My first observation is that while holiday photographs need a nominal amount of sorting and post-processing before being displayed, video is much more demanding of time, effort, and computing power. Having struggled to get to grips with previous incarnations, Apple’s iMovie 09 has been fantastic: arranging clips through drag and drop is very natural and when a “drop” is ambiguous it pops up a short menu of options. Cropping, rotating and reversing clips is simple and speedy (admittedly this is a borrowed MacBook Pro rather than my own wimpier and older MacBook). At first I was wary of the themes but the strong visual style makes it easy to decorate the film in an attractive way.

My second observation is that next time we capture videos there are some basic rules we can follow to make the post-processing a lot easier!

• Set the scene with a strong opening shot. For example, when capturing a ferry crossing, start the clip with the shot of the ferry’s funnel instead of panning onto it at the end (the aforementioned “reverse clip” feature has rescued at least one such clip which ended where it should have started).
• Keep the panoramas to a minimum: the vista may be beautiful but try to capture something a photograph cannot, such as the motion of waves lapping/pounding a shoreline.
• Leading on from the previous point, sound is important. The camera records audio as well as video, so even if there is little or no action the sound can bring interest to a clip.

To thank you for reading this far, while I have not finished my masterpiece film of our entire three week trip, I did make a short trailer featuring just the footage from our dolphin encounter in Kaikoura.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon it was bustling (for a village!) with friends and families heading to the gastro pubs and other brunch places (including a genuine greasy spoon!).

1. even on Christmas Day! [back]

Highlights for me in 2009 have undoubtedly been changing job, getting married and buying a flat—2010 is going to have a hard time living up to that! Holiday destinations in 2009 included San Francisco (including an amazing day of ski-ing in the sunshine in Tahoe), Gdansk and Sussex.

The three events mentioned in highlights did not leave me very much time to write about these trips here, or in fact write very much at all. There was also less need for me to write here to draw people’s attention to something: if I publish my photographs to Picasa Web then they are automatically pulled into Facebook and my friends are notified through in their new feed. The biggest change in web publishing in 2009 was not actually about the publication but consumption: twitter and the aforementioned Facebook news stream have provided non-techies with an interface to a facility geeks have had for years with a feed reader.

Traditionally, at this point, a review article should turn towards predictions for the new year. I do not have a prediction but a hope, that having to register individually for websites will become to be regarded as outmoded and unfashionable as blinking text. Not for important (or even semi-important) websites, but for “disposable” logins of low importance, privacy and security, I should really like to avoid having to generate a user/password combination and go through the rigamarole of “verification”. Do I ask too much?

Happy New Year.

Looking back to some photographs from earlier in the year you can see this else where. For example compare this photo of Rosie at the top of a cold and windy church tower to the Picasa version below.

Rosie at the top of the Rye Church tower.

Rye from the church tower (Picasa version)

Picasa was convenient but perhaps it is time to return to hosting my own photographs?

After reading two earlier stories based on research into archived correspondence—one on the forthcoming Official Biography of The Queen Mother which used correspondence as the main source material, and a second about how actress Vanessa Redgrave’s life almost took a very different path—it struck me that this notion of having a record of life is perhaps not so new after all, although the medium has changed from prose to digital visuals which makes for a very different kind of record. Our descendants will know much more about how things looked but how will they learn the story behind the photograph?

Fortunately letter writing has already made something of a comeback thanks to the convenience of email and combined with the ubiquity of digital cameras, a future generation of biographers should have a very rich library of material to draw upon. The weak spot is there are many threats to digital collections: corporate email retention policies which automatically expunge emails after a certain period of time, hard drive failure and theft are some of the most common, yet in many cases the (incomprehensible to those of us that value privacy) desire to publish this material can produce a useful safety net against digital loss.

Rye is a small, cobble-streeted village which must have more tea shops per square mile than Rome has churches. When we arrived early Monday afternoon the place was overrun with out-of-towners but since they were patronising the tea shops, the surrounding countryside provided a pleasantly tranquil amble and by the time we returned the tea shops were all closed and the streets empty. A lovely place (if you like tea and cake), but best avoided on a bank holiday I think!

The following day was spent in Hastings, featured in at least one recent travel supplement as an ‘up-and-coming’ weekend getaway destination. The sea-front is very similar to Brighton, but less tacky, and while some bits were in the process of being renovated there was plenty that looked rather run down. After a morning of walking along the beach and feeling rather uninspired we started back towards the town to find some lunch. By chance we wandered into a lane to look at the menu for a café only to realise that it led to a whole street of smart(ish) cappuccino lounges and artisan shops that had been entirely invisible from the beach! We also spent a wondrous hour browsing the memorabilia and photographs in the Old Town Hall museum which gave us a flavour of how Hastings and the Cinq Ports have been the first line of England’s defences for over 1000 years. In the same street there is an organic bakery from which I purchased a very fine eccles cake for afternoon tea.

Hastings was too grey and overcast for good photos, but Rye was quaintly photogenic.

Upon first boot it is not immediately obvious what is new in this release, although the new ‘Dust’ theme is so polished it feels like my desktop has received a heavy application of windolene, and it was nice to see that my widescreen monitor was now recognised automatically rather than requiring the installation of an additional package. Moving to Jaunty also brought an upgrade of my entire application set, including the latest version of Gnome Do which features an OS X-style dock.

Rarely is an upgrade without issues but this was a pretty good one:

• The Gnome desktop sharing service (vino-server) now causes X to consume 60% of CPU time even when no one is connected. The only workaround is to turn off desktop sharing.
• The new human-theme package conflicts with the Blubuntu theme packages. I just left this un-upgraded since I really like the blue theme.
• Not so much an issue, but after three years of successive upgrades there was some junk that needed to be removed manually: php5 and emacs22 are now default/production (and you still need emacs-snapshot for anti-aliased fonts) so I removed all the php4 and emacs21 packages. There were also half a dozen old kernels that were too out of date to be any use.

I’d rather hear what any of my friends says on any topic, rather than what people I don’t know say about a specific article.

Sites such as Disqus and Intense Debate also try to address these problems but populating yet another website with ‘friend’ information seems like duplication compared to using an existing network like Twitter, or Facebook.

Facebook recently released a very simple Comments Widget which I have installed below as a trial-replacement for traditional comments. To leave a comment, click ‘Connect with Facebook’ and authorise toobusyto.org.uk as a Facebook application, then leave your comment in the box. Regular comments are available below the Facebook Comment widget for people without Facebook accounts but since the Facebook widget can be customised to support anonymous comments, if the experiment is successful I eventually plan to turn that off. Let me know what you think!

PS – The ‘number of comments’ stat on the front page will be inaccurate due to the new system.
Comment counts should now (mostly) be accurate.