Mark Watson, author, actor, comedian and closet environmentalist (IMHO) has launched a new initiative on MySpace to generate social awareness about the environment and environmental issues. Obviously being very concerned about our planets health myself, added to the fact that Siân now refers to me as ‘Dave Angel, eco-warrior‘, it is probably no surprise that I was very interested in what Mark had to say on the subject.
To be honest, I didn’t know much about Mark Watson until this year when I started listening to his show ‘Mark Watson Makes the World Better‘ on BBC Radio 4, which in turn I only discovered after going to see Tim Minchin at the Salford Lowry Theatre and following him (not physically) to Mark Watson’s show on Radio 4. So… By this point I was hoping to have got an introduction about how we’re all ‘Crap At The Environment‘, but currently have only managed to re-enforce the six degrees of seperation theory and name-drop some famous people I wished I knew personally. Let me continue…
‘Crap At The Environment‘ (CATE) is a new project launched by Mark Watson on his MySpace page. Mark has realised that we are crap at environmental issues as a nation, even as a planet. This isn’t because we do not care, or believe the action of one will not change the actions of billions, but rather we have no conception of how to achieve anything to help the environment. Just as you think you have a faint idea of what to do, the whole thing is made more confusing when one group of people say one thing and then another group say the complete opposite. I mean where does one start?
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28.Feb.07 
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Last week I posted an article about how getting free HDTV programming through your aerial might be in danger because Ofcom is considering auctioning off the analogue spectrum to the highest bidder
. Well things this week look a little better for free HDTV, as today BBC News reported that the BBC Trust, the BBC’s governing body, has provisionally agreed that a Freesat service would be of “significant public value” . Freesat is a service proposed by the BBC to supply free digital television services to the UK, as is currently enjoyed by millions of BSkyB customers, but without their pocket.
Freesat was first discussed by the BBC and ITV in the summer of 2005. But issues arose with suppliers of the equipment and ITV’s rapidly decreasing advertising revenue hindered progression. In 2006 the Freesat idea seemed long dead and nothing more was said about it publically. Behind closed doors it seems the BBC have been developing the idea, probably spurred on by the very positive feedback from Free-to-air HDTV testing in London last summer.
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27.Feb.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
It has been five years since the last major train accident of catastrophic proportions. In fact this accident should have been the next massive blow to the industry, but in the end there was only one fatality. It is one fatality too many, but to have a high speed train crashing in the UK at over 90 miles per hour and only one fatality is a vast improvement on railway vehicle safety.
Currently the police are concentrating their investigation on a set of points that casts a very familiar shadow on the railway maintenance operations last seen during the Potters Bar incident in 2002. On that particular day I was travelling south from Darlington on the East Coast Main Line towards London when suddenly, after passing through Stevenage, the GNER train slammed on its breaks to draw short of crashing into the train across the line at Potters Bar ten miles away. We were only four minutes away from further disaster.
The Potters Bar derailment has never officially been solved. We know that a set of points that were maintained by Jarvis was allegedly reassembled incorrectly by Jarvis sub-contracted engineers. The case has gone to court a number of times, never resulting in a definitive result. It is widely believed that Jarvis were at fault, eventually resulting in the dissolving of Railtrack into a national not-for-profit body called Network Rail. The accident also resulted in a nation wide inspection of all railway points causing months of chaos lasting long into 2004.
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24.Feb.07 Uncategorized Comments (2)
If you only see one film this year, then make sure it’s… Okay, I’ll skip the cheesy American intro. But you have to watch this feature film about the facts of 9/11. If you are sceptical already about the official story the US Government supports regarding that fatefull September day in 2001, then this will be interesting and re-enforce your existing scepticism. If you are not sure, or do believe the government stories, then please watch this and then dismiss it if you still feel the same.
The film examines each of the 9/11 crime scenes in detail looking at the version of events released by various US Government agencies, juxtaposed with images and video from similar disasters and other sources. The analysis for each event is purely shocking, the content of which you are unlikely to see broadcasted on any television screen in the near future. The evidence presented is very concise and well researched, supported by strong scientific evidence. Much of the evidence is actually just common sense, something the American authorities obviously don’t think Americans have much of.
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23.Feb.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
In 2004 I completed the first Act of a two part short film called The Möbius Strip. The short was completed as part of my final year degree in Creative Visualisation at The University of Teesside.
Up until now the The Möbius Strip has been keep under lock and key and has not been shown to anyone other than select close friends and family - plus a few directors and the board at the National Film + Television School. With the relatively recent burst in User Generated Content availability through sites such as YouTube!, Google Video, MySpace and the new Zudeo, I thought it was maybe time to release The Möbius Strip to the world.
The release is now available on YouTube! and Zudeo at differing quality. YouTube! is restricted to the flash video format and the quality is less good. Zudeo, a Bittorrent system, has a full PAL resolution letter-box version, encoded in QuickTime format using the H.264 MPEG-4 codec. The latter will playback in QuickTime 7 or VLC Media Player.
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22.Feb.07 Uncategorized Comment (1)
United Kingdom HDTV sales in the months leading up to Christmas failed to slow making 2006 a very good year for High Definition Television manufactures. Strangely things were stacked against HDTV from the start of 2006. The Playstation 3 was delayed resulting in the release date being put back to March 2007 in the UK. Sky HD had terrible trouble meeting demand before the World Cup in the summer, with many customers not receiving their new boxes until after the competition had finished.
One of the only high-lights for HDTV in the UK was the terestrial trial of HDTV broadcasting that ran for several months in London for a select few members of the public. The results from the trial indicated that HDTV was well received by all, although there were some teething problems particularly with speech not in synch with the picture. This has been identified as an area that needs more attention as the higher picture details makes it easier to see when dialogue wasn’t synchronised properly.
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21.Feb.07 Uncategorized Comment (1)
This is a short film showing Brian Haw winning the Channel 4 Political Award for Peoples Choice of most influential political person in 2006, received from Mark Thomas and John Snow
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21.Feb.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
The first batch of photographs from Siân and my prototype mini-holiday to Europe using only trains are now available on my Google Picasa web gallery. There will be more photos to follow.
The holiday was a much needed short break for me to regain spirit, drive and strength after a gruling first two months of 2007 that can only be described as a rollercoaster ride of highs and lows. But the real reason for this trip was to test whether I was insane to even try and get around Europe by rail rather than plane.
The result will be posted on this blog along with top tips for getting by on European Railways and the stories of this trip our our pre-alpha test last summer. Watch this space.
20.Feb.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Over the weekend a new mini-site for JISC Collections, for whom I have worked exclusively for until recently, launched. This new web site has been developed internally and is hosted on Polaris Digital servers in a departure for JISC Collections.
The brief for the site was simple, “We would like a simple web site that we can self-maintain the content through a WYSIWYG interface, with a blog and RSS feeds”. I was contenplating using Joomla! to power this web site, but after much consideration it was clear Joomla! was a little overkill for such a site.
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19.Feb.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
On Friday Siân and I head off to Brussels and Amsterdam for a long-weekend away. It is a much needed break, but this is also a prototype for a much bigger endevour.
This summer we are planning to take a month out and complete a tour of Eastern and Western Europe by rail. We hope to demonstrate that journeys to Europe can be made using conventional rail rather than airlines, reducing the carbon emissions produced by the trip.
Last year Siân and I completed a two week holiday to Nice using Pendelino, Eurostar and TGV from Manchester all the way to Nice. It took ten hours to get to Nice from Manchester, which is eight hours more than flying, but we used a fifth of the carbon that would have been released by a jet aircraft.
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14.Feb.07 Uncategorized Comment (1)
