PHREADZ podcast

Well sort of. Some of the content from Kosso's phreadz.com is also available in MP4 format, which is kind of handy for ipod video. So I'm hoping this feed will populate my ipod with the fascinating conversations these guys are having. Only some of the content mind, not all of it, so these threaded video conversations might not be all that threaded. I have a horrible fear they might not be that interesting either. Why is so much (free) web content just so bad? I guess you get what you pay for.

I have found some that I like, that is free, here follows a summary. These are all audio only, I guess audio podcasting is a bit more established:

Collings and Herrin - Richard Herring and Andrew Collins. Only listened to a couple of these so far, but it's a recreation of a radio segment they used to do, but recorded on a laptop, on one of their kitchens, as neither of them has a radio show any more.
Cobra Beercast Dom Joly and Danny Wallace plus guests who have included Iain Lee and McKenzie Crook. Brilliant, hard to see how they can maintain it. Ooh, there's another one today.
Shindiggery - Iain Lee, bit weird.
www.guardian.co.uk/podcasts - their podcasts are nearly all great. I listen to their daily podcast every day, and the tech and music ones each week, but the occasional arts one is rubbish. The Guardian of course hosted the Ricky Gervais podcast, which really helped this whole thing take off.
Stephen Fry's podgram - I really like him, but it's self indulgent and whiny (like... oh) but also seems like it's fizzling out already. The first one started out in proper emo blog style, but the last one was him reading a speech he'd been paid to make by the BBC, hmm.

Some not so good one's that I've seen recently include geekbrief.tv and diggnation, they are both really light on content, geekbrief especially is based mostly around press releases it seems (from the few brief listens I've had). This is free content though, if I was trying to do regular news I'm sure I would resort to the same things. I will give these another chance, you'll be glad to hear. geekbrief.tv is produced (or executive produced) by Adam Curry, who you may remember mentioned here in the early days of podcasting. He was calling himself the Podfather before Ricky Gervais picked it up.

Um, I'm running out now, I will have to revisit this list.

Had a bit of a hitch with the ipod, computer crashed while syncing and I lost my whole library. Not the mp3's, they're all safe, but all the meta data about playlists and content I'd subscribed to is gone. My playlists were brilliant! It's a proper shame. I will be rebuilding this for most of the weekend, no time for any of the housework I had planned.

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Lord of the Rings Review

Invited to the star studded Leicester Squre Premiere? With my reputation? Read on...

Do you remember the last time you heard applause at the cinema? Seemed to happen all the time when I was a kid, whooping and cheering as the opening titles rolled up the screen. This was Hampshire, so possibly it was the wonder of electricity that people were applauding. Anyway, last night it happened all over again at the Lord of The Rings premiere...

Anyway, that applause - there was a big old fight, Boromir (Sean Bean) got it pretty bad from some big Orc goblin type beast so the full size hero of the film - Aragorn (Viggo Mortenson) - steps in. He thrusts, he parries, he slices, he dices, he cuts this big mother's head right off, and the audience went wild... It's one of many GRATE fight scenes in the film; if you were worried the film was going to be a bit Belle and Sebastian, stop fretting now...

They (Director Peter Jackson and New Line entertainment) don't seem to have taken any liberties with the story line as far as I can see, but they've possibly cut out some of the flowery dialogue - basically they've "sub-edited" it, and made it more relevant to the cinema goer. This is not a an academic text, this is a modern film for a wide audience after all... Some of the best examples of this are the encounter with the troll in the mines - it's CGI-tastic, so much more dynamic than I could have envisaged. It's Jurassic Park's T Rex terrorizing the kids, times a hundred. It may seem to the purist that casual mentions in the book are given too much of the film (like the love interest), and important bits aren't played out in enough detail, but I think the balance is, well, balanced... Another scene with more OOOMPH than you might expect is Arwen (aforementioned "leading" lady, Liv Tyler) is being chased by the Black Riders - it looks like they should be on Land Speeders rather than horses. This is NOT an episode of Black Beauty...

The New Zealand scenery is spectacular. If I had a garden, I'd be digging me a hobbit-hole to live in as we speak. At times (please forgive me) the setting of the film seems to slip into cliche, but then you realise - Lord of the Rings, uh, um - how do I say "wrote the book" in a non wanky way? This film blows the froth off anything I've seen for a long while (Harry Who?)

The effects are amazing, but subtle; it's easy to forget that Elijiah Wood (Frodo) and Ian Holm (Bilbo) aren't really half the height of Ian McKellan (Gandalf) and Christopher Lee (Saruman). Well not so easy for me, as I was sat about 20 seats away from them, but that's not important. Filming must have been MIGHTILY COMPLEX, but it flows together seemlessly, to make an exhilarating and moving experience. This film is smashing, and I liked it very much. It just about makes up for me missing my nephew's nativity play today.

Elvish has left the building.

(If you were wondering, I got in as a last minute stand by (replacing a major Eighties pop star) for the hottest film of the year, and found myself lovin' it lovin' it lovin' it for the whole three hours. More premiere league name dropping in Stalking Heads... Thanks to Emma @ Impressive PR who made it possible.

2001 :: Comment / reply

Damp and other delights

This spell of cold weather has made the whole house SWEAT! I've hd to put our central heating on at last, yay it still works, but uh-oh, this has led to condensation everywhere. Hopefully this will sort itself out when the temperature levels off a bit, will see. I'm a bit worried that condensation is an early sympton of potential damp...

The basement flat has apparently had some sort of damp issue, which has now crept into the flat on the ground floor, and we're on the second floor, for how much longer are we safe..? The full story is that the basement flat on this side of the building (rewind a bit, this is a big old building, split into two, then each again split into five, so ten flats in all, and two front doors, now carry on) negotiated himself the exclusive use of some storage rooms down in the basement, which in the neighbouring identical mirrored building are share between all the flats. now it seems this private storage room had a damp problem a few years ago, but basement flat owner didn't have the money to fix it, so left it. Now it's got out of hand and is going to cost thousands to put right. So there was a tenants meeting (we all own part of the freehold), which we didn't go to, but we did get a note asking what we thought about this, who should fix it, who should pay for it, maybe we the freehold company could lend the money to the flat owner, maybe we could take control of this basement room again. I wouldn't mind some extra external storage if it was right by the flat, but it being all the way down there, and also stinking with damp, it doesn't sound like such a good option to me. My suggestion was for the people involved to sort it out with their insuranace... Does that make me a bad neighbour? Ah well, it's at least one step up the niceness ladder from calling the council to complain about the damp health hazard.

UPDATE from neighbour we do actually speak to:

[basement flat owner] has managed to come up with some money to eradicate damp and he is dealing direct with contractor. He wishes to hang on to storerooms.

2006 :: Comment / reply