Walkway Closed - No Pavement for Pedestrians October 26, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : food and drink, transport, video, London , add a commentBack in the old days, before you could do any kind of building or digging work that required a temporary closure of the pavement, it was necessary to erect a proper cordon with signs and diversions including a clearly marked safe route for pedestrians. But now we seem to get all sorts of obstacles places in the way making travel by foot an increasingly hazardous venture. It’s not like this is some American city where everybody is expected to get around by car and walkers are treated like weirdos. No this is in central London where crowds of people get about using shanks’s pony on a regular basis.
And it’s not just builders, scaffolders, road maintenance and utilities crews. Where I live, a bit further out, parked cars are often left straddling the pavement blocking the right of way for pedestrians. Other obstacles are provided by roadside businesses who decide to expand outwards from their shop front onto the pavement. Hand car wash services for example seem to use the pavement, kerb and bus lane as part of their workshop area. Then there are the tressel tables of vegetables in bowls, all at £1 each which are spreading like potato blight in front of all kinds of non-food related shops, to the extent that proper greengrocers are going out of business unless they join in the bowls system as well. So now you can’t buy two lemons you have to have five, and a bowl of tomatoes is expensive at £1 whereas three aubergines might seem like a bargain until you notice that the two underneath are going brown.
Tags: pavementclosed, no pavement, walkway obstacles, vegetable bowls, hand car wash, rant
Google Suggests a pre-emptive text search July 16, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Long Tail, video , 3commentsA short video to show how Google Suggest works and to imagine how this might change people’s behaviours if it gets deployed as the default search mode.
If I’m right and Google are seriously considering releasing this live then how big a change do you think it will mean and what are the implications for search engine results overall if Google Suggest slips into widespread use?
Nurturing Creativity - The Harvest June 8, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : video, cider , 1 comment so farFeaturing a family that’s been in the business for about three centuries, nurturing around 350 a year. Harvest is the start of the process, when they are nice and ripe.
There are about 200 creatives in the top field, and maybe 150 in the bottom field. being creative need lots of praise, to massage their egos but you can’t leave them in too long or else they become temperamental.
They use a hydraulic juicer, because modern ones give 20% more juice. The distribution centre is for all the companies that need creativity.
Online and direct marketing campaigns. Computer games and animation industries. TV ads.
Testing new blends like the Swindon rootstock grafted to Cornwall foliage. Any rotten uns, just get mulched up and sent up to Chelsea, for the flower show. A lot of people pontificate about the future of advertising but you can’t beat good ideas.
Beat the Weather - Ebbsfleet’s tune for Wembley April 28, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : ebbsfleet, video , 2commentsPeter Norton, the Ebbsfleet United groundsman, has released a song called “Beat the Weather” to mark myfootballclub’s team’s appearance at Wembley in the FA Trophy Final on Saturday May 10.
Habibi Sushi - new Sushi bar in London April 22, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : food and drink, video, London , 4comments
I spotted a brand new sushi bar called Habibi Sushi which only opened last week, so we went back a couple of days later for lunch. The location is great, in the narrow Artillary Passage just a short walk from Liverpool Street station, fork left at the Seven Stars in the direction of Brick Lane or Spitalfields, so very handy for having a bite on the way home, or maybe picking up a takeaway box which looked great. Conveyor belt Sushi bars are great fun, and the original “Moshi Moshi” inside Liverpool Street station itself seems to have gone downhill a bit recently, so some competition in the local area is most welcome.
The food was very good, with some unusual variations on the usual sushi dishes, and about the right proportions of raw fish and cooked meat dishes. The only slight niggle I would have is with the stools which swivel in all directions including up, down and side to side. That might help fit everything in to a narrow shop, but it does make sitting down and staying on a bit of an effort after a while!
From their website at www.habibisushi.co.uk you can download pdfs for either the eat-in or takeaway menus, which is handy if you want to memorise the colour coding dish scheme for pricing conveyor belt choices.
Verdict: Well worth a try if in the vicinity or even making a special trip to visit. I hope Habibi Sushi keeps up the good standard and stays in business for years to come.
Is VIDEO on Flickr better than youTube? April 9, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, Flickr, video, London , 3commentsBetter than youTube?
Video uploading to Flickr went live earlier today so it’s a big topic of conversation, especially the inevitable comparison with youTube the leader in the field. So is Flickr video better than youTube or just different?
My first reaction was delight to discover that the flickr video upload and sharing is totally integrated into the photo sharing community aspect of flick that made it so successful. Videos appear in the photostream alongside stills, and can be community tagged, commented on, sent to sets and groups, and blogged using “blog this” which is fantastic. The quality of the video and audio is superior too, with up to 150MB file sizes acceptable for a 90 second video. Why the 90 second limit? Well this is to avoid the problem of being used as a file download service for copied music videos, TV clips and films etc and to encourage home made movie clips from digital cameras, phones etc. So Flickr can avoid the enormous copyright problem that google inherited when they bought youTube.
“long photos”
Central to Flickr’s philosophy for introducing video, and something that youTube does not really have is the concept of the “long photo” which kind of fits in with the use of digital still cameras that have the capacity to take video clips. This service is for genuine user generated video, short clips about everyday life, surroundings, little art videos and so on. Not so much about long videos of talking heads recorded straight from webcams saying “um” and “ah” a lot either.
London Video group
Flickr groups by default can accept both pictures and video but I thought it might be useful to have a group for London Video that focusses on video only, still linked to the London photo group, London Flickr meetups. I’ve invited some flickr contacts from London and from the social media cafe as well, but anybody interested in video is welcome to join and upload anything vaguely London related. All in all, it’s going to be very interesting to see how creative people use the opportunity that Flickr video is offering.
To give an idea, here’s Billy’s bacon video from Flickr, embedded on this wordPress blog.
I know, you can already do all that with youTube but I feel there are some significant advantages with the Flickr Video implementation, aren’t there?
Better than youtube
Yes or no?
Mariza - Portuguese Fado singer January 18, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Music, video , 25comments
Paul Velho sent me this you tube video within facebook and I just had to embed it here in memory of Amalia Rodrigues.
“The Pride of Portuguese Passion. For those who are Portuguese, you’ll shed a tear. For those who are not, you’ll wish you were born here.”
Explaining the crack at Tate Modern Museum London October 21, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art, video, London , 9commentsExplaining the crack
People walk up and down along the length of the crack, and sometimes they cross it. Bending over and peering down into the abyss is popular too. Children like to walk with one foot on each bank of the gorge, like giants playing at trains. Those with a logical literal nature are puzzling out loud as to how the crack was constructed. Some are chatting about other times in other worlds, not really conscious of the art, but still acting and behaving in a manner which betrays a spatial awareness of it. A couple holding hands over the crack, whilst ambling down to the end and back, like a promenade along the seashore. 
Doris Salcedo’s “Shibboleth”
This is Doris Salcedo’s “Shibboleth”, the latest in a series of memorable, grand modern art installations in the enormous Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London. The first in the series being Louise Bourgeois with the huge enclosed spiral staircase sculptures, and another famous one being Olaf Eliasson’s “The Sun”. What all of these installations have in common, apart from being huge and important works of art, is the way in which the audience participates in the art. Watching the way that people interact with it is as much a part of the experience at Tate Modern as is appreciating the art itself.
Tate Modern Museum of Modern Art, London
The Turbine hall is immense, and that makes it a specific challenge for each of the artists in the Unilever series. One tried to fill it with sound, and failed in my opinion. Another with white cubes, an intriguing effort. The crack is almost as effective as the Sun for initiating strange behaviours in the London mob, although the extent to which the artist’s intention to say something about the foundations of imperialism and racism is achieved is anybody’s guess.
I took some short video clips which just happened to capture one man amongst many waving his arms about explaining the crack in belgian. There are other things going on in it as well, but he is clearly the star performer. Watch:
London Bridge Animoto September 7, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : animoto, Music, video, London , 2commentsAnother Animoto movie, this time about London Bridge for the song “Cormorants“. After the one I captured from Animoto and converted for youTube recently, it was nice to get a comment from Tom Clifton of Animoto with a promise that we’ll be able to dowload high res versions “within a few weeks…?” That’s great Tom, I’m looking forward to being able to do that. Meanwhile here’s the embedded version of my latest short video, as served directly from Animoto’s own site.
The full version of the song “Cormorants” ( or should it be called London Bridge?) can be played, downloaded, scrobbled and embedded from it’s place on the Andy Roberts label at Last.fm
Kinetic Sculpture September 1, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art, video , add a commentI met Theo Jansen briefly last year in Trafalgar square at the time of his kinetic scupture exhibition - “Strandbeest”. The art in these strange mechanical scuptures came through via Theo’s own slightly eccentric anthropomorhic storytelling about them.
The professional video above brings out the visual asthetics of kinetic sculture much better in some ways, although the clip itself is a branded commercial for BMW.
Thanks for reading Andy Roberts articles about video
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