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Was doing a search on my computer today and happened upon these... all screenshots from my computer thirteen years ago.
As I have mentioned before I am no stranger to the 'hoard everything' party. In fact.. I may just be on the board of Directors. I have to say though, sometimes it's pretty cool when you find stuff like this.
Continue reading "Screenshots from my 1995 computer" »
For any budding entrepreneurs out there, Seedcamp is Europe's answer to Y! Combinator in the States, and is a way to get seed funding in return for a small stake in your business.
This year's Seedcamp applications are now open, and the deadline for applications is August 10th. While you don't need to be a UK business, you will need to confirm you can move to London between September to November this year.
For key dates and a full application guide, head on over to the Seedcamp website.
Anyone who knows me knows I'm a bit of a hoarder... three storage units and counting, I really need to find time to go through some of that stuff.
Well this little clearout won't make much of a dent in that but the very fact I've managed to drag myself to throw anything away is a step in the right direction.
Have decided I really do no longer have any need for a 33.3 modem card for a PC, a 1990's Mac SCSI adaptor and a broken PC video card. Oh yeah, I haven't lived permanently in North America for 7 years so some of my US power cables get the chop too.
Tech cathartism!
Wikipedia has a detailed and long post on the subject of profanity. Reading through it I came across this classic section...
"A profane word in one language often sounds like an ordinary word in another; such words are called false friends. Fuck sounds like the French words for "seal" (phoque) and jib (foc), the Spanish words for "seal" (foca) and lightbulb (foco) or the Irish word for "words" (focail), as well as the Latin and Romanian words for "do" ("I do" can be facio in Latin or fac eu in Romanian, which sounds a lot like the English "fuck you"). Arabic for "think" sounds just like "you fucker". Also, the Croatian word fakat sounds similar to the English "fuck at" when it actually means "factually". "Fuck" also sounds like the Latin imperative singular form of "do" or "make" (fac) and the Swedish word for "union" (fack); shit sounds somewhat like the Russian for "shield" (щит).
Continue reading "Swear words and other languages" »
We all suffer from it - email overload. It just keeps coming and coming...
I thought I'd delve into this and find out just how much time I spend dealing with the never ending digital flow... These are my stats for 2007*
So in other words, I spent 11 weeks out of my year dealing with 100 incoming messages a day, and writing 10 emails. This probably doesn't include the time spent thinking about a response or whatever.
I think we really need to have a global nom@il day. And soon please!
If you'd like to send me an e-mail about this...
*Figures derived from Eudora
We did some work today at WorldTV which showed that 5% of our users are Twitter users.
Not many people know this but my dad played a role in Stanley Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange'. As an actor he appeared in a lot of different roles, but for me, as a teenager growing up, nothing ever quite beat the 'cool' factor of his association with this movie.
I'd not watched it for a long time, but tonight, my wife and I sat through it, and I was reminded again of just how brilliant a movie it really is.
The part my father plays is a small one, but memorable. He plays the role of 'The Tormenter', the guy who when Alex, the protagonist, is being shown to an audience to be reformed, appears on stage and abuses him, punching him in the chest and pushing him to the ground. He then makes Alex lick his boots.
As I was watching the movie I began wondering where a lot of the locations were that they used to shoot the film. When it got to my dad's part, I wondered where the auditorium was that they used for that scene.
Rewind a few hours to earlier today and I was driving out to Heathrow to meet Ashley my business partner. I figured I'd scoot round the M25 to Terminal 4, but just before I got there, I heard a traffic report saying there'd been a terrible accident. I exited the motorway just in time, and began working my way through the weird no-mans land that is north-west of the airport - an area I'd never in my life driven through before. I ended up driving through the town of Uxbridge and for some reason noticed and made a strange mental note of Brunel University, something I had heard of before but never knew where it was.
Fast forward again to about an hour ago and I decide to do a Google search on 'A Clockwork Orange' to find out the locations for the movie. There, in black and white, is the location for the auditorium scene - Brunel University, Uxbridge.
Serendipity is a funny thing sometimes but this was an odd one. Stranger still was reading that 'Alex' had his ribs cracked while shooting that particular scene. Did my dad really break Malcolm McDowell's ribs?
I'll have to ask him tomorrow...!
UPDATED - Just got off the phone with my dad and he confirmed that Malcom McDowell did injure himself during the filming of the humiliation scene. It was when my dad put his foot on Malcom McDowell's chest while McDowell is lying on the floor. He's not sure if he cracked his ribs or not but said it was quite possible - McDowell was complaining of being quite hurt afterwards.
Some other trivia... Kubrick cleared all the crew out of the theatre while the three of them rehearsed the scene. In the part where my dad slaps McDowell's face, he wanted my dad to do it for real even during rehearsal. He made him do it several times saying "I want you to really hit him". My dad, still reticent to hurt McDowell slapped him a bit harder but Kubrick said "that's phoney". My dad then had a chat with McDowell behind the curtain and said "Listen I'm going to have to really hit you this time". McDowell said "Don't worry about it, yesterday I had a hypodermic syringe stuck up my arse!" The two of them went out and my dad hit him so hard that spit flew out of his mouth.
After shooting the scene for real my dad was called back the next day to give Kubrick an extra shot. Kubrick wanted a point of view shot of my dad from the perspective of Alex lying on the floor. As Kubrick had been a cameraman, he himself shot this, and laid down on the floor with my dad putting his heel into Kubrick's chest.
One bit of confusion. My father doesn't remember the location for the scene actually being at Brunel University. He remembers it as being a library theatre in Norwood, South London. While he says he can't be 100% sure - "it's a long time ago son" - he says he's almost certain it was Norwood near Croydon. No mention of Norwood on the location page on IMDB.
The plot thickens...
It's not often that you get to stick it to the man, but here in the UK a minor revolution is going on, and millions of people are set to benefit from it.
For several years now, banks in England have been levying absurdly high charges against their customers for stretching over their overdraft limit or for miscalculating a direct debit payment. In most countries this isn't even possible, but in the UK it is, thanks to a highly inefficient banking system.
Continue reading "Illegal bank charges in the UK (& how to claim them back)" »
Comments are working again on the blog after nearly a month without them. While I don't relish the need once again to have to filter through automated spam comments (joy), it is a relief to have everything working again for the real people out there.
In case the solution is useful to anyone else running Movable Type on their blog, here is the fix that worked here at WorldTV to solve the No entry_id error. It was an annoying problem to solve but in the end pretty easy to do.
Continue reading "Comments working again (No entry_id error)" »
Comments are currently not working on the blog. I will try to get it sorted asap. By the looks of things they have not been working since the beginning of the month.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
Firstly an apology to regular readers for the rather formulaic WorldTV posts of late.
All this excitement about preparing WorldTV for launch has left me rather devoid of time for other posts. A belated honeymoon with the wife, a growing addiction to Facebook, and a first child on the way has added to the mild confusion.
It's been an exciting day round here though - news that RCTV in Venezuela were beginning to put out their now banned broadcasts via YouTube spurred us to rebroadcast them in a WorldTV style. It should be a good test of our hardware and systems and is leading us to develop some new features which will benefit all users.
We were shocked by the actions of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez in silencing the independant media in a move that can only be seen as leading to a dictatorship. Should the government there move to block YouTube, we hope to be able to offer an alternative source for RCTV's bulletins out of Caracas for Venezuelan's worldwide.
If you don't know about the situation in Venezuela, read up on it. It's a pretty worrisome state of affairs. In the past I've always thought of Hugo Chavez as something of a welcome revolutionary, but when you silence the opposition media, push through bills that eliminate elections (thus allowing indefinite terms of office) and create new laws for creating new laws (so they don't have to be referred to Parliament), revolution turns to something more sinister.
Just arrived in Toronto and the big story here is an Ontario based pet food manufacturer that is facing almost certain demise after it has been discovered that Aminopterin, a reported rat poision, found its way into dog food.
Many dogs have died and hundreds of thousands of owners across North America are worried their dog could be next. 60 million dog food products are being recalled.
Just watching the press conference live now on CityPulse 24.
Crazy.
I've always loved driving shots, both when I used to be a TV cameraman shooting video (and occasionally Super 8) and now whenever I travel. Somehow they're just cool.
Here's some from my current daily journey into the office...
And some of my favourites from the past...
Continue reading "Driving Shots" »
Actually launched a month ago, I've only got round to linking this now...
It's a site we put together to highlight the very best Borat video clips on the net.
We think you like it very much. Nice.
If you've not seen it yet, CNN anchor Kyra Phillips got caught in a pretty embarassing position yesterday when she went to the bathroom during a live press conference featuring President Bush, and had her wireless microphone left on by an audio engineer. Her conversation with an unknown female, including some rather derogatory comments about her sister-in-law, went out live on air.
Presenters typically switch off their mics when they take a 'break', if only so crew members can't listen in to their conversations, but in this case clearly she forgot.
Video link here. Transcript here.
High resolution film footage of the original Apollo 11 moon landing, never before seen by the public, has surfaced in an Australian's personal film collection. The collection belongs to Peter Clifton, a rock video director who made films and videos for Pink Floyd.
It turns out the footage we all know was recorded off a TV screen by a video camera. In other words, the quality is way below what was on the original recording.
NASA has lost the original recordings in a maze of government archives. The footage found by Peter Clifton is expected to lead to the discovery of the originals.
More info here.
With all the hype about the current movie "Snakes on a Plane", I thought I'd pass on this real life story.
On August 25th 2003, passengers on a British Airways flight travelling from Heathrow to Cairo, were terrified to see a real live snake slitthering around in their cabin. There was a mild panic as crew members tried to capture the snake and calm down worried passengers. The snake was ultimately captured and its owners - a group of passengers travelling under diplomatic immunity - fessed up that the snake was theirs. The plane carried on towards Cairo, and the snake and its owners were ultimately re-united.
This scan is the telex (telex??) sent between airline staff discussing the incident. It's quite amusing.
It reads...
ATTENTION ALL / (NAME WITHELD) CUSTOMER SERVICE SUPERVISORS CAIRO
RE SNAKE INCIDENT FOR BA155 / 25AUG KINDLY FIND THE FOLLOWING:
CABIN SERVICES DIRECTOR INFORMS ME THAT THERE IS 6 PASSENGERS IN BUSINESS CLASS AFFECTED BY THE SIGHT OF SNAKE BUT THEY ARE OK NOW.
PASSENGERS NAME AND ADDRESS AS FOLLOWS: (WITHELD)
ALL AFFECTED PASSENGERS MET AND ASSISTED AT AIRCRAFT AND PASSENGER RECEIVED HIS SNAKE FROM THE CABIN SERVICES DIRECTOR AT THE END OF THE FLIGHT.
CAPTAIN ISSUED AIR SAFETY REPORT WITH WHOLE INCIDENT.
THANKS AND BEST REGARDS.
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