Hi all,
I'm nearing the end of my first week @ Square Donkey, I've watched hundreds of video clips on the internet, and all in all I'm pretty happy, going to embark on the mammoth task of getting the shortlisted clips onto DV, through a rather time consuming process of converting them (probably using iSquint) and them importing the MP4 clips into iMovie (cos for this I can't be arsed to faff around in FCP).
So what has it been like commuting up to London again. Pretty much the same as it was before, except I go straight into London Bridge and walk to the office rather than Victoria then tube to White City. There's the usual array of oddities on the train, which is always midly amusing for me (no doubt I'm mildly amusing for someone too).
Still getting into the routine of leaving Vic's flat at 8.00AM and getting back at 8.30PM (ish), plus would prefer to have my OWN flat, but hey :/
Lunches are not quite up to BBC standard, basically no roast dinners every day, first non M&S sandwich lunch was a rather tasty pastrami and colslaw granary bap from a deli on Borough High St. Although it reminded me that I should steer clear of cheap colslaw. :/
Still, I have been watching some awsome clips, although there's some shite ones too, but they won't get included. Have bunged a couple of Extreme ones in for good measure, see what the producers think eh? ;)
Speaking of Extreme, as I've been registering accounts with all manner of social video sites, expect to see ExtremeRetail all over the web once again pretty soon. ;)
Hi all,
Having just landed a job as a researcher at Square Donkey Productions on a pilot for a presenter-led clip show for one of the UK terrestrial channels, I'm sending out an appeal...
I need funny, interesting, weird and entertaining video clips, preferably that you've already uploaded to da net, or if you've found any good ones online send them to me as well (just let me know where you found them!!)
So if you have any, whatever they may be of or about, please send them in, either the clips themselves (I can cope with most formats) or even just a link to the webpage they're on, they may end up on telly!! ;)
contact@mattgrover.me.uk (not sure what my new work email will be yet)
Cheers all, take it easy
Matt
What a gorgeous couple of days!! Blazing sunshine, I've spent most of the afternoon mowing the lawns (they were long!) and the back of my neck feels suitably sore! ;)
So? What's new? I have a job interview tomorrow afternoon with a production company in London, Russ & Harv have decided they would like to contribute to the film review blog and I'm nearly out of Coke :/
Packing is progressing slowly for the big move, yep mum's in the process of moving, and thus since I currently live with her (!) I have to move too, just packed up most of my DVD's and the remaining CD's that weren't already boxed into what is one exceedingly heavy box now! Although everything is in a bit of a mess now and I look more transient than I already am!
click me.
I've encountered a lot of Austrailians recently, more than usual, maybe there's been a sudden influx of Aussies into southern England? I dunno, not that I have anything against Aussies, I just seem to have met more than I usually do...the things I pick up on eh?
What else over the past week then? Oh yeah, I'm unemployed again. Damn. Finished at Ricochet on Friday, so currently looking for some more work, been applying for a few things via Production Base, but nothing's come back yet (they don't know what they're missing out on). So fingers crossed I get something before I run out of cash eh?
2nd review added to my film review blog, thinking of bigger things for it, but we'll see how that goes ;)
Please do, check out and subscribe to my new blog The Matte Reviews (mattereviews.blogspot.com).
Basically, I've set it up to post little reviews of the various films that I watch, as I watch a fair few and always have some sort of opinion on them ;)
Well, it had to happen at some point, my final day at Ricochet.
Not a bad stint, a little over 7 months, will I be back? I guess that's up to the powers that be within Ricochet. I've enjoyed working here, it's in a good location for me, and hey, it's pretty much what I want to be doing!
What am I going onto next? God knows!! I haven't got a job lined up, have been applying for stuff but nothing's materialised yet, so a whole load of CV sending, phone calls n stuff is coming up. I'm doing a workshop/course, run by DFG London tomorrow, should be good and another string to the bow (I hate that phrase) as it were.
So a final day of going through the papers of a morning, something which you discover many things. Not nessecarily the things you'd expect, for instance; Lots of journalists are stupid.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are many intelligent journalists (and proof readers, see example) out there, but there are also plenty of real stupid ones.
The example from today's (damn didn't note it down..who's stupid now eh!!)
Written by Stephen Castle (in Belgium), the headline "Pole held for 'MP3 murder' that shocked Belgium". Basically a guy was mugged then stabbed around 15 times I think it was "after refusing to give up his MP3 at Central Station in Brussels".
Which MP3 was it? Toxic by Britney Spears? or the latest Ricky Gervais podcast perhaps? Maybe the mugger forgot his flashdrive or didn't have bluetooth to transfer the file and got frustrated? Apologies to those of you who are a little upset at this piss take of a tragic situation, but I hope you see my point. Journalism is supposed to report the facts (i won't get started on that rather heavy issue), schoolboy mistakes like this make it sound like it was written by a senile pensioner (no offence to senile pensioners), with no grasp of modern technology.
Either that or the guy was being mugged for an MP3 :/
And as a very special Easter gift, a couple more videos have been added to the Extreme Retail Video Archive on YouTube!!!
The Star Wars Short has been added as has Spider AARRGH!
I'm going thru the other vids that I've got to see what else I can upload. Unfortunatly the recent Extreme Retail : Season 2 Episode 3 cut that I did, seems to have vanished into the ether, so I'm gonna have to re-cut that (in Windows Movie Maker..joy :/ ) and try again. That will be the last official episode of Extreme Retail.
I have to say, I'm starting to warm to the idea of running Win XP and OS X on the same machine, which is wrong!
Initially I was like, no way! Being able to dual-boot a mac, sure it's cool, but I'd rather have a seperate PC to run Windows on, but I'm gradually being swayed. I'm currently eyeing a 20" iMac as my next computer purchase and being able to ditch my ageing 750MHz K6 PC in favour of having one computer is pretty cheers.
Plus I REALLY want Age of Empires III, which; a)isn't available for mac, and b)would cripple my PC.
I think the thing that would really swing it for me and I think could make a cool addition to Leopard would be to integrate the whole Boot Camp thing into fast user switching, THAT would be cool! w00t!
I know most people want virtualisation, which would also be pretty cool, it all depends on what u want to run. For running Windows apps that aren't available on OS X, or in a situation like at the moment, where there isn't yet a universal binary for Photoshop (et al), virtualization is fine, but full on games, if they're Windows only, it'd be easier (and probably better performace wise) to boot into Windows for them, if you can do that without completely re-booting the machine CHEERS!
Well well well, after getting on for nine years now, I have finally got back behind the wheel of a car, in this case an AA driving school Ford Focus.
Finally getting back into driving lessons (just booked a block of 10) and hopefully getting rid of the career frustrating thorn that is the lack of "Full, clean driving licence" on my CV.
I took to it surprisingly well, it is like riding a bike, you never forget (that basics at least), sure I'm not 100% comfortable in it yet, but it's a simple case of getting used to the responsiveness of the brake & gas and being comfortable again with powering this bloody great hunk of metal up and down Britain's roads.
The instructor was impressed anyway. Thinks that it shouldn't take much to get me up to the right standard again, and next week's lesson will be taking a nice drive out of town.
Let's hope I pass the bloody test this time!!!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY JIM!
Don't u just hate it when toilets back up and flood the bathroom, causing sever water damage to the celing of the flat below?
Yeah, me too :/
Still an eventful few days, think I've missed several phone calls which may have been possible work..damn. Had my overdraft increased to £2,250, which is just wrong! And bought a whole assortment of cool stuff, cheers :)
Right, I'm off to check the lottery numbers, I could be a millionaire and not realise!! (uhuh)
I've been working in tv since last May, and at long last I have had my first broadcast credit.
Last night, Channel 4, Selling Houses Abroad, I got my Junior Researcher credit as promised (unlike the other Selling Houses!), twas quite a good programme as well ;) followed up by Grand Designs (I didn't work on this one), which as far as I'm concerned is the don of property programmes!
After recently browsing the Open Source Weblog, (randomly as I was checking out some of the links from the TAUW) I came across a post of theirs about a Firefox extension called Foxspose.
Simply put, cheers! Mac users out there will know the wonders of Expose in OSX, it's basically the same thing but for Firefox. At the click of a button, which I had trouble finding at first as it's down on the bottom left on the status bar instead of on the toolbar where I thought it'd be :/, it allows you to see all the open tabs in FF, handy if you've got loads and loads of tabs open, which I have done whilst researching on various things.
Basically I'm well impressed with this little (8k) extension, definitly worth getting for all Firefox users.
After spending a few weeks on development, I'm getting a much broader knowledge of what's going on in the world and it seems to me that:-
Life gives you cancer
There are a stupid number of things that are said to give you cancer (I'm wondering if there's a definitive list) and I'm wondering how this all came about, may look into the history of cancer as it's quite an intregueing subject.
Also I'm tempted to spend £1m on this lovely little town in CA, USA that's up for auction on ebay! Cheers.
What an offer! macZot! are offering, what appears to be a top notch little app (the afformentioned AppZapper), and something that I personally think OS X desperately needs, for FREE, well it will be when they get 259 blogs to link to their site.
So A) I'm giving them a link and B)I'll be angling for a copy! ;)
One of the (few) things that has bugged me since I started using OS X over a year ago now, is the lack of any sort of uninstallation (which unfortunatly Windoze has, albeit not 100% reliable, it's more than OSX has got!). Sure if you know where to look you can delete everything an app leaves behind, the same as you can with any OS, but personally I'd like an easier way! ;)
Anyway, check em out and if you have a blog, give em a link!
Matt's not happy! >:(
Ok there was a few seconds of what I shot, which was about what I was expecting, were was my bloody credit?!?!?
Next week, is the first Selling Houses Abroad (Housetrapped), I'd better be bloody credited on that, mainly cos I worked on it for over 4 months and that the Portugal story was mine!
So yes, I'm grumpy.
Selling Houses, tonight on Channel 4 at 8pm!
hopefully it'l l be my first broadcast credit (see makeover stuff a few posts back) and maybe even some footage i shot too!!
If not, I'm gonna be horribly embarrassed and a tad pissed off.
Seems like the French are a bit pissed don't it?
Went and saw Hostel on the weekend, it's alright, not as good as Cabin Fever in my opinion, nor is it as good as Saw II, that I watched last night and was most entertaining.
Got to see Slither tho, that looks damn good! ;) Proper stupid horror film, last good one of those was Eight Legged Freaks, so bring it on!
Why is my bloody net connection so slow?!? >:( dammit.
Anyway...I've got a big old pack of Wine Gums, I'm gonna watch Seven Samurai in a bit (I might even have a choc ice!)
I'm currently having to use every little bit of will-power I can muster at the moment to stop myself using my shiny new Virgin credit card to purchase myself a shiny new iMac... i must be strong...god I want a new mac...I can technically afford a Quad-G5 at the mo :/ this ain't funny!
life is so unfair..still party on!
Ok, after viewing them... his films in order of greatness (IMHO).
Happy birthday to Greg!!
I have to say, this CSS lark is confusing the buggery out of me.
I'm getting there but I think it's been far too long since I last properly coded anything, my logical-code understanding mind has gone to mush. I've changed the links in the sidebar for del.icio.us links, and tried to get the style to match the rest of the blog, can't seem to get the link font right tho :/
At this rate I doubt I'll be completely re-vamping the look of this thing!!