The Gnomedex 6.0 conference starts today at around 5pm GMT. There is an IRC channel and a webcast, which is audio and video.
The conference is just about to start…here’s what’s going on there…the calm before the storm.
Ask a Ninja: Net Neutrality.
I haven’t been listening to any Daily Source Codes since my ipod broke - 6th time now but the warranty seems to have just expired on this last one. I’ve been treating it as a DSC holiday which has actually been quite nice as I’ve been able to do read some books on my commutes.
I was looking at the shownotes for the last few shows and it seems that Adam has been talking about net neutrality quite a bit. Check out this show [skip to 19:50] and this show [skip to 6:55]. He seems to have quite a lot of experience in this field and it’s worth listening what he has to say. He is against the net neutrality bill. If I get time I will try to summarise his views later today.
CNet: “Senate panel narrowly rejected strict Net neutrality rules on Wednesday”.
A few days ago a big water pipe exploded under the road just near my house. We now have two enormous holes in the road and a little river. This morning the water supply had been cut off which meant no shower and perhaps more importantly no tea. 
I’ve ventured down to Upper Street and am having a nice lunch in a cafe. Great wireless! Turns out the whole of Upper Street now has free wireless in some Islington council initiative. They are calling it ‘Technology Mile‘. Two very enthusiastic thumbs up.
My cousin Deirdre Mulrooney is soon to start working for Cirque du Soleil in Montreal. She has a blog which I really hope she’ll start writting a little more on. I’d love to know what adventures she’ll be getting up to. Good luck with it Deirdre.
Today has been a tourist day - in my own town. I’ve been living in London nearly 10 years now and you can easily forget how beautifull it actually is. I went down to the Tate meuseum to have a look at some modern art. It’s really refreshing to do this every once and a while, it changes the way you look at things.
I took some tourist photos all along the river during my travels but it seems that flickr won’t play ball. It’s actually been doing this for around a week now and I’m starting to worry that there is something wrong with my account. Can you imagine loosing all you Flickr photos? I mean they’re all backed up but what a pain to find them and ontop of that all the links that would break in the blog…
Downloaded the Flickr uploader for Mac OSX. No joy with that either. Urrgh.
Andrew Gursky (Germany) had one photo which simply has to be seen in its full glory. It is called 99 Cent and is taken in a US store. He has digitally altered the colours so that they are far more vibrant than normal.
Other pieces that caught my eye were ‘Siena’ by Olivio Barbiera who takes arial photographs using tilt shift lenses to give the impression that everything is a scale model. Here is an example.
Magritte’s painting of the man reading the newspaper was there too. This is one of my favorites. The way he changes the perspective ever so slightly in each quadrant combined with the fact that the man only apears in the top left quadrant makes me just want to keep looking at it.
Magritte, a Belgian surrealist, apparently prefered quiet subversion over public action. If you know Belgium and its people well you might have seen this in its culture, a part of which has definitely rubbed off on me from my years there.
I’m not too sure of the legality of any of these pictures being on the blog so I’ll be happy to remove them if this is a problem. Just mail me.
Amanda Congdon does a piece [video] on net neutrality for Rocketboom.
Kevin Marks is interviewed [video] about net neutrality at Supernova. According to Kevin it’s more about net symetry. The idea that the telcos are trying to make us pay for their bad provisioning is interesting.
Tim Berners-Lee: “When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA” [real video of his statement].
Earlier I watched the film “Good Night, and Good Luck“. It stars David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow a pioneering Radio and TV presenter in 1950s America. It tells the true story of how Murrow then a journalist of the CBS network managed to expose Senator Joseph McCArthy over his communist “witch hunt” despite huge pressures from the government and advertisers to drop the story. A brilliant performance by Strathairn.
It is a dangerous thing indeed when any person or organisation of people have control over a powerfull medium of communication. The internet has so far managed to escape this fate, but this film was a reminder that we should keep a close eye on things else we could loose the freedom of things like blogging, vlogging and podcasting, and maybe only some years after they were made possible for all.
Edward R. Murrow from his speech at the RTNDA Convention, 1958:
“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful”.
Richard Bennet: “When BitTorrent is slowed down by backoff, it simply propagates more paths, creating more and more congestion. In another year, the Internet is going to be just as unstable as it was in 1985″.
Richard at times seems like a pretty angry guy, but sometimes you need an angry guy plus I wanted to find the other side of the argument. You can find all his posts on the subject of net neutrality here [there are lots!].
Slingshot is a new British film company that plans to “use the freedoms afforded by the digital revolution up and down the value chain to make better films and deliver them more efficiently”. They’ve been getting some press 
coverage in the Guardian and Varierty. They also have a blog and were wondering whether anyone was reading it. Well it looks like some people are.
Feeling sad? Well the Laughter Network might be just what you need!
Where the hell is Matt? I was thinking this just the other day. Funny.
The Cinema Expo 2006 kicked off yesterday in Amsterdam.
One of the nice things that came out of my brunch on Sunday was some great reader feedback. I’ve known Pete for around 5 years now and he’s been a reader of the blog from back when I didn’t even talk about digital cinema. At the time he told me that he liked my style of writing, that he found it quite engaging. What he’s noticed of late is that since I’ve taken to the digital cinema route, that not only is he finding it less interesting for him but that he doesn’t even understand a lot of the stuff I link to.
Why did I take to writing about things in my field of work?
One important aspect of having a blog is how it helps you to find out things about yourself. The simple act of writing on a regular basis about things that cross your path and catch your attention changes the way you look at the world. It makes you more curious, more engaged, more interested. It helps to structure your thoughts.
The idea behind giving dcinput a digital cinema direction was to help me explore my current field of work and discover where my interests lie within it. The world of cinema is in such an exciting period of change right now, the boundaries of what is possible are being pushed on a daily basis. Understanding and being interested in this ever-changing environment is of the up most importance.
Using the internet as a tool for finding information and the blog as a way of structuring that information in a way that is meaningful to me is certainly one aspect of the ‘why’. If this was the only reason for having a blog then why bother making it public? Why take the risk of saying the wrong thing and end up with an unhappy employer?
These changes are without a doubt happening on a global scale. The blog then is also a tool to get around the problem of large distances. You see with this blog I can join into the global community of people involved in digital cinema. I can for example find out what technologies are being talked about, what social changes are occurring, and I can take part in the conversation.
In many ways I am still trying to find this digital cinema community on the web. It may be that there simply are not many people from the industry using blogs in this way. I am hoping that this will change. Taking part in Bloggercon IV over the weekend have made me sure of the importance of this new medium.
Even if I have not found the community I am looking for just yet, blogging it seems has another trick up its sleeve. Seen in a bigger picture sense, blogging is perhaps the most useful and powerful as a tool for building bridges between communities. In this new digital age, fields that have traditionally progressed on their own are converging massively. A blog allows you to have a foot in many communities at once. It helps you to build bridges.
Shaping a Blog around reader feedback
Now that I’m on my way to understanding why I do this blogging thing in the first place, I’m going to try to take Pete’s comments on board. Over the last few months my busy work schedule has meant that simply linking to digital cinema related articles has been faster and easier than actually putting across my personal views on issues that matter. I find that most of the things I actually work on I can’t actually talk about for several months and are in any case of a pretty technical nature.
Over the next few months I am going to try to identify certain topics that are of concern to the digital cinema landscape as well as others that cross into other areas. I’ll then concentrate my exploration of the internet somewhat around these areas and write about them as I learn new things. Though you will certainly find me occasionally talking about some new geeky piece of hardware, I will also do my best to venture into themes like Net Neutrality, Intellectual Property and Copyright for instance. I welcome any suggestions!
Thanks again Pete, I really value your opinions.
Looks like the Frontier kernel is heading for a spot of performance tuning. I have certainly noticed peoples blogs on blogs.opml.org acting real slow lately. It’s one of the reasons I’ve decided to stay with Wordpress for the moment.
Rex Hammond has also been thinking about why he blogs: “remember that: The core product, the core brand is you and your cause and your product or service”.
The making money angle is interesting. Making money is definitely not something I am looking to do with this blog. I have no plans to put any advertising in the sidebar and I won’t be pushing any products. This blog belongs to me, only me, and I like it that way. It’s my tool to explore, to experiment, to learn and to communicate. I won’t compromise on this in any way. Ah-ha.
Wimbledon starts today!
This year it seems the officials all have new uniforms. Why do they remind me of Butlins? Also they will be feeding us strawberries with a side order of RSS.
Yesterday’s brunch was fantastic. American pancakes with maple syrup, scrambled eggs with chorizo, eggs benedict and all acompanied by a live piano music. I had the wrong address in yesterday’s post: you will find Aganovich here.
Alistair McClymont is doing nice things with audio and video.
U2 rock the house in second life.
Wired News: “But despite the 21st-century tools that put awesome publishing power in the hands of total novices, the blogger’s ultimate weapon is as old as the first storytellers who sat around prehistoric campfires”.
Today I’m off to have brunch with Pete and Nana from Aganovich & Yung. Their site seems to be down currently but this is the sort of things they do.
[Update: You can now find them at Aganovich]
I’ve been listening in to the live wecast for Bloggercon over the last couple of days. Very interesting in many ways. All the usual suspects are there in some shape or form: Dave Winer, Doc Searls, Robert Scobble etc etc.
I’m impressed by the technology. The fact that a conference can go on the other side of the planet yet I can listen to it live over the internet, on my lap top, in a cafe with wireless is great. The fact that I can also participate in some way through the IRC channel is even better [IRC is new to me and it’s been quite a challenge listening to the conference while reading and writing in there simultaneously!]. When you think that people all around the world are doing this, how great is that? Well I think it’s great.
Plus it looks like we’re all watching the Argentina - Mexico World Cup match.
They are calling this an unconference. The idea being that in the room at any one time there is more knowledge in the room than a panel of speakers can ever have. Everyone in the audience becomes a participant and a discussion leader walks around and guides the discussion.
Interesting session on Building Bridges. Made me think quite a bit.
Boris Johnson has a blog!
Kosso needs a VMware brain [from the IRC]: “we got football = bigbrother - SL and irc”
Geez i’m really finding this crazy multi-tasking hard. Listening to the webcast, writing on my blog and reading the IRC channel and watching the football, following URL links from the IRC. Does this get easier with practice. I bet the kids these days find this a doddle.
I’m going to try and find Kosso in second life at his RSS platform. Grrr it’s asking for me to download a new version of second life and for some reason it won’t download…
OK so I am now in Second Life (SL) on the RSS platform listening to Bloggercon live and direct to Real Life (RL). Weird. Kozzo seems to be somewhere else though I can see his avatar.
Oooh my poor powerbook is freaking out.
Me and Kosso are sitting around the fire on the RSS Platform listening to the Bloggercon webcast from within SL. Cum bah yah!
Some photos from Bloggercon.
Right enough of this shenanigans. I’m off to meet some real people in a real bar and actually chat to them. Might even have a beer and everything.
God is this the future?
AccessIT announces 4th quarter fiscal 4th quarter end of year results. Net losses it seems of $16,812,000.
Digital Cinema Matters: “For now, those shareholder seem happy to bankroll further losses in the hope of a bright and cash-flow positive digital future”.
I noticed that with the acquisition of PLX Systems, Access IT is taking its next step into the world of digital distribution and licensing of content. I’ve also noticed lots of .NET positions on the film job boards recently. Maybe they are hiring?
The first lot of photos from my school reunion are up thanks to Emily Cox…and another set from Liz Gosme! Surely that’s not me pretending to be drunk with Mick?!
The class of 1996.
Last night I went to my 10 year school reunion in Brussels. Around 40 people that I was in school with all those years ago turned up along with some teachers. Walking in to see everyone for the first time in a decade was truely one of the most surreal experiences of my life. It’s such a strange thing to come back into contact with people that you shared most of your childhood with. What a brilliant night.
Just about to head off to Germany to soak up some World Cup atmosphere with the Portugal Angola match and maybe a stein of beer or two.
