Archive for July, 2006
Scotland’s self-employed cry hot, salty tears
According to the Evening Times:
FURIOUS tax staff in Glasgow and East Kilbride today joined a 24-hour national strike in protest against new working practices.
And they warned that unless an agreement was reached with management they would escalate the dispute.
O noes the taxman is on strike!!!!!11111 etc.
A nifty wee Mac app
[photopress:doodim_sc.gif,full,pp_image]
Doodim is a freeware program that does a simple but handy thing: it dims everything but the currently selected window, making it easier to focus on what you’re doing. Only problem I’ve encountered so far is that it doesn’t seem to work with a second display.
[Via Digg]
MySpace phenomenon, my arse
Many, many years ago - in the mid 90s - I was in a band with a chap called Mark. Mark knew a girl called Tippi - they were from the same bit of Scotland - and she annoyed him immensely: she was one of those “I want to be famous at all costs” types, and at the time she was apparently modelling herself on Natalie Imbruglia.
After numerous style changes, Tippi was signed to a Scots management firm who put her records out on their own label. When she murdered The Blue Nile’s Tinseltown in the Rain (a dancey single in 2002 which, incidentally, attracted some particularly transparent astroturfing on Amazon), Mark was so upset that his large intestine attempted to throttle his brain. I’m quite sure that Tippi’s 2004 direction - a love of Led Zep and AC/DC producing music that sounded like, er, Sheryl Crow and The Bangles - caused Mark to hurl his naked body onto broken glass and rusty nails.
He’d have been really pissed off if he’d read this week’s Sunday Times “Ecosse” section: Tippi’s back, this time as singer with MySpace garage rock “phenomenon” The Hedrons. But I’m not just posting this to annoy Mark (although that’s a big motivator) but also to point out that whenever you see a story about a MySpace phenomenon, it’s usually bollocks.
Rather than coming from nowhere and building an online buzz, Tippi and her pals are signed to No Half Measures management, a very good management company indeed, and the band’s success so far is due to boss Dougie Souness’s contact book and Tippi’s previous life as a Weller-supporting “what style of music is popular this week, boss?” solo artist. MySpace is a red herring: yet again, it’s being used to put a grass-roots veneer on a very polished and very professional PR strategy.
Remember, pop kids: if it says MySpace, it’s from The Man!
When demos go tits-up
Microsoft shows off Vista’s voice recognition technology. It doesn’t go entirely to plan.
[Youtube. Via Digg]
Sony faces the music
Following on from my comment (in the Microsoft’s Doing an Xbox post) about Apple’s competitors’ inability to get their shit together, it seems that Sony’s coming to similar conclusions:
Sony President Ryoji Chubachi, who heads the electronics business, believes that TVs and portable music players are two products in which Sony must show it’s a winner.
“If we lose in either category, it’s inevitable that people are going to have doubts about Sony,” he said.
Sony has fallen behind Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod in portable digital music players: Sony has sold one-fifth as many players as the 58 million iPods that consumers have snapped up.
A book on Sony by Japan’s top business daily, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, said the success of the iPod and the iTunes download service made Sony’s brand power “a thing of the past.”
“As an outsider to the music industry, Apple acted extremely quickly,” according to the book “Sony Versus Sony.”"Sony, which had its own music division, worried about possible damage to CD sales and could not act as quickly.”
One error Sony made was sticking to a format for music files called ATRAC3, which protected against illicit copying. Sony only belatedly adapted to the more widely used MP3 file format. The iPod played MP3s from its inception.
Although Sony won’t say much more about its plans for future music players, Stringer is giving more say to software designers and requiring greater interaction among the various teams developing products.
Late last year, Sony brought Tim Schaaff from Apple and appointed him senior vice president of Sony’s software development. Schaaff oversaw interactive media at Apple and the development of Apple’s QuickTime media player for computers.
I reviewed the first generation of Sony Network Walkmans and the first generation iPod, and in almost every respect - battery life, sound quality, sheer grooviness - the Sonys were the better products. But Sony blew it in two key areas: its bone-headed refusal to support MP3, and the equally bone-headed insistence on making punters use horrible, horrible, horrible software to transfer tunes to their player. Taken together, those moves effectively said “Hey, Steve Jobs! We don’t want to sell any players! The market’s all yours!” It’s one of the dumbest business decisions of all time, and I hope Sony hasn’t left it too late to undo the damage.
Oi! Crichton! Noooo!
I’m posting this mainly to annoy Stephen: a climate scientist says Michael Crichton has misused his research.
Our results have been misused as “evidence” against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel “State of Fear” and by Ann Coulter in her latest book, “Godless: The Church of Liberalism.” Search my name on the Web, and you will find pages of links to everything from climate discussion groups to Senate policy committee documents — all citing my 2002 study as reason to doubt that the earth is warming.
[Via Digg]
Zune: Microsoft’s doing an Xbox
More details on Zune are starting to appear, and while there’s still no hard information on what the device will actually do (although the message from Microsoft is that it ain’t a portable Xbox; it’s a caring, sharing media playback device) the big picture is starting to emerge. I’m particularly interested in this snippet from Zune Zone:
Microsoft are not looking at payback from the Zune project until 3 to 5 years down the line, said Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division, today at Microsoft’s annual analyst meeting.
To me, that sounds like Microsoft’s doing an Xbox. You probably know this already, but just in case: the original Xbox lost Microsoft a whopping $4 billion over four years, but presumably Microsoft thought it was worth it to get 20% of the console market. And now, it seems as if it’s taking the same approach to Zune.
This isn’t a new approach. Amazon.com did it for years, losing as much as 30% on every sale until it had wiped out the competition and developed sufficient muscle to demand big discounts from retailers. While it was building up market share it lost a fortune, but in the long term that paid off. I think the same will ultimately happen with the Xbox - provided it eventually pays, that is; I can’t imagine a third-gen console from Microsoft if the 360 doesn’t get the games division back into the black. So if Microsoft is taking the same approach with the Zune, things could get interesting.
Of course, you can’t polish a turd, and no amount of discounting or long-term courage will persuade punters to buy a product if it sucks. But if we can leave Apple vs Microsoft fanboyism out of the picture for a moment, it’s important to acknowledge what Microsoft does. Yes, it rushes products to market; yes, sometimes it backs the wrong horse. But Microsoft is very good at learning from its mistakes, and it has both the determination and the cash reserves to stand by projects until they work. If the first Zune is good, then hurrah - even if you’re a die-hard Apple fan, competition is good because it’ll make Apple raise their game. And if the first Zune is bad? If Microsoft’s committed to losing money for three to five years, you can be sure that it’ll keep refining the device until it *is* good.
I’ve said before that Apple owes some of its iPod success to the complete inability of its competitors to get their shit together. I think that’s still true in many ways - Sony’s MP3 players are superb of late, but they still have Sony’s horrible software; some PlaysForSure devices are pretty nifty, but the vital spark (for me at least) is missing; Portable Media Centers are a nice idea, but not very attractive in reality, and so on.
Where Apple’s approach to digital music is icy cool and rather aloof - “We made this. We’re geniuses. Of course you’ll love it” - Microsoft’s more puppyish: “is this cute?” “What about now?” “Now?” “How about now?” “Love me love me love me love me!” And each time Microsoft tries, it tries that little bit harder, and it does things that little bit better - so for example, Windows Media player has evolved over its 11 iterations from something that really, really sucked to something that’s really very impressive. Windows Mobile did the same - used to suck, now it’s excellent - and while Microsoft’s forays into the portable media market haven’t been perfect so far, odds are they’ll get it right eventually.
I’m fascinated by this, and I really hope the Zune is as good as Microsoft clearly thinks it is - as I say, even if you hate Microsoft, an intense war between MS and Apple means both firms will raise their game. We’ll find out in the next couple of weeks when the device is finally revealed.
Naturally if it’s a piece of crap I’ll pretend I predicted that all along…
The Internet is broken, so let’s talk about Disco Dog
Why does the Internet always break when you’re on deadline? I don’t know whether it’s my ISP, the US power outages or evil space gremlins, but I’m getting nowt when I try various big-name sites - mainly .coms (including Google) but also .co.uks.
Given that I can’t actually get any work done just now, I might as well blog about Disco Dog.
I bought a frisbee for Megan the Destroyer today, and rather than the usual Tesco Value ones (which she either destroys or sinks) I decided to get one from the pet shop. Enter Disc-o-dog, a frisbee that’s designed to be easy for dogs to pick up. It’s great, but the best thing about it is the name.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a superhero called Disco Dog? He would be a kind of shaggy Shaft, or maybe a blaxploitation Labrador. Every week people would find themselves in mortal peril, but then Disco Dog would appear (in a blast of wah-wah guitar and some funk bass, of course), throw some Disco moves and bite the baddies. And then everyone would say “thank you, Disco Dog!” and let him nuzzle their crotches.
I’d watch it religiously. It’d be like Hong Kong Phooey, but even better.
Splat’s entertainment
As I mentioned last week, I’d been invited to see Sony blow up stuff as part of a new ad campaign - and because of the need for secrecy I wasn’t allowed to write about it. Which was annoying, as the Evening Times clearly benefitted from a leak and ran all the details on Friday. Oh well.
Anyway, now the cover’s well and truly blown I’m able to blether about it.
As everyone in Scotland now knows, Sony’s been filming an advert in Glasgow involving lots of paint. It’s an ad for Bravia high-def televisions, and the Glasgow one is going to be the sequel to the famous bouncing-balls-in-San-Francisco ad. I was invited along in my capacity as a blogger, in the hope that I’d write about it afterwards. Which, obviously, I’m doing now.
The concept behind the Bravia ads is that Sony’s tellies (they say) offer amazing colour, and as a result the colours on-screen have to be real - no post-production to tart up the colour, or turn cloudy skies blue, or anything like that [although post-production will be used to fill in any gaps, for example if a single charge didn't go off]. Given the importance of good light, sunshine and predictable weather, Sony naturally decided to film it in Glasgow.
The council and housing associations helped Sony find a suitable site - a condemned tower block in Toryglen, on Glasgow’s South side - and director Jonathan Glazer got a team of around 200 people to wire it up with explosives. Here’s the stats, according to Sony’s PR team:
70,000 litres of paint
358 single bottle bombs
33 sextuple air cluster bombs
22 Triple hung cluster bombs
268 mortars
33 Triple Mortars
22 Double mortars
358 meters of weld
330 meters of steel pipe
57 km of copper wire
Sony didn’t blow the tower up - although if you’ve seen the old tower blocks in Toryglen, you might think such an explosion would be an improvement - but instead, covered it in hundreds of barrels of paint, each one containing an explosive charge. They did the same with the neighbouring low-rise. When activated, the explosive charges create a kind of daytime fireworks show, with huge jets of coloured paint shooting all over the place.
It sound simple, but it isn’t. For example, to take the shots of the low-rise the explosives along the bottom of the block were detonated as a tracked camera zoomed along from right to left; then, more explosives were added and the camera shot again but this time from left to right. After that, the explosives on top of the block were set off, and after that… you get the idea. For continuity reasons the light needs to be identical in each pass, so the camera crew and techs spent an awful lot of time hanging around waiting for the light to change. I was there on the Saturday and in the previous three days the crew had only managed to nail two shots.
As I’ve mentioned, realism is important - but real life can be too realistic, so the ad crew spent a huge amount of time and effort getting rid of offensive graffiti, reglazing shattered windows and hanging curtains to make the buildings look lived-in. They also covered neighbouring houses - where people still live - with netting to protect them from paint, and they sent the locals off on all-expenses paid day trips to the seaside.
So was it worth it? Like most supposedly glamorous things I’ve attended (big gigs, TV studios, magazine offices and so on) the reality is much less exciting than the idea you might have in your head. Filming such an ad, it seems, is a bit like sex: you spend hours hanging around in a hard hat and a hi-vis vest while 200-odd people give you funny looks, then someone fires a klaxon and you create an enormous mess in a fraction of a second.
Er…
I didn’t see the tower block go up - that was being filmed later in the week - but I did see the explosives go off along the low-rise block next to it, and it was impressive stuff. I’ve been taken through the plan for the other explosive displays, and I think that when it’s all done and edited together it’s going to be pretty spectacular. Funny, too: the estate was rather keen on Celtic Football Club, and Sony’s first batch of explosives cheerfully painted the block in red, white and blue.
A couple of random thoughts:
* Due to the top-secret nature of the shoot, I wasn’t allowed to bring my digicam - and when the explosives went off, I was so far away from the action that getting a decent pic with the supplied Cybershot (3x zoom - bollocks) was damn near impossible. It’s particularly frustrating because if I had stood outside the locked-down set, I’d have got some cracking pictures. Naturally the Evening Times coverage meant that other people didn’t have to worry about secrecy and got some superb shots, which are all over Flickr.
* I met Sony’s European PR manager, which I was a bit apprehensive about after months of slagging various Sony divisions in print. However, rather than have me killed she offered me an ice cream (incidentally, I went purely because I was invited. I didn’t get cash, beer or kit, and I didn’t fancy ice cream either. Maybe I should have asked for a Bravia, or an Alpha DSLR).
* Whenever you have a security firm keeping an eye on things, at least one of them will be a shades-wearing arsehole who looks like Dom Joly but thinks he’s The Terminator.
* If I ever direct a video that needs sunshine, I won’t do it in Glasgow.
* One Glasgow newspaper received tip-offs about the shoot from people offering to disclose the location in exchange for £1,000. Unfortunately said newspaper’s writers were visiting the shoot at the time.
* I met some interesting people: Tim Sandys, who has a blog about art, and Carol Walker, who has a video/photo blog. Both sites are in the links list on the right, and both sites are well worth your time.
* Toryglen really is a dump.
Microsoft Cock
I’m indebted to No Rock ‘N’ Roll Fun for this fascinating fact about Microsoft’s iPod killer: Zune is apparently French-Canadian slang for penis.
I’d make a joke involving the Zune and the Wii but I’m far too mature for such tomfoolery.