Month: January 2006
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StroMotion
I love a good bit of new TV sports technology, so I was excited to read about StroMotion, which we are to see in the BBC’s Winter Olympics coverage. It takes snapshots of competitors during their movement – for example an ice skater performing a move – and allows you to see them as a…
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The Bigger DAB Picture
Dissent is beginning to well and truly break out in the radio world with, broadly speaking, Gcap set against the rest as it opposes Ofcom’s announcement before Christmas that it will indeed be inviting applications to run a second national commercial DAB multiplex. Essentially GCap’s Ralph Bernard believes that GWR was awarded the sole national…
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New Sky Services
Sky has busily been announcing new services over the past couple of days. But there are a couple of issues with some of their new services. The big new service today is the availability of some of their films to be downloaded to PCs owned by subscribers. The only problem there is that it’s seemingly…
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Sandhurst
Lots of stories today talking about the increased security at Sandhurst as a result of Prince William starting his training there. Let’s see – it’s an army base, full of guns and live ammunition, at a training facility for the future leaders of our armed forces. One might just hope that there’s already quite tight…
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Sony Reader
OK, so the Google presentation didn’t exactly live up to all the expectations (or hopes) about $200 thin clients or whatever. But I’ve just been reading about the Sony Reader, their new ebook machine, and there are couple of interesting aspects that are worth commenting on. The first is that the memory is pretty tiny.…
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See New Zealand
The American tourist board are currently running a series of ads to get us to visit their wonderful country. This uses the guise of films with the tagline “You’ve seen the film, now visit the set.” Now, leaving aside the unsuitability of some of the titles (Leaving Las Vegas really isn’t the film to put…
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Jarhead
Jarhead is the new Sam Mendes film, and I suppose for that reason alone, is worth paying attention to. It’s based on a book that came out a couple of years ago written by Anthony Swofford recounting his experiences as a fairly new Marine as he becomes part of, first, Desert Shield and then, eventually,…
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Freakonomics
This is the breakthrough “business” book of the moment. Economist Steven Levitt and New York Times writer Stephen J. Dubner, take us through a very strange selection of essentially interesting facts and stories. At the outset of the book, they explain that there’s no real “theme” to this book. Instead they jump around the place.…
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Set-Up Joke, Set-Up Joke
A few years ago Rob Long, sometime writer on Cheers and several [less succesful] US sitcoms, used to write a very entertaining column about the industry in The Observer. These either came from, or made up (I forget) a book called Conversations With My Agent which is now seemingly out of print. It was very…
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Darwin and Einstein
This news sounds quite interesting – the BBC are int eh process of putting together a pair of single dramas about Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. I wonder if they have a US co-production partner for the Darwin film yet? It’s strange that the Einstein film should come this year (assuming it’s not next), since…
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The Master and Margarita
Russia has just finished airing a dramatisation of The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which sounds really interesting. According to this story in Variety and this story from BBC News, it’s been a massive hit. While there are often stories about how many programmes we export around the world – you know, 123 different…
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Travel
I’ll try not to sound smug here, because I know it can happen to any of us, but why do so many people leave it until this morning, the first day fully back at work after the break, to buy their train tickets? This morning at my local station, where there’s one assistant and one…