Tag Archives: travelling

Dopplr

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Dopplr is a social site that lets you share your travel with others and it works out your carbon footprint. I’m not sure what it means to see that someone else is travelling, though I guess if you see people travelling at the same time to the same place, or who have gone to somewhere you’re new to, that could be handy. Still, interesting combination of social software, maps, and the green economy.

Ah, from the email after I subscribed:

Dopplr is all about serendipity – meeting up with friends and colleagues on the road or in people’s home cities. So we encourage you to invite travellers you know to join too.

and

Dopplr gives you email alerts about coincidences in your trusted network. If somebody is coming to your town, or happens to be travelling where you are, you can get an alert in your inbox. Initially we’ll send you weekly alerts; you can change your email settings at http://www.dopplr.com/account/email

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Two Trains Travelling To and Fro

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This is another lumiere rhizome. One was shot while travelling from Paris to Brussels on the TGV while the other is the return journey a few days later. I really like travelling on trains. Much more room than on planes (well, I guess I might not think that if I travelled first class, but like that’s ever going to happen), and you get to see sky and land and sometimes places too.

Two Trains

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Brussels Non-Place

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My second visit to Brussels. I caught the train from Paris, and as someone from a large country (like Canadians, North Americans, etc) the idea that I can get on a train and only 90 or so minutes later I”m in a different country, different language (well not quite, Brussels is bilingual with French and Flemish), and in many ways a different culture. Well, that’s just thrilling. Dammit.

Once in town I had a lot of time to kill. I’m staying with friends here, but they’re not home for two hours. I have no intention of sitting on their door step for two hours, after twenty six hours of travelling, so am sitting in the mall at Bruxelles-Midi (an exemplary Augé non-place) in a Häagen-Dazs having very bad (very bad) coffee, a too chocolaty milkshake (but I guess it is Belgium) listening to pop music. Why here? It was the only place I could find with an available power point as the PowerBook is dead as. So, I drank my not good drinks, keep trying to finish my presentation, before arranging to get to my friends J and N’s. It was very grey outside, dull, the sort of colour if you were a set director (and cynical) you would ensure if you wanted to suggest a city of bureaucrats.

This is where I’m a poor traveller. I should have locked away my suitcase in a locker, caught a train the short distance to the city centre, and just hung out in the medieval square there. But I was tired, wannted a shower and a shave, and needed to finish my presentation. Saturday is the declared relaxing day where I’ll see something local before saddling up for the long voyage home.

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On a Jet Plane…

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Got Jim White’s “Transnormal Skiperoo” which came out October one, Jenny Owen Youngs‘ “Batten the Hatches”, Joe Henry’s “Civilians” and Mary Gauthier’s “Between Daylight and Dark” as new company on the iPod, still deciding what book I need to read, and a presentation to write. Today I leave for Brussels. A good near eight hours to KL, then eleven or twelve thirteen to Paris, and a couple of hours on the train.

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Blogs and Participation

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OK, it is that time of the semester, you need to write a blog post that looks at the criteria you established in the first two classes (about participation and your blog) and see how they’re travelling. How would you assess yourself to date against what you said you would do? Is there anything you said you would do that you now realise is irrelevant, or not very important? Something that you now realise is really important and should be in there? These are to be written in your blog and should be done by this Friday please.

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The Vacuum of Air Travel

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I enjoy travelling. The actual movement of travel, like going for a long drive, or a train trip. I also enjoy visiting other places. Right now I’m in Amsterdam. The light is quite like Melbourne in winter, but with the canals, cars on the wrong side of the road, and of course the bicycles it is Amsterdam. I like stepping out of the airport into another world, different colours, smells, sounds. The texture of place. I think part of the pleasure is the surprise of it all, a surprise that comes from the plane. There, you’ve more or less crammed into a long tin can, cruising ten kilometres above the ground at nine hundred kilometres an hour, and in that bubble you don’t travel so much as pass time. It is quite anonymous, the differences between airlines being, as far as I can tell, really quite minor (which is not to say that these differences might not make a difference), and from this generic and neutral time of international air travel you step out into place. Bang, or more usually, bang.

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Amsterdam Next Week

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I will be a participant in the Workshop Any Media Documentary in Amsterdam next week. I’m presenting some material on the afternoon of Friday, November 24, and will be involved in the workshops on Saturday and Sunday. I haven’t been to Amsterdam since 2004, and then it was only for three days, so I’m looking forward to returning, even if it is a lightening visit (again I’ll only be there for three nights). I’m looking forward to the workshops. These guys have run some great stuff over the last few years, so I’m very interested to see what sorts of outcomes happen, and of course meeting some people. The downside is that I’ll be travelling for around 50 hours for my three nights in Amsterdam. Australia is a long way from a lot of places.

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Because Otherwise I’ll Loose It

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http://www.wotif.com.au/ is a site that accesses cheap accommodation at hotels around Australia. Seems to provide standby rates, and there are excellent bargains and it’s a good way to find cheaper somewhere to stay when travelling, etc. Stuck it in the blog otherwise I’ll just lose the bloody thing.

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Lugano train vog

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This new vog is a minor departure from the recent ones that I’ve been making, which have all involved zooming and draggable movies. I’ll return to those shortly. The Lugano train vog is a larger work, and is deliberately intended to be more polished than the everyday variety vogs. It has been embedded so that it plays within QuickTime player, primarily because it is 720 x 540 pixels in size and that just looks silly as an embedded movie in the vog.

There is a picture track that takes up all this space, which is made up of three jpegs. The jpegs are photos that relate to the trip to Lugano I had earlier this year (for the EdMedia conference). Embedded within this is the video track, which is the footage that I shot while travelling by train from Zurich to Lugano on one foggy, damp, afternoon. Mousing in to the video track progressively slows the video, to half, quarter, eighth normal speed. Clicking within the video restores the track to normal speed.

One child movie soundtrack loops, this is an announcement made during the train trip about which stations are coming up next, in German and Italian. This is only a short sound grab, and so this loops via the child movie track independently of the duration and play back speed of the parent movie.

I added a small sprite track that contains some hand written frame rates. This is to let the user know the effect of mousing in to the movie and indicates feedback as to what the behaviour is. Hopefully if the soundtrack is looping at this point they might also wonder how a movie can slow down the video rate but not affect the soundtrack. They’re hand written because I just wanted something like my notebook going on, nothing fancy, nothing with that fancy Flash come vector aesthetic. There’s nothing fancy with the scripting either. I could have written a script that retrieves the frame rate and presented that in a text track, but that just adds to the processor overheads. The way I’ve done it is to just attach it to the same sprite that counts mouse enters, and when it halves the frame rate it also just changes the image index for the second sprite.

Since the movie is targeting QuickTime Player I added a couple of buttons so that clicking one moves the movie into full screen mode, clicking the other moves the movie back to normal. After experimenting with this I changed the event to mouse in rather than mouse click, I much prefer the action of ‘caressing’ the surface of the object that the mouse in event produces, rather than the lugubrious ‘click here’ that makes us all into experimental subjects. Touch with the mouse, things happen.

There are three photo’s in the movie as well, revealed simply by mousing around in there. Finding and displaying a photo has the effect of loading another child movie soundtrack, though I expect over a network this will not work because of the lag – mousing out stops the childmovie track and I don’t think it will have time to start playing given network lag. If this is the case I’ll rescript this a bit more so that mousing into and revealing a photo will play that soundtrack until you click. In fact, that’s a better idea, so I’ll do it now (insert sound of coding…….)

Ok, that only took 5 minutes. So, now if you click the photo then it stops that soundtrack and returns you to the other one. The three sound tracks I have added are rambling affairs, but suited to the medium. One is just remembering the train trip, one is thinking about thinking about place, and the other discusses my vog practice. This movie works much better if you take the download option…

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