BorehamBlog

I’ve been working all hours over Christmas on a great project for Samsung. We photographed and filmed the mobile department’s conference in Brighton before Christmas and have been cutting and editting it inot a movie I am pretty proud of.

But the STRESS!!! Had to install and learn new software, Pinnacle Editon, as our existing kit did not do what I wanted. Its great, but the most complicted bit of software I have ever played with. Then we needed to make more disk space for the video files, some of which had to digitized again for the new software.

But in order to make the vast gigabites of space required we needed to shunt some data onto a backup drive. Although brand new this was not working so I organised a replacement from Maxtor expected it to arrive the next day. 3 days later and no disk so I call Maxtor again to be told it is on is way - but coming from Hungary. Suddenly its Christmas and another week passes. The new disk arrived today and seems to be working (at the moment). it will take about 4 hours to write the data.( *Update- not working- exact same problem as previous one. )

Meanwhile I need a lovely new video monitor so I can be certain of colour balance and preview the film on a TV rather than a computer monitor. After many calls to find a place that is a. open and b. has the stock I hack off to Watford yesterday to purchase what is effectively a 14″ tele for £800. (I think Sony saw me coming)

Connect it all up and it looks fab- for 10 seconds before the graphics card screws up and I realise that there is not enough processing power in my 3gig ram twin Xeon mega machine to render the rather compicated output that has up to 8 channel of video and sound all running at the same time.

So now a need a video accelarator capture card thingy as well to make the TV work. So, of we go to the telephone and after 300 calls to try and find a shop that is open. No joy, so I have another fiddle with my graphics card and low and dehold after 40 mins the whole system is totally screwed and am unable to see anything on the 3 minitors except a small blue square.

Screaming softly its time to turn off and go and do something else instead. Sadly I cannot contain myself and after copious use of ctl-alt-del and windows safe mode, all is nearly back to normal.

So, time to write the DVD of the movie, at which point we discover that the vid software won’t see the DVD burner and will only create a disk image file, which is humungous and we don’t have enough space on our hard drives because the backup system is not ready yet…. etc etc. Further, any attempt to output the file as an .avi (movie file) results 4gigs of garbled rubbish

And so it goes on. I am now white haired with the appearance of a man 4 times my age.

But I do love it really, as you can see from this picture….

Today my son Matthew who is 10, announced that he rated this Christmas as only 70% perfect. When we asked what we could do to get it up to 100% he said we should go out and get some Wensleydale Cheese (and I presume some crackers) and that would improve the Christmas to 95 or 100%.

How sweet life must be when perfection can be wrought by the purchase of some cheesey comestibles. 

Some shots from our visit to Hythe beach today (Boxing Day)

Maggie and my Dad impersonating David Dimbleby in ‘A Picture of Britain’. In my Dad’s case he is doing ‘A Picture of Brian’

My brother Alec and our kids throwing things into the English Channel.

Yesterday night watched a program about Spike Milligan, who was a serial womaniser and depressive. Tonight, watched a program about Tony Hancock, not quite so serial with the birds but a depressive alcoholic. Recently watched a film about Peter Sellers who was a serial womaniser, depressive and verging on madness as far as I could make out. Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, John Cleese - all have suffered from mental health or drink problems. And they could have had as much Wenleysdale as they could have managed. It seems so sad and its often been commented upon, the tears of a clown and all that. It seems there is a price to pay for having that kind of talent and no amount of cheese makes it right.

Whats worse of course is having to pay the price without having any of the talent…

Must find something cheerful to write about soon!!

Happy Christmas :-) 

“not only does man share 98.5 per cent of his genetic code with the chimp but he shares 75 per cent of it with the pumpkin.”

(From ‘The Spectator’)

Wonderful! So we may be quite like chimps, which is pretty obvious really, but we are also quite like vegetables. So, the fact that we are 1.5% different from Chimps is actually still very very very different indeed considering we are only 25% different from a pumkin.

So when the secularists tell us how we are actually little more than educated monkeys, you can tell them that we are in fact, ground vegetables with a bit more style.

Happy Christmas.

Today for some reason we decided to burn all our garden rubbish. Rather worringly it has not rained here for weeks and everything is very cold but bone dry. I put some parrafin on a box of leaves and it all went up a treat. the boys heklped by throwing just about anything they could fine into the pire that was soon so hot I scorched my face. Fabulous fun, and very theraputic. 

Maggie planted a tree. Its an Acer Rubrum which grows into a Big Red Thing in the autumn. She was so happy- she’d wanted one for ages. We had one at our old house.

There was an awesome blue sky over the house this afternoon - I wanted to call some clients and try and get somework in to give me an excuse to photograph photograph something but decided they might not appreciate the call!

There is a Christmassy theme to the first post! 

I do find Chistmas a strain. Its terrible really- as a friend of mine said recently ‘Christians should be happier at Christmas than anyone else’ which is of copurse, completely true if Christmas had not been hijacked by the retailers and e-tailers and Jesus hidden away in a little corner whilst Santa looms large.

Think I’d better stop this or the first entry of the new Blog will be a miserable one – bah humbug

Yesterday we took the kids to see a stand-up comedian called James Campbell. (http://www.comedy4kids.co.uk)  Here he is on stage yesterday at the very snug Comedy Store in the West End, talking about mud and other silly stuff.

We saw James last year and he was excellent, and this year was equally good, with the additon of some ‘ginger haired bird’ playing the piano to accompany his selection of silly songs. The boys laughed and laughed. We try to alwyas go and see a show on Christmas eve.

Afterwards, we walked up Regent Street and along Oxford Street to see the lights but instead all we saw were about a million people all trying to do the same as us!

Here is a blurry Buffy at Waterloo

In the evening I watched most of the film ‘Kill Bill’ because I was told it is an art-house masterpiece but after an hour and 6 or 7 decapitations I turned it off and wondered if the world had been made a better place by the creation of such a gore-fest? If Tarrantino ever drops by I’ll ask him face to face. Then I’ll decapitate him.