, to a 5 point lead in one yesterday. Or in a different poll yesterday, an 11 point lead. And sure enough, there's already chatter about whether opinion polls should be published in an election run-up.

Based upon the lack of consistency, its questionable whether these polls have a great deal of meaning. I hope they are also checking that their Excel is adding up properly.

cowboy bebop redux

I could hear a faint Japanese song playing somewhere in the darkened rashbre central, when I realised that I'd somehow left a DVD in the system on the menu loop. It was on a very low volume and sounded quite ghostly.

My guilty secret was out.

I'd been waiting for the (quite old) movie version of Cowboy Bebop to arrive after hunting it down and this had led into a short manga-fest whilst I'd been eating curry at home alone.

Many will be familiar with the early 2000s TV series, but I'd never seen this most enjoyable movie version, with one of those complex plotlines that twists and turns involving terrorist tanker explosions, nanobots and all manner of car, train and space cruiser chase.

I hear they are making a live action movie now along the lines of The Matrix, but Cowboy Bebop (basically about bounty hunters in a spaceship) stands alone as an action manga sci-fi set of stories, with some stunning graphics, plenty of good one-liners and some excellent humour. Here's the original trailer from the movie.

i speak because i can

I've probably listened to the first Laura Marling album 100 times, so its good to hear the new one is finally ready.

A few tracks have popped into circulation early notably the Devil's Spoke and Goodbye England, which was released as a single. The tracks in the online collection above are lovely and I'll probably listen to the new album another 100 times.

There's a link to the Times Online which has a good quality selection from the album to stream until the album is released in a few days time.

Click the picture above to jump to their site to enjoy or below for one of the songs from the first album,"My manic and I".

movie making interlude

Helping out with a bit of movie editing today in Final Cut Studio. The project has a one hour duration with probably 300 camera cuts involved and I've been putting them together for a DVD. It's really part of the bubbleandsqueek enterprises, and I'm just helping out, but its been quite interesting.

The toughest part has been to get the sound and action resynchronised because one of the cameras had inaccurate timecodes and everything was off by a variable amount from one to three seconds. I've literally had to count the frames to get it back in line.

That and cleaning up the sound which had some unfortunate traffic sounds in a few places that had leaked into the soundtrack. Some Soundtrack Pro editing and filtering seems to have fixed it.

Anyway, we've made a test cut of the whole thing at a very low resolution (in the interests of speed) and played it back through a big plasma screen and its looking pretty good. Now it needs the titles and some additional graphics added and then a massive re-render and then it will be a completed item.

The first cinema type screening is not for a couple of months, so we still have plenty of time.

movie title is a winner

I missed most of the speeches from the Oscars, and my hopes were pinned on this film, which seems to have somehow been at number 11 on the various lists of ten.

I'm sure that the sequel will do better so long as they remember not to include any card games and laughter. Thanks to britanick for this little gem.

"Catchphrase"
"Famous quote" : furious woman.
"Metaphor"

"naive yet inspiring statement as music gets hopeful"

Emilie Autumn in London

Farringdon for an early evening pizza and then on to the improbable shopping mall in Islington where the O2 Academy was hosting Emilie Autumn. It wasn't hard to spot the venue because of the large quantity of Victorian and gothic people standing in a well-behaved line outside. We decided it was better to head for the nearby pub and wait until the doors had opened for what would anyway be a standing gig.

Sure enough, a rich and hoppy ale later, we returned to an almost empty queue, somehow missing the separate entrance for 'O2 customers' which would have saved us all of five minutes but meant we missed the spectacle of those around us applying small hearts to their faces using various cosmetics.

There's a challenge for the style of production of someone like Emilie Autumn. An intelligent and talented writer and performer, with a strong eye for the theatre of a show, there must be some compromise to taking such an endeavour on the road. The premise of the show is a women's lunatic asylum and much of the writing in the songs is about the situation and the various tragedies as women were consigned to these places in Victorian times.

The show, however, takes on a bright and somewhat pink look at the situation, with jagged lyrics sung with a poppy twist. It is deliberate, of course, and provides an entertainment spectacle which probably has some parallels with the emotional dilemmas of the Victorian tours of the asylums.

So where's the performance compromises? Simply that this is a show with a major star outlook but being produced for what one assumes is a relatively small budget. The most noticeable adjustment is the lack of a full band, which makes some of the numbers run on backing tracks rather than performance. Quite honestly, there's many mainstream performers that do this anyway, we've all spotted miming on the biggest shows and some pop artists struggle away from the studio.

I'll still take this show as a big-hearted attempt to drive a full-on theatrical style experience. Good staging, a small cast of friends providing burlesque and circus style antics alongside the songs. It didn't all work and could probably have been condensed in length (around two and a half hours of non-stop performance) but I'll still take away the spirit from it as a strong piece of entertainment, if not a 'music gig' in the conventional sense.

Emilie Autumn is interesting in that there are probably various directions she can take her career and talent. Whilst relatively niche and unknown to mainstream, it was interesting to see a broad and diverse group of followers, from full-on fans in costumes, to burly rockers making the sign of the horns and people waving old school cigarette lighter flames in salute to almost Hendrix style violin solos.

Not a photographic evening for me, but there's an excellent set from the opening part of the gig by Taya Uddin posted in flickr.

I'll settle for this little poem here from Emilie.
Ghost

clear vision, anyone?

I know we've just been told the date for the budget as 24 March, but although there's election posters all over the place in central London now, there doesn't seem to have been a date declared.

Perhaps naively, I find this slightly insulting to the British electorate. Much of the normal business of Parliament has been turned into the theatre of pre-election sound bites and the two main parties seem mainly intent upon point scoring.

Brown eschewed the opportunity he originally had to be voted in as leader of his party, or to have an election about a year ago when there was a previous opportunity zone.

Now, instead of declaring his position on this publicly, he leaves us all guessing that it will be 6 May, aligned with the date that other local elections are due to take place. I believe there's theoretically a few weeks into the start of June which would still be available, but it would seem slightly odd to get everyone voting twice in a matter of weeks.

So now we are hearing of senior civil servant pay freezes and no doubt some candied words in the Budget, whilst Brown presides over a 12.8 percent of GDP borrowing level (just slightly higher than Greece and about double the rest of Europe).

We'll be hearing more 'weathering the storm' and 'bumps in the road' speeches over the next few days as well as the Conservatives promising to rescind whatever gets stated in the next Labour budget. On top of the sundry scandals, these points reinforce the purposelessness of the last days of the current Government.

This time, to add to the fun we appear to be getting the politician's partners being propelled into the limelight. Miriam, Samantha and Sarah are all being blended into the campaigning to support their husbands and no doubt to receive camera scrutiny of their own.

At least Brown's recent comments about the economy may be accurate: "There will be many months ahead of conflicting statistics, false hopes and mixed signals."

As long as all this doesn't start to affect Britain's credit ratings too.

collecting stamps and badges

Its quite difficult to keep up with all the daily new social software now vying for attention. I tend to route most things back to rashbre central as a sort of hub with the occasional link to other things of interest.

Like many, I'm also on twitter, flickr, last.fm, del.icio.us and have a myspace, facebook, friendfeed and similar. Of course, that particular set all seem relatively traditionalist nowadays.

Professionally I use LinkedIn and Plaxo and for fun I've contributed a few entries to Qype when it was starting up as well as adding things to Wikipedia over the years.

I've also gone through that process of unpicking some of the links that cross post between one system and another. I know that OpenId and microformats can make it simpler for these systems to divulge information to one another, seemingly at the click of a tick box. I'm not always sure I whether I really want everything linked to everything else.

There's been the well-reported issue with Facebook and more recently with Google Buzz, both of which seemed determined to become über-aggregators of content. Presumably in Web 3 selective disaggregation will become the new aggregation.

So when we were sitting together in the Brasserie a couple of days ago and the iPhones appeared to type in the latest foursquare rendesvous, I was thinking about the sparks from the electronic trail we are all being encouraged to leave.

Foursquare is another system that uses a community model with little badges as you contribute more things into its files. People become 'mayors' of localities and can be deposed when someone else earns more points.

Qype has a similar model (actually I've no idea who got there first). I can understand the point of getting everyone to create the underpinning reviews for the various venues featured, but I suppose there could be a difference between people filing genuine impressions compared with those simply collecting badges. I was on a site a few days ago and someone had managed to post 25 reviews in just over an hour, which seemed -er - suspect.

The social network issues continue too. Privacy, security, trust, reliability of information, expertise, vested interests, noise, clique filtering are some simple top of mind examples. I suppose most of us get an instinct for the area of the interweb we are browsing and the consequent likelihood of reliability or otherwise.

Caveat browser, I suppose.

Axis: Bold as Love

A few days ago I put up the short video of Jimi Hendrix playing 'Bleeding Heart' live at Glastonbury 2010 in some kind of parallel universe. It concludes with Michael Eavis in a Land Rover picking up the folk who'd wanted to say they'd played the Pyramid. Sony music decided it wasn't suitable for Youtube though and have removed it.

This replacement post is a Hendrix guitar lesson in the blues on a stage still littered with speaker systems stencilled with 'The Who'.

My original post related to the anniversary of Hendrix and I notice a new album of unreleased tracks has just been issued.

What I've found interesting is another different new release, which is the remaster of Axis:Bold as Love. There's a new 2010 version which has been freshened up from the two track(!) master tapes.

Alongside the great Hendrix material is a little DVD of Eddie Kramer, who engineered most of the Hendrix music. It's a great little 20 or so minutes as he talks through several of the tracks and plays around with the engineering, so that you can hear how the relatively simple 4 track mixing technology was used.

The video has him sitting at a mixing deck and as he plays with the controls you hear the differences in the sound. For someone like me who messes around with this technology for fun, it's fascinating to see a master at work.

Kramer has also been a photographer and his own site kramer archives has some great photos of various bands he worked with including Hendrix, Zeppelin, Zappa and many others.

And the same package also includes a couple of samples of Hendrix lyric writing, complete with the scribbles.

Quite a good way to spend ten quid.



Update: they unblocked the Glastonbury video too...

battersea sunshine

A walk through the park yesterday afternoon on the way the Mason's Arms, which is by Battersea Park train station and just across from the old Battersea Power Station.

There's an interesting mosaic of the power station in the pub and we all thought it was made of those little tiles, but actually its 380 Rubik Cubes stacked together.

I shall try not to think further about making art from Rubik's cubes although there is something faintly compelling about that particular idea.

After our pleasant late Sunday lunch, we headed back with the real power station as a backdrop almost as colourful as the cubed version in the afternoon's cold bright sunlight.

Look carefully at the picture and you'll be able to see the London Eye and Big Ben.

alice in wonderland

An evening visit to the Electric Cinema in Notting Hill for a spot of madness. As it said on the curtain before the film, "We're all mad here'.

Curiouser and curiouser, we thought as we clipped on the high tech 3D glasses to watch Alice and her friends in the Tim Burton sequel to the well-known Lewis Carroll stories.

As the opening titles rolled I was already thinking 'ooh I want to see this again' and sure enough after a slightly cumbersome alternative beginning, the White Rabbit pulled us all down the rabbit hole and eventually through the little door.

There was enough plotline similarity to keep a general sense of the original stories, although the chess boards and card games became somewhat blended.

The 3D was surprisingly good after a few minutes in the 'real world' scenes to become adjusted. Not quite the MuppetVision of Disneyworld but a produced in way that was generally additive to the experience.

There were various Tim Burton trademark moments in the script and staging, including a funny little moment where the Mad Hatter (Depp) snipped a very Edward Scissorhandian little dress for Alice.

I enjoyed the experience of the film. There were a few Disney overloads in it like the strange dance that the Hatter performed close to the end of the film and which I think could have been safely edited out. I hear that Burton only finished it a couple of weeks before the premiere and as we sat in a cab after the film, there were a few comments about 'the director's cut' implying there might be some unfinished business in the final edit.

I've always enjoyed the Alice stories and thought this movie played a warm and affectionate update.

casino royalties

I mentioned a few days ago that I'd received my first royalty cheque from the novel 'The Triangle'. I also decided that I'd spend part of it precipitately, in keeping with the original spirit of the 'novel writing in a month' experiment.

So today's the day I gamble part of the cash.

Actually I've already done a small test gamble and am already a little bit ahead, so now I'm hoping I haven't used all of the luck.

In between my experiments in 3D later today, the casino had better watch out.