I’m currently addicted to the Channel 4/12 Yard Productions Coach Trip, a reality TV show that combines a Big Brother style game show format with travelogue.
Here’s an example of what makes this show fun to watch:
I’d really like to see 12 Yard go that extra mile (boom boom!) and take the show to the US – from New York to Los Angeles – since the previous four series have remained firmly in Europe and a little bit of Africa and Asia. Perhaps for series 5, eh?
In the mean time, all four series are available on 4oD, YouTube or SeeSaw.
I’ve just discovered the greatest Android app yet. It’s called My Tracks, and it records your movements via GPS and presents you with both real-time stats as well as a summary at the end. Obviously if I’m cycling, I can’t see how fast I’m going, but I can gather some interesting stats about my journey. Below is what My Tracks gathered about my route into work and plotted the track against Google Maps:
Total milage: 7.56 miles
Moving time: 34 minutes
Average moving speed: 13.39mph
Elevation gain: 137m
Min. Elevation: 74m
Max. Elevation: 152m
Now, I’ve just got to find the right camera mount and borrow the work’s Sony HXR-MC1P camera (the same kind that Robert Llewellyn uses for his Car Pool show) to record the journey in glorious HD.
This Daily Mail article about the cost of producing Children In Need's Around the World in 80 Days only reinforces my opinion that it is an ineffective and very expensive excercise in raising money that's not likely to yield the BBC and Children in Need much return.
If you want a REALLY good travel show from the BBC, I highly recommend Charlie Boorman's From Sydney to Tokyo: By Any Means 2. Now THAT's how it's done. Almost missed the show as it wasn't being promoted very well in the iPlayer.
Bring back Michael Palin, all is forgiven! Not there was anything to forgive in the first place!
I recently began watching the BBC's new "travel" series, Around the World in 80 Days. But hang on, didn't that Michael Palin do all this back in the late 80s? Yes he did, but this is a new endeavour designed to bring in money for BBC's Children in Need appeal.
Where this program fails is in the direction and editing. The format concentrates almost entirely on the travellers and Children in Need, and glosses over the places they're visiting – which kind of misses the point when it comes to travelling in the first place. While Messrs Mack and Skinner ARE very entertaining, we barely have time to take in the places they're visiting or the people they meet along the way. Yes, they've got a strict time-scale to get the travelling done, but Michael Palin and his team managed to strike a good balance when they did it the first time around. The most we get to see is the Crown Prince & Princess of Serbia. Everything else is too much of a blur and utterly forgettable.
Unfortunately Around the World in 80 Days just comes across as an expensive exercise/advert in getting more money for Children in Need (a worthy charity, of course) whereas the budget for this show might have been better spent putting it directly into the CiN collection tin. This series is just not as inspiring as the one Michael Palin brought to us back in 1988.
Have edited together some of the video footage I’ve shot whilst at the Natural History Museum. There is no sound, and haven’t yet found a good soundtrack to go along with it. Note: any slow-down/jerkiness (other than my wibbly camera work – the Kodak Zi6 has no image stabiliser – I’ll have to get myself a proper HD camera one of these days – is due to the Zi6’s somewhat temperamental H.264 encoder)
Jennifer and I have just returned from a wonderful weekend away in London. We stayed at the De Vere Devonport House in Greenwich overnight and despite no air conditioning, it was a most comfortable stay. That said, their breakfast menu has severe apostrophe problems.
On the Saturday, we went along to the Natural History Museum’s Butterfly Jungle and was amazed by all the different types of butterfly that were freely flying around (video). We also visited the main NHM building and was most taken with the Small Mammals exhibition (although taxidermy still doesn’t sit right for me – especially when the animals are smiling at you).
After the NHM, we took a river cruise from Westminster bridge up to Greenwich, checked in to the hotel, and got another river cruise back into Central London and went to Tootsies in James Street for our evening meal. It was wonderful – Tootsies had produced some of the best food we’ve had in ages. I opted for their Hereford Steak and Merlot pie, and the sheer size of the thing meant that I couldn’t find room for desert. Or a starter. We then made our way to Hyde Park to see (or rather hear, given the distance we were from the stage) Terry Wogan introduce Barry Manilow and John Barrowman perform a few hits (which saw groups of people leave the compound in droves at that time – seriously!). It got a bit too cold after Can’t Smile Without You, so we decided to head back to Greenwich.
On the Sunday we were going to go to the Movieum of London, but ultimately went for the Imperial War Museum instead. It was a good choice. We spent all day wondering around the First and Second World War exhibits before visiting the excellent Holocaust exhibition. We even managed to find the record of my aunt’s death by a flying V2 bomb on Smithfield’s market (video) on the IWM’s civilian deaths database.
Overall an excellent weekend. But it could have gone a little better if Boris Johnson and his mates at City Hall and London Transport didn’t keep doing these “weekend improvements” at the worst possible time. And we had no idea that one could buy tickets on the bus – the details provided on the timetable/bus shelters provide no such information. And we found buying tickets for the River taxis/cruises to be quite confusing too. Again, a lack of information does not help.
We set off to Dubai for a week before heading to Tobago for another. Photos of which can be found here (Dubai) and here (Tobago). I'm in the process of sorting out the video, but here are a couple of simple shots taken from the Dubai Mall: Bagpipes, Dancers, Carnival. Jennifer and I both had a wonderful time, and it's regretful that we're now stuck with rain all week after two weeks of glorious sunshine.
Work-wise, I've taken delivery of a Dell XPS M1730 laptop that consists of a 2.80Ghz Core 2 Extreme processor (overclockable through BIOS to 3.4Ghz), 6Gb RAM, 640Gb disk space (2 x 320Gb 7,200RPM hard drives in hardware RAID 0), Blu-Ray reader AND writer, 2 x NVIDIA 9800M GT 512Mb graphics cards in SLI configuration. It's a wonderful system except that bloody Dell have supplied both a 7,200RPM 16Mb cache hard drive and a 5,400RPM 8Mb cache HD instead of two 7,200RPM drives. What's even worse is that the primary drive is the slower 5,400RPM model. I'm also a bit miffed that although they supply 800Mhz DDR2 memory, but the chipset only supports up to a maximum of 667Mhz thereby squeezing more money out of the punter who sees no additional benefit.
Generally it's a very impressive rig, but it's let down by Dell's incompetence.
Am awaiting the arrival of Adobe Creative Production Premium suite for Windows to go with the laptop as I'm in the process of doing a lot of video editing and encoding for work at the moment. The irony of this is that Adobe After Effects includes software from my previous employers who made me redundant.
My boss, Kate Craig-Wood, is interviewed by CNBC here which features me in a cameo appearance as "engineer who plugs in SSD drive into server". Speaking of Memset, we have some very, very good miniserver pacakges at the moment. Prices are incredibly competitive in my opinion.
