Last weekend was the 2008 RAF Waddington air show and, as we've always done ever since we moved to Lincolnshire, we went along on the Saturday.
The forecast was awful. Mostly rain but with the chance of it clearing up a little in the afternoon. This would normally be disappointing anyway but it was worse given that this show was going to be the return to the skies of the privately rebuilt Avro Vulcan XH558.
As forecast, the morning was wet and horrible and hardly anything was flying (although the Red Arrows managed to put on a small display despite the fact that the cloud was very low). Thankfully the forecast chance of better weather in the afternoon did happen and we ended up with a nice sunny day.
Given that I had the PowerShot G9 with me as well as the EOS 400D I decided to try recording some videos too:
A joint display by a Typhoon and a Spitfire:
XH558 takes to the sky:
A joint flypast of XH558 and the BBMF's Lancaster:
I quite like photographic slideshows done as videos and I've dabbled with them from time to time. However, I've never published any because, ideally, they work best with some music to back them up and as far as I'm concerned that can create all sorts of copyright issues.
This morning I read this RedBubble journal entry by Grant Bissett and decided to create an Animoto account and have a quick play. The thing that most attracted me was the fact that they appear to have a library of licensed music, thus solving the copyright issue I tend to worry about.
It's pretty clever too. You start a video project, you either upload a bunch of images, or download them from a small selection of supported image-hosting sites (in my case from Flickr), you make the final selection, you select the backing music, and then wait a (very) short while. And then you've got a video.
There are options for sharing and embedding the video, and there's also the option to upload to YouTube:
There are two levels to the service. You can create videos for free but they can't be any longer than 30 seconds. If 30 seconds isn't enough you can make a longer video on a pay-per-video basis. There's also the option (which you also have to pay for) to create DVD quality videos. All seems fair and sensible to me.
Besides, these days, who's got an attention span longer than 30 seconds? ;-)
While I appreciate that any recorded report is going to be a little one-sided you really do start to wonder what the hell is going on when you read something like this and see the accompanying video:
On Saturday I managed to get hold of a copy of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I'm only a couple of chapters in at the moment and so far it's a good read.
Because of the release of the book he was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight last Friday. I managed to miss it but, as usual, YouTube comes to the rescue:
Note that the interview is also currently available on the BBC website — I've been unable to watch it there today because the stream is very choppy.
As a song it's very derivative, kind of obvious, it has simplistic lyrics but, but, but..... it just works.
And it seems to play well live too:
Given the probable average age of their core following I'm probably in the "dad" bracket in relation to them but I'd still really love to see them live...
Back in the mid to late 1980s, during my late teens, I was a huge Japan fan. This, of course, involved collecting as much as their output as possible — not just the records but also trying to get hold if promo videos and stuff like that.
Anyone who knows the band will know that they had an early "glam rock" phase that, as the band evolved, they sort of ignored. Videos from that period tended to be quite hard to find, generally only available in some sort of "bootleg" form.
These days, thanks to the net, it's so much easier to find this sort of stuff:
