vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

From a recent university newsletter “A record 142,662,678 emails were sent/received in September 2008 (138,631,058 of these were rejected as spam)”. For someone who started online before .com and pretty much before spam this is just, well, somewhere past galling. I also realise that makes me a greying idealist bore. It is the cost that irks. Not so much in time but in bandwidth, it is bandwidth pollution of the worse kind, and things aren’t free or infinitely replicable online, bandwidth is our key material condition and constraint (and therefore cost).

Some recent observations. Around the corner from home there is a stencilled sign in a front window - “fuck xmas”. I took the elder children camping to Mt Buffalo just before Christmas. As we were setting up the tent one of J’s school teachers came past. A brief chat and he asked did I come up here often? When I thought about it I realised I had not camped at Lake Catani since the mid 70s. That’s 30 years ago. At my age that doesn’t sound that dramatic. Except I teach at a university where my students are usually 19 or 20 years old. So the last time I went camping somewhere was nearly a generation before they were even born. This ageing business first struck me many years ago when I still taught cinema studies and I mentioned Star Wars. Some wit in the class observed that I had probably seen it when it first came out. I, of course, was still not yet aged enough to assume that that was when everyone had seen it.

There is no point where I have noticed that I’m now old. Some threshold. Even when I get cheap public transport, which really isn’t so very far away, I’m not sure if that will make me feel old or just that I’m getting a better deal. I now need glasses to read. I need longer afterwards if I try to party. Having a drink knocks me around a fair bit. Recovering from anything, well, I need to recover, and it can take days. I have children, two marriages, a career. These are all the necessary signs, but mostly I feel much like I always have. Not a lot of plans, wondering where the days are going and watching things pass past.

Mount Buffalo was beautiful. It is easily as good as the Prom, that most celebrated of local national parks, and the camping ground is much better. Quieter, more trees, more immediate bush. We did some nice walks, clambered and bouldered through rock chasms, scrambled up stupid big pieces of granite, and met a couple of wombats. (Wombats are joyfully misanthropic. When animals are injured great care is often taken to make sure they don’t bond with their keepers so that when they’re released back into the bush they don’t hang round humans. Not wombats. You can pat ‘em, cuddle ‘em, spoil ‘em all you like, once they’re released off they go with complete indifference. They’re the marsupial version of a Hummer. Entirely appropriate in a mammal. Somewhere past questionable and merely bogan - here’s the evidence - if you’re a member of our species. Then again perhaps wombats are perhaps just autistic?)

Looking forward to getting back up there for a longer time, dreaming of having one of these to fit all the stuff in (2 adults, 3 kids for a week’s camping, you just can’t fit it all into a car).

In other news I settled on a new video camera, the Sony HVR-V1P. Have shot a bit of time lapse with it but due to some administrative issues have not yet looked at anything on screen (software yet to be installed). First impressions are it is very good. Second impressions are that it doesn’t quite do what I bloody well want. The big thing I was after was an intervalometer, or time lapse. This has it, but it turns out they are all presets, eg 1 second every half, one, five or thirty minutes. I had expected I could nominate n frames every n seconds/minutes. No way. This is seriously disappointing. So at the moment I feel like I have spent a lot of money on a lot of camera that doesn’t actually do what exactly I wanted. I was offered the chance of a trial, and foolishly didn’t bother. More fool me.

With a camera like this I need to plan shoots, set aside time to drive to places and film. That’s good, it means you have to think about some projects, on the other hand the vast majority of the filming I ever do is quotidian, off the cuff, observational. This doesn’t go with such a hunk of camera. But I do have some projects in mind which I want to use this camera for, and I do want to shoot some high quality footage as part of my online practice, and that is what this thing is for. Stay tuned.

Open Video Alliance is, well, an alliance of people committed to open video. Open video is about non proprietary formats (read primarily codecs) for digital video, from creation, editing through to distribution.

Well, I had thought that with the end of semester well over what, six weeks ago? I’d get a lot of writing done. Haven’t done any. Nilch. None. Every day I’ve been busy, I seem to be actually managing work load much better than in the past and not only keeping track of what needs doing, but doing most of it. This is a big step forward. But all I seem to do is tread water as I keep up with sending out work for examination, collating results, chasing up results, entering them, adding results to various forms and databases, ranking applications, attending meetings. Honours results have been coming in, and two are top of the range outstanding - just wish I’d been able to persuade them to continue with postgraduate study. The work warrants it and they would have been in with an excellent chance of receiving an Australian Postgraduate Award. Still, the majority have done well, and I’m really pleased with how the artefacts have been presented, it really does shift the work from being just another student work to professional practice.

I did get to grow a moustache for movember, and was described as either a detective from a 70s Sidney Lumet film or Jonathan Quayle Higgins III, the English housesitter from Magnum PI played by John Hillerman. Could have done worse. My fundraising activities with the mo weren’t not stunning, but I did manage more than a hundred of the local dollars so thank you to those who contributed. In the case of my better half it was less a donation than blackmail. I informed A. that unless she donated a sufficient amount it was staying on after November, so in her case I wasn’t getting a donation for growing the mo but shaving it off (which, thankfully, it now is).

So, rather than finishing off a series of papers for the end of the year I’m going to struggle to get one littley out of the way and then worry about translating a variety of old conference presentations into decent papers. That and what looks like two possible ARC applications to participate in which are both interesting, but the more I get involved in them the further away from what I’d think of as my ‘core practice’ they become.

Meanwhile, I’ve found WordPress for iPhone and iPod touch. Yes, been out a while but now I finally caught up with my own touch am now finding these things. Finally, the week has ended on hot note, 30C today and it’s only early December. Water restrictions are about to get a bit tighter again. As our reservoirs dry up the government is spending billions on desalination and piping. In an age where small nodes and distributed networks instead of building enormous energy intensive and polluting desalination plants why not just pay for a rain water tank to harvest it off our roof tops for every home? Use this grey water for garden, laundry washing and the toilet. We could do the same with solar panels too to contribute back to the grid on hot sunny days (the days of peak demand) and we wouldn’t need to build another coal based power station. And let’s not forget what this would do for development of solar panels and local industry (a couple of million water tanks, a couple of million of roof tops for solar panels…)