Weekend video 1

Not sure why I am posting this. But I find it very impressive.

MIP time

None of these markers points to me. Once again I shall not be attending the MIP-TV in Cannes this year. However nowadays with so many of the conference sessions streamed live there will not be that much that I should miss out on.


My regret is that there will not be the weekends before and after in Paris and that very special feeling of being on a train heading south. Even now with the TGV is still get almost the same frisson as I used to when I made the journey in the seventies on the Train Bleu... being woken by the steward in the morning with coffee and a croissant and, suddenly, the sinful blue of the Mediterranean outside the window.

Rebel without a clue

"Being a Conservative Teen – we'll keep the caps – sure looks different than being a regular teenager. Conservative Teens appear to be the ubermensch of this age group — blonde-haired, fair-skinned specimens chiselled from perfect, Germanic stock and dressed for a day of casual yachting. Unlike teenagers, they seem to have overcome the gangliness, the uncertainty and the acne which tend to characterise the most awkward years of human life. Maybe because they have transcended these developmental hitches and hiccups without so much as zit, Conservative Teens do not find themselves as weak and left-leaning as teenagers."

The full (scary) article from The Guardian is here.

Referrals to The Guardian

Even the people at The Guardian who are responsible for all things digital seem to be astonished. Suddenly referrals from Facebook are as important as a traffic driver as those coming from Google. I fear that as far as social networking is concerned I simply don't 'get it'! I do not have a large entourage of friends or acquaintances with whom I wish to share the trivia of my personal life. Nor do I use tagging properly to give this blog the SEO it might... conceivably... merit. I own neither a smart phone or a tablet device and while I know what apps are they do not have any place in my digital life.

Can it be that being fully satisfied with the tech of the day before yesterday is a sign that I am losing touch and becoming less excited by innovation and progress than I once was? 

The idea of The Guardian being so dependent on referrals from either Facebook or Google I also have difficulty in grasping. Any content source I value is simply added to my RSS reader.

Am I missing something here?

Weekend video 1

This I find quite astonishing. I am convinced that the Kickstarter funding will be completed.

For no particular reason I did follow the budget speech made yesterday by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Today he is being roundly criticized for what is called his 'granny tax'... a modification of the tax allowances for pensioners. 

Many years ago, when I realized that due to my constant moves from one country to another I would never qualify for any national pension scheme, I knew that there would for me be no retirement from professional activity... ever. There was also my suspicion that the monetary value of pensions was unlikely to be enough to live a decent life.

So I do not feel terribly surprised that 'granny' is going to be hit! Not, of course, the granny in the middle of the visual.That is an entirely different story...

Yesterday my stroll through the city took me past a shop called Pylones, the Munich branch of a Paris gift shop selling quirky objects which are as ironic as they are colourful. And there she was in the window, our Queen, waving at me. In this Jubilee year I could not resist. Her hand moves... the power comes from a photovoltaic chip embedded in her handbag. And so as soon as I switch on my desk lamp in the morning I am greeted so royally. Bliss!

Yes!

A new German president

As the BBC put it...

As president Joachim Gauck is expected to speak his mind, and in Germany his past gives him real authority. He has charisma. 

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung said his strengths were his 'preacher-like emotionalism', but added that this might present a difficulty for Chancellor Merkel... "His thoughts and words and sometimes even his actions are guided by emotions. As president he will be difficult to predict, he will irritate people." Above all, Mr Gauck will not be run-of-the-mill.

No, we seventy-two year old sons-of-clergy don't do 'run-of-the-mill! No sir!

Last Sunday...

Here is my effort to sum up in an audio package the St. Patrick's Day parade last Sunday in Munich. I am still feeling my way around various sound editing software suites. With Audacity there was distortion I could not get around. But the controls on the MixPad audio editing interface are very intuitive and I think that will be my preference for the future. The Audioboo is below.

listen to ‘St. Patricks Day Parade - Munich - 2012’ on Audioboo

Weekend video 2

Seems just the right kind of listening while browsing the 400 pages of 'Mirage' magazine. (Thanks for the tip, Jessi!)

Weekend video 1

Yesterday I made my way to the Sodabooks outlet in Munich. It is a long time since I have been confronted with such a massive collection of avant-garde print ephemera. In the pre-digital era I was a compulsive collector of magazines, although I have now reduced my stash to just a few copies of 'Twen', 'Frendz' and a few other titles from the sixties and the seventies.

I had learned by chance earlier in the week that what I had assumed was just a Tumblr feed was in fact just a remediation of content from the print publication, 'Mirage', previewed in the video.

When I subscribed to 'Monocle' magazine a couple of months ago I swore to myself that I would not return to my addiction to beautifully produced print... I fear I am weakening!

Car design

About a year ago the Daily Mail profiled Jonathan Ive in a long article here. It was written prior to the death of Steve Jobs and before he was dubbed Sir Jonathan.

"Ive went to London’s Central St Martins Art School with an initial passion to design cars, but switched  to an industrial design course at what was then Newcastle Polytechnic."

One of the photos illustrating the article shows Jon Ives driving his Bentley Brooklands. Is this, perhaps, close to the automobile he might have created if he had remained a designer of cars?

All this is motivated by thoughts I have been mulling over with regard to automotive design. In the course of my daily translation work for a car-themed website I encounter so many new concept vehicles which I find so ill-judged. Indeed Bentley is showing at the current Salon de l'Auto in Geneva the study for a hulking SUV model of which they should be thoroughly ashamed.

I suppose the car makers are as enslaved to the notion of differentiation as are the major marques in the fashion business... Chanel can hardly be confused with Versace.

And yet... what if the task was to come up with the ultimate essential car... the best possible combination of styling, technology and functionality. Is that not the definition of the iPad?

For a start... and I think Ive would agree... the end product needs to look exactly like what it is. A motor car should look like a motor car. We all have our own idea of what a car should look like, it is our own acquired cultural memory slightly influenced by our recall of the cars driven by our parents.

I would start, then, by listing perhaps twenty automobile models which have over the past half century been perceived as practical, popular and evocative of positive emotional response. They would be, I think, sedans and estates and the list would exclude sports cars (no Jaguar E-Type here) and luxury models out of reach for normal citizens (no Roller, either).

Yes, the Mini would be included, along with the Beetle and the old BMW 3-Series...

The next step would be to morph the wire-frames of all the cars listed in the same way that computer analysis has crunched image data in an attempt to define beauty. The result would be an averaged automotive phenotype... a certain length, a specific wheel-base, an optimal track width, a defined profile... not bad for a start!

Next step... take the phenotype data and optimize it for aerodynamics in order to favor energy efficiency but retaining as much as possible of the look which immediately announces "this is a motor car"! 

Ultra light-weight construction can be taken as a given. And the internal combustion engine on board would probably be diesel fuelled. But in my opinion the traction would be in fact electric, with a hub motor in each of the four wheels and the diesel only serving to generate energy.

Performance? Maximum efficiency at about 130 kilometres an hour but with enough torque on hand to quickly get a further burst of speed to about 160 for overtaking. No, this would not by any means satisfy the boy racers on the German autobahn... but for almost everyone else on the planet it could be an ideal personal transportation solution and one which would truly resemble not a spaceship, not a quirky wheel-chair, not an exo-skeleton... but a motor car.

The Chase

 

Awesome French computer animation... full-screen HD viewing is a must.

Quality of life

A few years ago I read in Monocle magazine that Munich had topped a 'quality of life' poll. It might have been part of what motivated me to return from the Sandlands to Bavaria rather than to France or indeed my native Scotland.

The Monocle team made a short film portraying the city which I cannot embed but the link is here.

Weekend video

The party will,of course, be virtual. In the real world my birthday will be marked just be dinner this evening with my ex-wife and a Skype messaging session with my daughter in Maastricht.

But the invitees to a virtual celebration would, I think, include a couple of contemporaries at least. Doing rather well of late in Germany are Joachim Gauck and Otto Rehagel.

The latter is a legendary football trainer who at the age of seventy-four was brought back to take charge of the unfortunate Hertha Berlin soccer team, to motivate a squad whose memory of victory had almost been eradicated by a streak of twelve games without a win. Yesterday they won. Sweet!

As for Joachim Gauck, born as I was in 1940... the former pastor from Rostock and one of the leaders of opposition to the regime of the German Democratic Republic will in a couple of weeks be elected as the next Head of State of the Federal Republic. How heartening to see a man of my age getting a new five-year deal!

A further manifestation of wrinkly-power is the selection of Engelbert Humperdinck (born in 1936) to represent the United Kingdom at the Eurovision Song Contest. Those inclined to mock maintain that the hope is that he will garner nul points so that the the BBC will not have to bear the costs of staging the next edition of the extraordinary event.

The other places at the tables of my virtual birthday bash would be reserved for readers of my blog and for the writers of the blogs to which I subscribe. Now that guest list would certainly make for some interesting conversations.

Then there would be the matter of my virtual present to myself. I find that an automobile would be a fittingly contrarian indulgence, given that I am a non-driver. But the Jaguar built in the year I was born must surely be recognized as a thing of wondrous beauty...

It would have to have the appropriate license plate...

From the passenger seat I would wave regally to those who stop to watch our progress at the side of the roads... roads which in my virtually perfect world would be mainly in the south of France.

Weekend video 1

March

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian

"On Thursday, Google took down the barrier that had, until now, prevented it joining the dots of your electronic life. It had already been logging all your Google searches, remembering what you looked for and when, as well as watching what you watched on YouTube, photographing your house for Street View and, if you use a Google smartphone, knowing where you've been and maybe where you are right now. It had been using that information to generate, to take one example, the ads that appear on your Google search page based on your past searches. But it had never connected these separate silos of information. Now it will. Thanks to a change in its privacy policy, Google can make deductions based on one aspect of your online activity and use that to sell you things in another."

More here

Freedland's article is free of the hysterical paranoia with which some German tabloids sought to scare their readers as the new month dawned. A world of total transparency and 'publicness' will be different, it will take some getting used to. But Google is not the Stasi, for heaven's sake. Henceforth all my Google histories will determine what advertising is thrown my way. So what? I have never, ever clicked on any advert served by Google not on banners or pop-ups cluttering otherwise worthwhile websites.

And so the 1st of March did not cause me any real concern.

However the 4th of March is a slightly different matter. And I mean not just the likely return of Putin as president of Russia. I await his acceptance speech... "Putain, génial, merci, formidable!"

Which might also express my own sentiments tomorrow, given that it will be my 72nd birthday. Although I did indulge in a minor numerology riff about a week ago in these pages I must now admit that '72' is a figure which I have lived with for a long time... 72 dots-per-inch screen resolution... 72 point type for headlines (Perhaps in Helvetica of the timeless CBS Didot font I have used here). So I shall be seventy-two years old? Move on!

On the 11th of March the Celts in Munich will don their traditional finest for the annual St. Patrick's Day parade and party. 

Come the 15th of March there will be the hope that the Ides pass without misfortune.

A mere five days later the 20th of March will be the date of the Vernal Equinox, after which daylight will be of longer duration than darkness for six precious months. 

And on the 25th of March we shall be moving the clocks forward to enjoy later sunsets as spring... almost a miraculous prospect after out February freeze... inches towards us.

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