CD Times - the shape of the future? - I've been subscribing to BillTunes.com since it launched at Christmas - since I'm a huge fan of ex-Vigilantes of Love frontman Bill Mallonee I've really been enjoying the slightly left-field content on this (modestly) paid-for website. "...Maybe after the last few years of litigation, a solution may be emerging that will make both musicians and fans happy with the added bonus of snookering major record labels. Now that is what you call disruptive technology..."

There was Asbestos at Fame Academy back in autumn 2002 when I was technical supervisor on that show. Endemol - the production company - have known about this for a year and even if they have contacted their subcontractors Resolution (who I was working for at the time and did all the post-production) haven't thought to contact any of their current employees, freelancers, or ex-employees about this. I found out via BBC News online (link above). So, I've contacted my union, my institute, the HSE and all my old colleagues who worked on the show and I intend to use this blog entry as a means of keeping abreast of the process for all of us. I'm putting the permalink for this entry in the side-bar (permalink URLs can be so unwieldy!).

Here is the first reply from my old employers, Resolution, their reply text is in italics:

Thanks for the prompt reply - I'll reply to your points individually:

1) They consider the risks to be minimal given the period of exposure but not negligible.

I'm told by a close friend (Dr. Onn Min Kon, MBBS MRCP MD - St. Mary's leading respiratory consultant - Google him to see his published record) tells me that it takes only one fibre to cause mesothelioma twenty years down the line.

2) They have asked me to confirm if any of our staff were involved in drilling into the fabric of the building as it is asbestos in its disturbed state, dust, that is of greater concern. Phil, can you answer this for when you were there.

Although we didn't do any drilling ourselves pulling bundles of cables through voids and holes kicks up an awful lot of dust

3) Did our guys do any work in the basement? If so can you give me an idea of the period/level of exposure you feel they were subjected.

We ran many cables through the basement over a period of several days.

4) When you say "register" what do you mean? Peninsular were not aware of any requirement to register anywhere you will need to explain further.

I know when I was at the Beeb they discovered asbestos at BBC Glasgow and all staff who'd worked there went on an HSE register so that in twenty years when they might need to seek compensation their potential exposure had been documented.

5) I will be speaking to Endemol about this generally and see what service they are prepared to offer, the only one Peninsular could come up with was an xray. I am not currently aware of them offering any scheme. I will however keep you informed.

Here are some links furnished to me by Mr. Tsuyoshi Kihara at the IIE (link in the right-hand bar):
What are asbestos-related diseases?
HSE's circular on the subject

MPEG2 encoding if interlaced vs progressive - this is a great thread on uk.tech.broadcast (link in RH bar) concerning qualatative differences between encoding 25i and 25p material - it seems that DCT based compression deals better with non-interlaced material (not really a suprise - there is no motion within each frame!) - I still can't get away from the fact that I love the look of proper interlaced video!

Orange SPV M2000 'phone is my new work mobile. It is a great device as it is more like a PDA (in fact it is a regular PocketPC 2003 gadget with a 'phone built in!). The killer app for me is being able to look at Excel files on the move as all my cable schedules for jobs are in that format. Here are a few notes based on the fact that I've had to re-install a couple of times now.

• Don't use PocketMusic! On the C500 it was my favorite MP3 playing app. Now Media Player seems usable as you can now pause in the middle of a file and drag the play-point to whatever part of the recording you like (hasn't every other audio app had that for a decade?!). I found that on the two occasions the M2000 crashed so that it needed a re-build PocketMusic was the culprit.
  
• Make sure you use xBackup! It does a memory backup to SD card and so if it does crash badly you can wait for five minutes while it re-builds from memory rather than having to re-install all your apps & re-configure.
  
• If it looks as if it has crashed don't tug the battery because that will take it back to factory config. The recessed reset button (on the bottom) does what it says non-destructively!
  
• Origional SPV & E200 chargers work with it
  
• The WiFi is great! BUT if you have very poor signal Windows file transfers don't work (even though you may have some web-availability).
  
• Skype! Brilliant - why pay for cell calls when you only to have walk another ten yards to find an unsecured WiFi spot and leech some bandwidth to make a Skype call! Remember Skype-Skype is free and the quality is better than a landline (and by extension better than a cell call).

More thoughts as they occour!

Norm Leete's Mellotron Page - I saw one of these once - a Mark V as I recall - just think of the flute sound at the start of "Strawberry Fields" and you'll know what one sounds like - it's an analogue sampling keyboard - all done with lots of reels of tape and a rack of replay heads.

Wires - A girl, a toolkit, Iraq - I was just thinking about writing some stuff about the various wiremen I have worked with over the last decade-and-a-half when Ben (whose desk is three away from mine!) sent me this link to Fiona Katie's blog - she is currently installing studios in Iraq - hardcore! Now I'm just working on an install in Saudi Arabia and so I'm off to read Fiona's writings with some interest.

"...to paraphrase from the treatment of alcoholics, "Don't be their "crutch" in the absence of their own responsibility." Their excuses for not learning are not acceptable." - I spotted this quote on Lockergnome (link in right-hand content bar) from a PC repair shop. I think the same is true providing tech support to the film & TV industry. So many folks are too proud to "sully" themselves with details!

Very funny clip courtesy of our friend Frances - I've transcoded it for the SPV 'phone (MPEG1 for PocketTV).

Microsoft R&B creator wizzard - this is really how it's done!

Gates bemoans US visa restrictions | The Register - this article caught my attention becaouse of a sentance near the bottom - "...in India, 40 per cent of students take engineering degrees, against just four per cent in the US." - I suspect the comparison with the UK would be similair - you gotta watch the sub-continent because as it's population becomes more educated they will be disproportionately more advantaged in the 21st century.

About Google Video - this is amazing! Google have been taking feeds of the closed caption data (which if they implement in Europe would be the page 888 teletext data) for the last year and ripping clip-frames from all the US networks. You can now search that data and see stills from the shows in question - convergence may actually happen! With this in mind you could start doing the same with DAB digital radio and many other places where meta data is generated automatically. Hmmm.

Terrablock is the SAN system that Root6 are starting to ship in numbers - I put one in at Teacher's TV last November and it is a superb solution for low-end video facilities. It starts at 3Gbytes and scales - with small numbers of clients it even supports hi-def video. It talks over 2gig fibre and appears to the client OS as a SCSI device but it has a management layer (that you can access over the network) that allows you to create and re-size volumes. At a fraction of the price of similar video-type SANs we think it has a great future - Chopper has a written a PDF you can read here.

Another SPV skin - this time based on the artwork in the Lemony Snicket books "A Series of Unfortunate Events". Again, inspired by what my kids are reading at the moment. Get it as a .cab, here.

NirSoft: freeware utilities, password recovery tools, system utilities - my colleague Saul lost his MSN password - this worked well.

UK braces for black Monday 24th | The Register - according to my fav UK IT news site Monday is going to be a killer for a record number of Brits! I can only recommend two things - go to church the day before or (with a lot more earthy language) check out Nina Gordon's version of Straight Outta Compton (the seminal N.W.A. track). If you know the origional you'll know that (like a lot of hip-hop) it ain't one for the kids.

HdTach seems like a good utility for checking the through-put on volumes (single drives & arrays) - I'm using it to test performance on an HD editing workstation.

Captain Underpants homescreen - Dan (my nine-year old) loves these books by Dave Pilkey and so we set about doing a skin for my SPV C500 mobile 'phone - I had to pull out the XML documentation and so it was an education as well. Here it is as a .cab file - you may need to application unlock your 'phone - details are here at Modaco.

Maybe Apple are no longer the choice of the rich and foolish! - with the launch of their £299 miniMac I'm interested in picking one up as a cheap and space-efficient Linux node. Apple's page on it, and what they are saying on The Register.

Jackass JoeJoe's RenameMaster utilities was a utility I came across when I had to selectively rename about six hundred HTML files within several thousand - no leading zeros on files numbers below ten. This made it a breeze and I normally pride myself on being able to do anything through a command prompt! It also has great rename options for MP3 and JPEGs (can stick in all the metadata you can discover) - a must for webmasters and folks with big music collections everywhere - and it's free!.

E to E Ltd in Leeds build OB trucks but I spent a week working with one of their engineers, Jonathon, commissioning JML's studio in Kentish Town, North London. Those guys really pushed the boat out with XDCam (see my mobile blog pictures) and an MXF workflow over gigabit. They also have a nice big 5 camera studio with play-in and transmission off Grass Valley M-Series servers (nice units - they support most protocols & compressions standards). I enjoyed a week of being a proper television engineer again!