Ed Wilde

Interesting doc-music-video detailing the production and stories behind The Beatles legendary tune A Day In The Life. Fascinating how much of it comprised of little 'accidents' which could never happen in today's recording process, but culminate to make the track truly genuine and authentic. [via Cynical-C]

This was the first of the three week movies given to us in the second year of my degree. Why is it called a three week movie? because we only had three weeks to plan, shoot and edit them. If memory serves, the brief was completely open...just create a 5 minute movie about anything. We spent AGES (at least a third of the overall time) in a little room on the top floor of one of the technology towers (less impressive than they sound) thrashing out what the movie would be about, what would theme it and what kind of music should accompany it. I cant actually remember how, most likely it was the least hated theme in the group. But we settled on using a £10 note as the theme...as we could really make a movie about anything then, since all it had to do was contain a tenner. The plot then thickened into a day-in-the-life of a tenner, and finally about how it could be used for good or evil and the meaning behind money being reflective of the intent of the carrier. After brainstorming, story-boarding and (on my part) being in various locations taking pictures of £10 notes in odd locations, I still cant remember why. We decided that we really wanted to take video of harmon house (pictured), a great mirrored building in central uxbridge. And it would be a good excuse to get up really early and take some dawn-video of the sun rising in the reflections of the mirrored glass. Loosely tied to the prefix of the beginning the day of the subject of the video. As you may be starting to guess (if you haven't already seen the video) this was created in a shot-centric manner (we made the movie fit around the shots we wanted to take, rather than any storyline). But hey! It was the first time we were let loose with a whole load of really expensive cameras and equipment..of course we will go a little wild... One of the background stories during the filming of the video, was that the preliminary shots of Harmon House were taken on the day that the US invaded iraq. So me turning up, in a battered, old volvo, at 4am taking photos of the building, wearing sunglasses and leather gloves, then driving away at speed as I had forgotten to bring the tape to film on, kinda spooked the security guards. When we returned to film a few hours later and setup two large cameras with tripods (on public property). The security came out and told us we couldn't film here, once they were certain we weren't going to combust anything, pah! As always the reason of 'security' was actually a veil for the owners not wanting video of their building to be used for commercial purposes...fair enough, we just had to get a note telling them this. I seem to remember this wasn't that hard, and that they didn't even look at the note we produced... The next in the list of shots we wanted to get was a bunch of trickshots in a bar...this was pretty good fun, the smoke was generated with many uninhaled cigerrettes which almost killed the star of the show as the trick shots didn't always work, and each shot needed a fresh blast of smoke to make it look authentic. The most impressive shot was the full table pot, bouncing off the cushion...this probably took about 30 mins to get, probably upwards of 40 takes...I lost count after a while and just left the camera recording...It was only after we got the shot that we realised it made no sense, as the ball he was avoiding was the same colour as the one being potted...ah well! Then to finish, the classic poker, liqueur and drugs shot. Where the star of the show sucks sherbert in through a rolled up £10. (bought from me in a mens room at uni, needless to say some of the other patrons were a little surprised to see two girls filming two guys passing small bags of white powder around in a toilet stall). This project was a lot of fun, the result is somewhat humorous. The post production stage was the first time I had ever done any video editing, as well as the first time I had ever used premiere, I still think it didn't come out badly, since we just had a bunch of random shots to glue together with video of shoes walking. In final days before the project was due to be handed in we came up with the title, every student needs to make a crazy movie with a latin title we thought...we chose In Metum Argentum (what we thought meant 'the love of money', I never bothered checking at the time but a quick glance at an online latin dictionary suggests it actually means, 'the fear of money'...not all that dissimilar, really).

(pt.1 here) (pt.2 here) (pt.3 here) Well, this is the one I chose...the xda mini s or HTC Wizard as it is also known. To summerise, this is a very nice phone with all the built in functionality one could hope for, stunningly let down by abysmal software. Let me give you an example: To make a phone call. Bearing in mind, this is a device sold in mobile phone shops, not computer shops. It is supposed to be a phone first, and a pda second. Phone is an application, it must be executed and closed like an application. It (like most windows mobile applications) suffers from numerous bugs and design flaws. I have only had it a week, already phone has crashed during a call (when the phone crashes, the on/off switch ceases to work, battery must be removed), irritating! So, to make a phone call, one must first open the 'phone' application, sometimes this works by pressing the green 'call' hardware button (great!) but not always. Sometimes pressing this button gives you your contacts, sometimes it does nothing except light up in pretty green. I wonder if one day I will be able to predict what response pressing this button will give. The second problem with this phone, believe me there are too many to go through here, is the support. There is NO mac support for the o2 xda mini s, none...nothing from microsoft, nothing from apple, nothing (as yet) from any 3rd party. Apparently the reasoning for this is that microsoft 'improved' the security in WM5 which broke iSync and the 3rd party offerings (pocketmac and missingsync) to the extent that they have to go back to the drawing board to sync. The os has been out since last april and still nothing...thats pretty bad if you ask me. Ok, I can put up with only using my pc and bluetooth. Ha! I connect a bluetooth serial port, go through the rigmarole of pairing and...no connection. I must also point out that the activesync program has sound effects while trying to find a device (arrrg!). Now I am somewhat irritated, but hardly surprised, so I connect the supplied usb cable to the back of the pc... 'installing drivers', 'device is ready to use', zonealarm tells me i have a new network...fzzt! The Pc resets itself. The pc also refuses to boot while the phone is connected... So, I cant sync with a mac, I cant sync with the pc...what do i do? I try virtual pc, nope...I try safe-mode, nope...I try different versions of activesync, nope...all have the same effect of driver wont start or just straight crash. Beginning to run out of ideas, I installed the dreaded XP sp2 on a spare partition. Thank-god, finally a sync through usb...it really shouldn't be this hard! With regards to the phone itself, it isnt that bad...well, I am getting used to it anyway. The buttons on screen are usually too small to press with a finger, so the stylus has to be brought out, nerdlyness ensues. There is something about using a mobile device and a stylus, just needs black-rim glasses fixed with sticky-tape to complete the image really. The camera seems to actually be worse (although higher resolution) than the 7650 (the very first phone with a camera). The lens is almost useless in low light conditions. The flash/light on the camera is actually pretty useful as a torch, useless for images as it really seems to make no difference in any other condition except pitch-black. The wifi is kinda cool, only 802.11b though. IE for mobile is ok, it sort of does what you need in a mini browser. I tried opera mobile 8.5, it seems largely the same as IE, except with an irritating 'this will expire in 40 days' screen. The wifi connection is relatively stable, it sometimes has trouble getting an ip address (I have had this on three separate networks, so i am sure it is the phone not the individual dhcps), range is pretty good too...even found a couple of networks my powerbook couldn't see. Such a shame the gprs is prohibitively expensive. Bluetooth seems to be even more temperamental that the 7650, sometimes it works and can sent to the powerbook/pc, sometimes it just doesn't want to play. I would guess this is some kind of ms-patched-to-death security fix... By far the most entertaining part about Windows Mobile 5 is the message you get when you shut-down the phone

Warning: Device will be off,and may lose some data. Do you want to continue?

Damn, those are some confident programmers...simply powering down the phone may delete all of your contacts, images, themes. It probably doesn't mean this, but how can you be sure? To a new user this could be pretty freaky...well, if they actually read it. Windows also seems to have lost the ability to actually close programs. You think I am joking? In windows mobile 5, pressing the x in the top right corner, no longer closes, it minimizes/hides the active window. This is terrible, especially when there isnt a task-switcher easily accessible. I dont know whether this is some kind of ill-fated implementation of the osx style of application management or what, but after a couple of hours of twiddling with the phone you have to go into task manager to shutdown all of the programs you have used. I can see the novice user having great problems with this...as the memory gets used up, the phone gets slower and slower... Luckily, I am not the only person who has had these problems...after following advice on various forums, I removed the o2 'active' software, this improved the phones performance by about 50%. I also discovered a couple of programs which deserve to be packaged with every copy of WM5, the first is called spb PocketPlus. It fixes the ghastly task manager problems, it creates a nice customisable shortcut collection and monitors collection on the desktop (or today screen as it is known) and does all sorts of other useful things in the background too. The second is a cool voice-recognition software called fonix voicedial, it basically allows you to do almost any phone operation by voice only and it actually works, first time, with no training...great! I think I have vented enough annoyances about the phone...so what does it do well? Well, it looks pretty :) The qwerty keyboard is surprisingly easy to use for txting and emailing, it is quite strange to know where the keys are when typing with thumbs though. A nice feature is that txt messages are displayed on screen for a few seconds when you receive them...just enough to quickly read them without having to go through the process of opening etc...The contacts list is nicely organised, and the search is quick and comprehensive. The battery life is good, my first trial lasted for 48hrs with no charge to take it down to about 10% battery, certainly better than my old phone. Just a shame that the only docks available for this phone are plug ugly. Looking back on my list of things I wanted to be able to do...after a week of usage I am at 6/15. I can connect through wifi, connect through gprs (for £2.32 per megabyte, urk!), send photos to flickr via flickr email (not ftp yet although it is possible), blog via email, vibrate (duh), tetris (yet to find a copy which isnt crap though). I reckon there is software that will do voip, but I have heard it isn't great. If only I could sync with the mac... All-in-all, I am relatively happy with the phone, after a week of usage I am learning windows little foibles. One thing I must add though, is that the phone/pda market really is ripe to be iPodded. All it will take is for some company (hopefully apple, this tuesday) to release a stylish, easy to use mini pda running some well designed, pretty software and they will completely take over the market. Windows mobile would not be any competition, they are on their 5th version of the operating system and it is still dire...they wont get it right anytime soon and Linux is still in the theoretical stage of development.

This shot from Time magazine depicts a typical day in the office for Al Gore. What a shame screen-real-estate doesn't influence elections. [via blackrimglasses]

Well, every other blogger is rapidly installing the new OSX and blogging about it, so I thought I would do the same?nothing like conformity is there? Just for those non-geeky or Windows fanatics who really cant understand what the fuss is about, I couldn?t either when I when I was a PC-only person, the OSX tiger upgrade is kinda the reverse of Windows SP2 downgrade. Instead of breaking a bunch of stuff and removing functionality and compatibility with their own applications, apple chose to actually improve their system...and did it pretty well.

Install was a little worrying (since my original panther disks are over 100miles away) especially when it locked up on the first boot, then hung for a few minutes on the second. I am guessing now, since it is working fine that this was spotlight doing the rounds. Spotlight is a native search which is hardcoded into the os and filesystem, rather than hunting through your disk file by file every time you want to find something, it keeps a metadata-base which allows for far faster searching. For example, I have 1,2013 files which contain the characters ?and?...it listed them in just under 20 seconds. I think this was sort of what windows was aiming at when they put disk indexing into ntfs volumes, except like most windows ideas, it didn?t really work.

Dashboard is great fun, and the widgets are painfully easy to make, made my first one on the same day I installed the os...this does lead me to believe that there are going to be a plethora of superb widget ideas by this time next year, at the moment they are really just going through the standard ideas which konfabulator has had for a while. I do have some ideas for widgets I would like to make in the future, although for the most part they are simply to make my life easier, rather than be useful to others...but who knows...

Haven?t played with automator yet (a kind of macro-maker for os/program actions), although I have heard it is pretty powerful. I expect my first one will be something to take this text out of word and plug it on the blog, cant imagine that would be terribly difficult...

I do think that apple has been a little cynical is generally replacing popular applications with in-built ones. konfabulator is the obvious one, dashboard completely blows it out of the water in terms of speed, as well as ease of creating widgets. Spotlight really seems to replace Quicksilver, especially since it took it?s keyboard shortcut too. I am still not sure whether I prefer quicksilver for finding applications though, it is a little faster than spotlight for this, as spotlight looks for everything.

I also have some peeves with tiger, generally most people love it and I haven?t really seen many negative comments about it. Well...I am gonna be negative for a while...first, and most irritating, every time I switch to the mac using the kvm switch a little wizard pops up asking me to identify my keyboard, this is horribly windows-esq. panther seemed to recognise it fine...the new iSync util is bugging too, it now demands that I install an application on my phone to sync with it, and the application is HUGE (in phone terms) and is now the biggest app on there, 4 times bigger than the one which controls winamp and all it does is allow for functionality which I already had. The Wi-Fi seems more unstable than before, after sleeping it sometimes cant find my adhoc network. Actually I cant really think of any other significant peevs, other than the fact that everything is slightly slower and I seem to be able to crash firefox much more easily than before...I am putting both of those down to my lazy upgrade installation, rather than a prim and proper format install.

All in all, I would say that tiger does pretty much everything that a paid-for operating system upgrade should do. It adds enough features to put a bit of a thrill into using it, as well as lays the groundwork for some very innovative ideas and ways of working.

Imagine if windows was this exciting...

Seems a lot of people who rushed out yesterday to buy half-life2 (along with halo2, probably one of the most anticipated games of 2004) are not allowed to play the game yet.

Valve, the games producers put in a special anti-piracy protection which forces people to register online before they can play the game. Unfortunately they underestimated how many people would want to register on the first day...and subsequently all their servers crashed from over-population

oh dear, guess the only way around it is to use the emulator which has already been used to put the game into the newsgroups.

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