No, not the BBC programme, but me, going thru my stuff that's in my mum's loft prior to moving, to sort and break it down into 3 categories..
1. Keep
2. Ebay
3. Bin
And there are some gems let me tell you!! A whole host of Games Workshop stuff, a BBC Model B, a train set, some really bad ties, a shitload of random computer parts, 123 3.5" cover disks etc etc, I keep so much crap!
I often wonder what it'd be like to have a ninja machine that can suck the very life-force from entities around it (such as a PowerMac Quad G5 with 8Gb of RAM), I ponder this whilst waiting 20 minutes for my iBook to render an 1m40s After Effects project.
The PC is dead, long live the Mac!
Well kinda, I've finally unplugged my PC and am currently 100% Mac based!! :D This will change, when (after the move) I set up my PC again, so I have a printer & scanner again, but for now I'm wallowing in Mac happiness!
And I've started on the blinging road to pimping out the Powermac, I've ordered a new Pioneer DVD burner (fingers crossed that it will actually work, indications are that it'l be ok!), a 160Gb internal HDD and SATA card.
Basically I've spent too much money over the past week. I've still yet to get the FW800 card and ADC-VGA adapter :/ then the other options are, get another external HDD (probably a LaCie d2 250Gb as a scratch disk and use my existing 160Gb for other data (sound samples etc)), possibly upgrade the graphics card and finally the possibility of a processor upgrade, although that is rather expensive, and for the cost an upgrade I could probably buy a faster G4 Powermac off ebay! I think I'll see how I go with that one.
At the moment, it goes pretty good, rendering in FCP4 is painful, but, that's only cos I'm working on something with several effects and have to re-render each time I make an adjustment, cheers :/
It'll be interesting to see how After Effects gets on when I get it installed on here, mainly how it compares, rendering time wise, to my iBook, if it's about the same I'll be happy.
When we do move and I start to get everything set up again, I hope I have enough room and power points!! There's gonna be a lot of kit...
* Powermac
* Monitor 1
* Monitor 2
* Ext. HDD 1
* Ext. HDD 2
* Behringer Mixer
* Speakers
* DV Camera/Deck
* TV (for output until I get a broadcast monitor)
* PC
* Monitor
* Printer
* Scanner
Then theres the...
* PS2
* iBook
* mobile phone
* Marshall bass amp (& fx pedals)
* Paper shredder
Hopefully I'll be able to put the wireless router in another room...Hell yeah! :/
Lunch in a tiny burger bar, cheese burger n chips. To be honest, it wasn't bad, obviously you can't expect too much, but for £2.99, it was an ok lunch.
Apparently some of the buses up here are fuel cell powered, which i find a bit odd, haven't seen anything fuel cell powered before, i don't even know what exactly a fuel cell is! :/
i'm sure i'll forget to look it up. Got an email reply from an old friend from school this morning too, which is nice :) Hi Tina :)
WHY OH WHY OH WHY?!? Has it been sooo difficult to get hold of a new TV for Vic??
I'm guessing cos she's going for a cheap 28" 4:3 CRT rather than a "super bastard plasma screen" but still, surely it should have been easier than trapesing round Sussex for a day with no joy and eventually me ordering one online from a rather shady looking website via Froogle, who's customer service I now come to regard as utter shite! Last time I buy something through Froogle!
Now I've eventually got them to deliver it when they said they were going to (after giving in and paying out another £8 for a different courier), lets see if it turns up and works eh? If not I'm not gonna be fucking happy.
Rant over, on a plus note, for lunch , I've just had a rather good jacket potato, cheers.
How come? Richard at Square Donkey very very kindly gave me his old PowerMac G4 (Qucksilver) and the two Sony CRT monitors that go with it (but I've yet to get them home), so A big big THANKYOU to Richard!
I've set it up at home to check it out, give it the once over and run a software update on it and to be honest, I'm very tempted to unplug my PC entirely and just run the PowerMac and my iBook, until such time I can set both up (probably after the move), of course this buggers me for printing stuff at home as I only have an old HP Deskjet 690C, with a parallel connection (I can't be arsed to get a converter as i want a laser printer anyway).
There is something comforting about seeing MacOS X on my Evesham monitor, I'm also surprised as to how good the PM's internal speaker sounds, considering it's an internal speaker!
One of the main issues at the mo with it, is that it's running MacOS 10.2.8 (Jaguar) because it's got Avid Xpress DV 3.5 installed which won't run on anything newer :/ Now here's the quandry, I want to run Avid, so I can learn the interface and get some experience cutting with it (Avid FreeDV just isn't the same), but I also want to run FCP 4.5, which needs 10.3.2 at least. Damn. (Plus the lack of Expose has already caught me out once!)
However, it feels surprisingly nippy. It's got an 800MHz G4 (slower than my iBook) and a generous 1.25Gb of RAM, which is clearly helping it along. It's got an ATI graphics card in there, but I'm not sure which model (has both DVI & VGA outputs), 40Gb HDD and, I believe, a Combo Drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW), although I have yet to test that to check (I know it's not a DVD writer as iDVD refused to open).
So, I'm looking into how much I can pimp this by, eg: Processor upgrade, optical drive upgrade, add HDD's, graphics upgrade, FW800, and also I'm pretty sure OS X allows you to boot from and external drive, which may be the answer to my FCP4.5 issue, but I'll have to check.
I'm typing this on the PM at the mo, in Firefox, the stripyness of the Jaguar interface is a tad odd, but it's very responsive. It also has an Airport card in there, cheers!, it's an original card I',m guessing as I had to change my router settings to Mixed to allow both 802.11g & b, as the PM wouldn't connect initially.
If I'm honest here, da da da da daaa I'm lovin it! L8r.
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).
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 :/
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!!!
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!