Looking at the software I use regularly and wouldn’t like to be without, I see that most of them are free and that I heard about them by word of mouth, so I thought I’d share the love.

So…

10) Vixy Beta
Still beta software so not without it’s problems from time to time, but this is a very useful, desktop based piece of software which will convert online .flv files into .avi files that you can save to your hard drive. For the non-technical amongst us, this means you can point it at the web address of a youtube video, or similar embedded video online, and it will ‘copy’ that video and save it to your hard drive in a format that you can play. Pretty cool huh? Also very easy to use. http://vixy.net/

9) 7zip
A worthy successor to Winzip and Winrar and other file compression utilities, this will compress and unpack a wide variety of file formats and does so more efficiently than predecessors. http://www.7-zip.org/

Comodo Firewall.
Excellent free Firewall programme, easy to use and configure and offers good protection. All of you paying annual subscriptions to Norton or McCaffee are wasting your money. This, combined with Avast, will do the job better and for free. http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/index.html – NB I notice they have developed their product range to include antivirus protection and other products – I’ve only used the firewall, can’t vouch for the others.

7) Avast Antivirus.
This is a decent piece of free Antivirus software, guaranteed free for the lifetime of the product. Plays nice with Comodo. Go check it out – http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

6) Spybot S&D
By far the best spyware shield on the market, and free. Go get it. http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

5) Esword
Perhaps less useful if you have no interest in the bible, but I wouldn’t be without it. With plugins for just about every available bible translation in english, plus a ton of foreign languages, and a huge range of commentaries and other scholarly material, Esword is the premiere free bible study programme. Includes Greek and Hebrew texts, with and without Strongs numbers etc. If you ever wanted to study the bible in its original languages for free, look no further. http://www.e-sword.net/

4) Gimp.
Why buy photoshop when you can have this? Awesome image manipulation programme. Really does rival photoshop for functionality in my opinion. http://www.gimp.org/

3) Open Office
Similarly, why buy micro$haft office when you can have this? Does pretty much everything the commercial programme does, only better – plus a few things it doesn’t do like .pdf creation. Save yourself £150. Go check it out: http://www.openoffice.org/

2) Firefox
In my opinion, the king of internet browsers. STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER RIGHT NOW. Honestly, everything about this programme is better – even the name. Microsoft are so rubbish at naming things – if they made toilet paper it’d be called Microsoft Butt Wiper. Firefox is just such a cooler name and look at the logo! An enormous fox with its tail on fire! Attacking the earth!! Who would not want this programme?!? http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/
NB If I could, I’d block people from reading this blog in Internet Explorer. Who knows? Someday I might? Download Firefox now just in case!!

1) linux
Chances are your computer runs windows. Some of mine do, but some of mine run Linux as their primary operating system and it’s great. Honestly, there are so many good things I could say about it that I don’t know where to begin. Trouble is, most shop bought computers come with windows pre-loaded, and if you’re anything like me you feel a bit weird about erasing windows to replace it with linux – kindof like you’re throwing away money. If you build computers though, or have old computers you’d like to re-condition, then linux is definitely the way to go. Takes a bit more configuration than Windows, but if you use a well-supported flavour of Linux, like http://www.ubuntu.com/ then you’re less likely to have driver issues etc. What’s more, ubuntu lets you “try before you buy” by loading a DVD based version of the desktop from windows to try it out.

I’d recommend all of the above as decent software, but a word of warning – if you mess up your computer don’t come crying to me. Only install and use stuff if you’re sure you know what you’re doing.

… almost literally… almost…

A couple of weeks ago, I was on the verge of buying airline tickets to Los Angeles, turns out now that I’m not going after all, but it’s still an interesting story.

It’s all to do with the film. Under the banner of Polaris Media Productions, my little team and I put together a short (roughly 8 minute) film, as mentioned in previous posts, to enter into the 168 project film competition. We shot it digitally on a Canon XM2 which is the same lovely little camera that I’ve been using for the Lifetime memories project. I then edited it together using Premiere Pro, and we sent it off via overnight courier after a “no time left to get it all edited and finished and exported and all the documentation signed and sealed” 24 hour non-stop no sleep marathon.

Now this competition is no small thing. It’s American-based, and the final judges are some big-deal Hollywood types – for example one of the guys who produced the X-Men – people like that. So, Judith and I – who’ve been hankering after a trip to California for a while now – got to thinking that it would be pretty cool if we could go over there for the festival and maybe do some other things while we’re there like have a bit of a holiday and visit Bethel and so on and so forth. Sadly though, getting time off work for Judith is not the easiest thing in the world. FE colleges seem to have the worst of both worlds when it comes to holidays. Staff are only allowed to take holiday during the school holiday periods (most expensive time), but unlike school teachers, do not automatically get all school holiday periods as time off – instead they have holiday days like most other professions (around 30-40 I think), but unlike the rest of the work-a-day world cannot take them when they like, they can only take them during the school holidays.

So, the festival (3-4 of April) falls just outside Judith’s holiday period which means we can’t go together, and going on my own doesn’t seem quite so appealing somehow.  Added to that, I’m due to have my tonsils out on the 14th and I have a pre-op assesment on the 1st so I’d need to go between those two dates and leave enough slack so that I don’ t miss my op if flights are delayed. Then, on top of that, the festival organisers contacted me to say that they were having problems with the final cut of the film and that it wasn’t displaying properly, the eventual upshot of which being it’s now not eligible for any awards.

So I was nearly going to LA next week, but not quite. However the film is screening out there on the 3rd (the editing guy their end has done something with it to try and fix it), so it’s not all bad. We may not be winning any Oscars, but at least our stuff’s out there.

In other news I got a new car today.

Shiny.

Well, the filming is going well at least. It’s a cinema-verite-style documentary about how elderly relatives often get unintentionally frozen out of young families in our glorious western culture. I spent a couple of hours filming my mother the other day eating a lonely microwave dinner, all the time skirting around the issue that she does, quite commonly in fact, sit on her own and eat a lonely microwave dinner. I am the victim of my own insightful cinematography.

In other news I woke up this morning to find that I’d been given a parking ticket for parking outside my house. Apparantly I was parked next to a dropped curb or something. There’s £50 I won’t see again. It seems that Croydon council are getting desperate – just over two months till april and they need to pay the bills. Glad to be of service Croydon.

Will try and work out some way of posting the finished film to this blog when it’s, y’know, finished.

Well, it turns out I’m making a movie. There’s a short film competition that I’m entered in called the 168 Project – you make a movie in 168 hours (7 days).  So far all is going well – it’s a short documentary about neglecting the elderly – more later…

Well, It turns out that having an iphone hasn’t helped much in keeping this blog up to date after all. I blame the lack of a keyboard.

So what’s been happening lately? Well, the Americans have a new president, and a very nice chap he is too by all accounts. Shame about the swearing in fiasco, but it’s nice to have a bit of a laugh now and again. On this side of the pond things have been quite quiet. Christmas was good – busy but good. I’m currently knackered all the time but that’s more a medical thing than anything else (turns out my tonsils are choking me in the middle of the night and causing me to snore/waking me up quite a lot, so I have to have them out – more on that another time).

I’m currently researching the life of Vincent Van Gogh – someone I’ve been fascinated by for a long time.  I recently saw Jim Jarrett’s production of ‘Vincent’ (written by none other than Leonard Nimoy) and while I felt Jarrett’s performance was a bit mediocre for someone with all his experience and training (vocally he was frankly pretty rubbish) he did succeed in making me like the play a little better, and helped me to see more warmth in it than I thought was there.

For anyone who doesn’t know it, it’s not a text I would instantly recommend – Nimoy may be a great Vulcan, but he’s not a great writer – at least ‘Vincent’ is not a great piece of writing. On first reading it comes accross as pretty sterile, almost amateurish in places, and if it weren’t for the fact that Nimoy wrote it for himself and starred in it, I doubt it would ever have seen the light of day. But there’s not much out there about Vincent and frankly there ought to be.

For a long time now I’ve had the desire to write something myself on the subject, but I don’t want to launch half-assed into it and balls it up. That’s what Vulcans are for. The story is too rich and somehow too important to do a crappy job on, and I’ve kept putting the idea off until I’m a bit older and wiser, but it’s been nagging at me again recently and I think I should at least move things on a bit. Vincent was, after all, 27 when he started painting so I’ve got a couple of years on him now.

What really captivates me about his story is his faith. Vincent grew up in the radical wing of the dutch reformed church. His father was a minister, and there was a period in his early 20s when he was determined to follow in his father’s footsteps. Being an all-or-nothing kindof guy Vincent took Jesus’ teachings at face value. He went to live in an impoverished mining community in Belgium, gave away nearly all his possessions and went to live among the people. He poured himself out for that community in every way possible and they loved him for it. He preached and taught, but he also shared himself with them unreservedly, ate with them, worked alongside them, wept with them. This was too much for his denomination – they decided to shut him down for being too radical. They sent another guy in to replace him, and basically kicked  him out. It totally destroyed him. After that he was at a loss – didn’t know what to do with his life. It took a couple of years of bumming around feeling sorry for himself before he decided to try his hand at painting, the legacy of which we know all too well, but it was never his first love. Weird huh?

Anyway, that side of the story is rarely told, but Nimoy’s “Vincent” makes quite a bit of it. After seeing Jarrett’s production I’m convinced enough by the text to try a production of my own, and in a shocking bombshell move I think I’m going to cast myself in it. I’m still exploring the feasibility at the moment, so it may not happen, but if it does you can expect to see me playing one of the most famous and talented gingers the world has ever known at a theatre near… well… me probably because I hate touring.

Lots of work to do before then though, including memorising  50-odd pages of Vulcan prose… joy!

Well, I never thought I would, but I’ve finally succombed and got an iphone. The good news here is that it’s a fab little piece of kit that does everything I want it to do and some, including allowing me to update this blog on the move, the bad news is I feel dirty. I feel like I’ve cheated on my beloved, if somewhat dowdy pc with a beautiful, very sexy, but overwhelmingly shallow piece of appleware.

I shall save further ruminations on why this may be so until I have a proper keyboard beneath my fingers. For now, expect more frequent (if shorter) updates, at least until the novelty wears off…

Well, the race is coming to a close and the democrats seem to be getting themselves into a sweat, bizarrely, about possibly loosing to McCain.

I say bizarrely because it seems impossible, from this side of the pond, for McCain to do anything but lose. This is, of course, a point of view unaffected  by the news storm surrounding the VPs and the Obama campaign’s unwillingness to bare it’s teeth,  but nevertheless, the American people in general and the democratic party in particular seem to have forgotten that John McCain is running on the heels of one of the most unpopular presidents in history, at the head of one of the most disastrous administrations in history. How can Obama possibly lose?

No, my fear has been that Obama stands more of a risk of being assassinated than he does of losing the election. For once, the comparisons with JFK seem justified, and some of his rhetoric has surely upset some very powerful shady people.

But then I found this list, which amused and reassured me in somewhat equal measure. Maybe with the name Obama he’s safe after all…

Lincoln – Kennedy Coincidences
1) Lincoln was elected in 1860, Kennedy in 1960, 100 years apart.

2) Both men were deeply involved in civil rights for African Americans.

3) Both men were assassinated on a Friday, in the presence of their wives.

4) Each wife had lost a child while living at the White House.

5) Both men were killed by a bullet that entered the head from behind.

6) Lincoln was killed in Ford’s Theater. Kennedy met his death while riding in a Lincoln convertible made by the Ford Motor Company.

7) Both men were succeeded by vice-presidents named Johnson who were Southern Democrats and former senators.

Andrew Johnson was born in 1808. Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908, exactly one hundred years later.

9) The first name of Lincoln’s private secretary was John; the last name of Kennedy’s private secretary was Lincoln.

10) John Wilkes Booth was born in 1839 [according to some sources]; Lee Harvey Oswald was born in 1939, one hundred years later.

11) Both assassins were Southerners who held extremist views.

12) Both assassins were murdered before they could be brought to trial.

13) Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and fled to a warehouse. Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and fled to a theater.

14) LlNCOLN and KENNEDY each have 7 letters.

15) ANDREW JOHNSON and LYNDON JOHNSON each have 13 letters.

16) JOHN WlLKES BOOTH and LEE HARVEY OSWALD each has 15 letters.

17) A Licoln staffer Miss Kennedy told him not to go to the Theater. A Kennedy staffer, Miss Lincoln, told him not to go to Dallas.

Spooky eh? Looking at the list, I’m sure there are more. It’s a bit like playing ‘where’s wally’…

So… UFOs.

Random? Let me explain. I’ve been reading a lot of conspiracy theories of late and similar rubbish that can be found floating along the intertubes. You may be surprised to hear that this sort of behaviour is not particularly unusual for me – I enjoy sifting through the bizarre and peculiar things that can be found on the glorious marvel of technology that is the internet, and regularly find a topic of interest that consumes me for a few days or sometimes weeks, or occasionally even months.

UFOs has been days so far, although I should clarify that by adding that the general theme of ‘conspiracy theory’ is a recurring one for me  – especially over the past year or so while I’ve been slowly ‘researching’ them for an as yet unnamed and undiscussed project that I have lurking in the back of my brain – more on that another time perhaps.
So, where was I? Ah yes, UFOs. I’ve spent a bit of time reading about them of late, and it seems things have moved on somewhat since the late nineties when I last showed any kind of interest in this subject (largely thanks to Gillian Anderson). There is now, it seems, a growing movement of people clamouring for ‘disclosure’ in an increasingly loud and, what I imagine to be, somewhat irritating manner for the governments of the world who may or may not be hiding things from everyone else. What’s new about that? Well, it seems this ‘disclosure movement’ have become pretty organised and respectible. No longer are we looking at a bunch of star-trek convention rejects wearing rubber alien masks, waving bits of fence around and shouting ‘Roswell! Roswell!’ – no, these guys are wearing suits and have serious jobs with acronyms and a website (http://www.disclosureproject.org/) and are willing to swear a whole bunch of stuff before congress.

Now if it were just about swearing in front of congress, then I’d go right in there and cuss ‘em out myself, but as we all know Governments are pretty tricksy where things like UFOs and Aliens are concerned. Which is why I’m so impressed with these disclosure folk because they essentially ARE the government, only retired or kicked out or moved on. Every single one of these people who’ve come together (and there’s about 400 of them) have worked in sensitive situations where they’ve had access to first hand evidence of UFOs or ETs, and some of them have brought it with them. Tell me that’s not cool.

You can see some of them on this video here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1166743665260900218

From the lowliest Air traffic controller to the loftiest ex-moondust soldier, each of those guys has a story to tell, first hand, with plenty of corroborating evidence – whether it be hard-copy stuff, or just a cast iron personal history that verifies they are who they say they are, it’s pretty impressive for UFO stories which can usually be traced back to nutcases spouting drivel somewhere or other.

I don’t know what to make of it all really. I have this sort of love/hate relationship with conspiracy theories of any type. On the one hand I love to read them – there’s something about a well written conspiracy that’s quite captivating. On the other hand they live in the portion of my head devoted to fiction. On the one hand I can usually see a lot of sense in how the stories are laid out, and my natural distrust of authority plays right into their hands. On the other hand, I can’t help but laugh at the ludicrous nature of most of the claims.

Most folk tend to come down on one side of the fence or the other – either loving and believing or loathing and denying. Whichever side, they’re usually vehement. However, I find it very difficult to do either. When it comes to conspiracy theories I’m a born fence-sitter. I love hearing them, I enjoy chewing them over, but I can never really wholeheartedly embrace or reject them. I just… sit on the fence. It’s about the only area of life where I find myself paralysed with indesicion. I love it.

So if you find yourself with an evening to spare, join me on the white picket fence that separates the Governments of the world from the lone gunmen with their rubber alien masks, respectible acronym-laden jobs and potty mouths, and watch while the two sides tear up the ground stakes and beat each other over the head with them. Who knows what’s going on out there? Who cares? This is some serious entertainment. It sure beats season 9 of the X-files anyway.

It shocks me to look at the date of the last entry and realise that a) it feels like last week that I wrote it and b) I have not really stopped being hyper busy between then and now.

I’ve just got back from teaching on the Riding Lights summer school where our group put on a production of Cabaret in approximately five days and I’m totally whacked, so please don’t expect this entry to be full of insightful comment on the human condition. However, I’m once again profoundly humbled and moved by the whole Riding Lights summer school phenomenon. For the curious, there’s a link to their blog: http://ridinglights.blogspot.com/2008/08/friday.html

Today will be a day of rest and relaxation but I promise I’ll update again later in the week now that things have calmed down work-wise. I have several half-finished posts so it should be easy enough to get something up.

Today’s entry deserves a little bit of background explanation.

One of the things I’m doing at the moment is something we’ve called “The Lifetime Memories Project”. Around October last year we managed to secure funding for this project from a trust that specifically funds things benefiting OAPs. The aim of the project is to record the personal histories of OAPs in our area by interviewing them and producing a DVD with edited footage of the interview, and digital copies of any pictures/documents they have pertaining to significant moments in their lives. The idea is that we will be able to preserve pieces of living history, and provide these OAPs with a lasting record of their lives that can be passed on to their loved ones in order that it might outlive them.

The idea was born out of something I did with my Dad about a year before he died – we sat down with a minidisc recorder and I interviewed him for a couple of hours – that night I found out so many things about my Dad that I never knew, and when he died a year later it became a priceless record of the man he was. I’ve cherished it ever since.

Anyway, today I was interviewing one particular pensioner with a colleague of mine. I’ve only done one other interview like this so far, so my experience of it is relatively limited, but something particular has struck me about the stories of each of the elderly people I’ve interviewed so far – my own father included- for each of them the defining event of their lives has been The War.

For everyone who lived through it the war has had an overwhelmingly significant effect on their lives it seems. For the old lady I interviewed today, it changed the entire course of her life – she had been a farmgirl on her parent’s farm in a remote northern village when war broke out, and ran away from home with her best friend to join the RAF. There she met and married an airman, went on to have five children, and has lived most of her life in London. Without the war, she would have remained in her remote northern village, married a farmer, and lived her life out as a farmer’s wife milking cows.

But the effects of the war on the lives of those who lived through it did not end in 1945, neither did it end with rationing, or the cold war, or the fall of the berlin wall.

A friend of mine has a theory. In fact, he is writing a book about it, and one day I hope to pick up a copy in Waterstones for the snatches he has read to me are truly excellent, but his theory is that for these wartime survivors the war is still going on.

This was certainly true for my father. Every night that I can remember when he was alive, no matter whether we were at home or on holiday, he would meticulously switch off every electrical appliance in the house at the mains, and unplug them all. It drove my mother (postwar generation) absolutley potty, althought I find it somewhat touching now, when visiting her, that she has taken on this night-time ritual for herself – probably as a means of remembering him. My father also hated wasting food, and saved all manner of unlikely objects “in case they might be useful”. When he died and my mother decided to move house, she had to pay the local handyman for a full day’s work cleaning out our garage of all these “potentially useful” items dating back decades. The poor fellow spent all day loading up his van, driving to the tip, coming back, loading up, rinsing and repeating, before the accumulated detritus of my father’s habit had been disposed of.

For my father, the scrimp save and scavenge mentality had been born out of teenage years spent living through the blitz (he was never evacuated, unlike his siblings) and he never shook it off. For him, subconciously at least, Hitler’s panzers were perpetually at the channel – the need for vigilance over his own wastefulness never fully disappeared.

For the lady I interviewed today, I recognised similar signs – the unplugged electrical appliances, and useful items readily to hand in case of an unexpected blackout.

How will we cope, I wonder, when we come to the end of our lives and, disappointed by our meagre pensions and living on the poverty line we struggle to make ends meet? Will a lifetime of wastefulness catch up to haunt us? Will we finally learn the lessons of our fathers? Will the panzers of poverty make it across the channel or will a resurgence of the spirit of the blitz repel them?

Time will tell.