Pressure Valve

On a sunny weekend in early April 2009, The Middlemen assembled to make a film; an entry for the Sci Fi London 48 Hour film challenge.

We were given as our pre-requisites:

Title Pressure Valve

Dialogue I do not speak your language and you don't speak mine

Prop Five ring doughnuts

This is what we made:

(best full screen, and HQ of course)

Pics in Use

Goodness, but it's been a while!
Note to self : if you're going to pay for the hosting of a blog site, then it's probably a good idea to use it...

For starters and by way of a little piece of news - the people at Schmap, who produce online travel guides asked me very nicely if they could use one of my pictures on their site. It's to illustrate the Lloyd's of London building in the City. They found the picture via Flickr after I took one during London OpenHouse and posted it to my photostream.

You can see how they make use of it here.

BBC Ood

Here's something new that I have made. It's a variation on a theme of other stuff I have made, but after watching Planet of the Ood a couple of weeks back, this was a sequence which leapt out as needing this treatment:




UPDATE
If you can't see the embeded video above, then try this direct link to YouTube.

As an aside - YouTube really make it difficult to add widescreen content. Sort it out YouTube!

Fame part two, on TWO

In the continuing story of the spread of my spoof BBC ONE ident, one of my You Tube watchers has just pointed out that the BBC TWO website are linking to it now.

It's here - at the bottom of the page under 2-turn.
At least for now.

Yay!

Fame

Well - a little anyway. It seems my washing machine BBC1 ident has made it into the Media Guardian (under Tuesday's entry).

Yay me.

One Day in History

Today, October 17th, is the day of One Day in History. The idea is for a collection of blog-posts all written today and with a slant towards a historical theme, to be collected together and recorded in the British Library to give a national snapshot of our historical musings.

Here's my contribution:

Family history has, co-incidentally, been on my mind on and off over the last week or so. It's probably seeing "Who Do You Think You Are" on the telly that has prompted me to do some digging of my own.

It's always the case with this kind of project that you wish you made a start when some older relatives were still alive to remember - my gran, on my dad's side, in particular, especially as she was the only real link with the past on that side of the family apart from my dad himself. There are so many things about family history that I’ve just taken as read that I want, now, to discover if they are true or not. It is probably likely, for instance, that my family is originally from Wantage in Oxfordshire and has a history there going back a thousand years or so at least. It’s what I’ve always been told but I don’t just what to know the where’s, but the who’s too. Wantage was, an important Saxon town and the birthplace of King Alfred, so it’s not out of the question. It’s certainly pre-Norman.

I’ve made a small start, something which is a lot easier now so many documents and records are accessible online. It means I don’t have to traipse off to Kew, or wherever, to do this kind of thing. At least for now. However I still have a lot of gaps to fill before I can reliably start working from the online census records. As these are kept secret and locked-away under the 100 year rule I have to get at least back that far, a good few generations, before finding named ancestors. It doesn’t help that several of them had a habit of using their middle-name for every-day use, and so not being known by their recorded name. This is where living relatives’ knowledge could have been useful.

I have had a dip into the online census records and found some likely candidates, but I do need clarification. I should head back to see my parents in a couple of weeks to look through their pile of old bits and pieces. I may get some names from that and if not then assuming I have some success with this I can add names and flesh-out lives of people in them. We have several that go back getting on for 80 to 100 years. So just another 900 years to go!

Washing Themes

Time for blowing my own trumpet again. I blogged last week that the BBC were updating their BBC1 continuity idents, and how pleased I was that the dancers were being dropped. Well I spent part of this last weekend doing my own version. There's a small flash version to see here. I'm quite pleased with the way this turned out, although the fact I haven't managed to YouTube it in widescreen rather than 4:3 is annoying.

Spider Watch

In the on-going saga of the transformation of my flat to some kind of small-game wildlife reserve, here are the latest two ugly brutes caught in the last few days. I'll probably find David Attenborough behind the bookshelf next!

Menagerie

There's something about this time of year which makes spiders find my home increasingly attractive. At the moment I seem to be particularly afflicted by a large number of these (see pic) beasties - something I always called a Wolf Spider, as a kid, but which I now know to be the Greater European House Spider. Either way I hate the bastards. This isn't in a phobic kill-it-now way, but just in the sense that I'd just rather not share my house with them. I'm finding and chucking out-doors one or two of these each day, rather than coming across one every few months, so it is rather unwelcome. I'm also left wondering just what they're finding to eat in my house that's getting them quite so large and fat. I suppose I should be grateful they're gobbling up whatever crawly-things they're partial to, but I'm finding it hard to see things that way.

BOOM!

Been a bit offline recently as my PC decided to blow-up after I attempted installing new DIMMs to expand the memory. Windows XP took great exception to it and threw a huge wobbly.

While I've managed to get it just about running again things are very sluggish and nursing back to health is taking much longer than I would like. Plug and Play? My Arse! It always happens when you've promised things to people too...

Anyway - things working just about well enough for me to record the brilliantly poingnant <DOCTOR.WHO> in an exciting adventure with some nostalgia. Which is just as well as my magic space box decided not to record it and Mr 0tralala will be pestering me for a look-see in the next day or so.