Bluebeard at Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

Posted on October 25, 2011 by andy

Ok, im going to keep words down to a minimum here, so just a quick update, we left Birminghm on out little bus to Heathrow, sat round in the airport for quite a while, flew to Lisbon and checked into our hotel ready for another 48 hours of Bluebeard madness at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian theatre Lisbon. Here i must say this building is fking amazing! I believe it was built around the 60’s and almost everything looks original, the decor the seats the James bond style underground car-park and tunnels and building plant rooms, if your in Lisbon, this place is a must visit.

Steve & Richard in the underground carpark.

 James Bond Dr No style plant-room, this is original!!

We have an entire days get in here which is a treat but is also useful as we have some crazy projection angles to deal with, were quite high up off the set and off centre also which throws up some masking issues. On-top of this we have a technical issue with the sails, an integral part of the set. We spend the rest of the day updating and reprogramming the rest of the show with only one sail which actually didn’t look out of place!


Nick Hilel, Steve Homles & Myself dealing with MonoSail!

Once again the setup time and rehearsals prior to the gig seemed to vanish into a frenzy of activity updates and lineup tweaks. After programming all day I can get quite grumpy and frustrated, probably due to forgetting to eat, drink enough water and generally the hard thinking for 6 hours straight its all worth while. The past 3 venues the content has evolved gradually, the programming and some of the timings have changed, to make things fit better after seeing the show in a few different scenarios now, I like this, generally I just like progress, progress in the right direction! Alongside the updating and evolving of the show, we had heat issues to deal with in Lisbon after sticking 4 high power projectors in a small room, the local guys came good with air conditioning

and the creative use of fans to help with the circulation, the picture is a bit shit but you get the idea!

4 x BARCO HD20’s, a little helping hand!

Once again the gig went well, and everyone seemed to enjoy it, I still have no idea how to judge opera audiences though! On the way home we spotted a traffic light which made us giggle. Im glad to see that childish humour carries through the world over!

Posted in Work | Leave a comment

Bluebeard’s Castle in Birmingham

Posted on October 23, 2011 by andy

We arrived in Birmingham around 19.00 direct from the RFH after the mega long rehearsal day, the schedule was as follows, Steve & Richard go to the hall at midnight to begin setup, Nickin and Myself follow at 05.00 for video lineups & programming, Steve & Rich have a break and some sleep, we then do an afternoon rehearsal and then a show on the evening. Its a mental schedule and allot to squeeze into such a short space, with each venue throwing up a new challenge. This was the view from our projection/control booth for Birmingham, with massively different angles to rehearsal in the RFH, (we toured the toilet roll).

From arriving at the venue, the entire day seemed to vanish, doing lineups, redrawing masks, and going through programming the show, changing and updating footage. Interspaced with a full rehearsal, we continued through the day tweaking and programming and possibly got a little obsessive with matching the sail-moves timing with the video which was tacking the sail-moves. In the end it was time well spent, the masking and mapping was “bang tidy”, (inset a geeky high five here). With a short break for tea and doing final transfers to the backup machine we ran the world premier of Bluebeard’s Castle with Video, it was quite tense but Laura the show-caller is very clear which helped greatly. The show went down very well with i think, although I have very little experience with opera audiences and their reactions. Overall it was top performance and technically seamless :-), on top of all this, Steve had somehow managed, not to have a break and by the middle of the get out had worked for 24hours and was still managing to carry on. It was at this point that Nickin and myself decided it would be the right thing to do to wrap Steve up in PVC LX tape just to make him feel appreciated. This was definitely the most grown up thing to do and was perfect for that time of night!

Tres Fatigue (Trezfattygay)

Bluebeard Birmingham, TICK! Next stop Lisbon!

Posted in Work | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bluebeard’s Castle Begins

Posted on October 21, 2011 by andy

After getting back from Dubai I spent a couple of days at StageOne keeping on-top of drawings for HTTYD as well as managing and overseeing the start of the installation of around 500 Schnick Schnack panels in some scenic ground-row which is progressing nicely.

Now its the beginning of Bella Bartok’s opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. Bluebeard’s Castle is a project I have been working on over the past few months with Nick Hilel (Yeast Culture) , Nick Corrigan (Nickin), Steve Holmes and Rite Digital allongside the Philharmonia Orchestra. To explain the opera better than I ever could, here is a brief excerpt from the Philharmonia’s website.

The extraordinary Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, Bartók’s only opera, is widely regarded as his masterpiece. Its world is sinister, dark and deeply disturbing. There are just two voices throughout, Duke Bluebeard and his new wife, Judith, and the entire one-act opera takes place in the hall of his castle. Judith opens the hall’s seven doors, one by one; each door reveals its own horror. In one, a torture chamber; in another, an armoury filled with bloody weapons; and in another, a garden where bloody stains the plants’ leaves. The final door opens and reveals Bluebeard’s three former wives, who step forward and receive Judith into their eternally imprisoned group. This is chilling, psychological drama, one of the great achievements of 20th century music.
SOURCE

Throughout the Opera we are projecting visuals on a stage set which surrounds the orchestra representing Bluebeards Castle consisting of 6 turrets which are our some of our projection surfaces. All of the content was all filmed and created for the piece and edited specifically in time and size so we can map perfectly to the projection surfaces in each venue. Projecting on the 6 surfaces is a challenge in itself , but to add to this there is also a centrepiece to the stage consisting of 3 sails suspended above the orchestra which move and rotate during the pice to represent the opening of each room throughout the story. This was the second challenge, figuring out how to project onto this matching and masking the complex shape whist it was moving.

IPhone photo during testing at the Royal Festival Hall

From our side, the run up to Bluebeard consisted of developing a system using Catalyst (Media server) which allowed us to mask to the shape and move the masks in realtime to match the projection on the sails as well as being flexible enough to tour multiple venues with different projection angles. Much testing tweaking and head scratching resulted in a rather tidy video playback setup, here are the details if you want to geek out!

BASIC PLAYBACK RIG
2 x MacPro 8 Core runing CatalystPM4 (1 Main & 1 Backup)
1 x KVM for backup switching
1 x BARCO Matrix Pro (DVI-I)
2 x Matrox Triple Head DVI
3 x 1080p Monitors (Output Preview 1, Output Preview 2, Catalyst Preview)
1 x TouchscreenPC running Chamsys MagicQ
1 x Chamsys PCwing
4 x BARCO HD20 projectors

The beginning of the ‘Tour’ (mini tour, very mini tour) started with a get in at the RFH after mid-day wednesday the 19th October, we had a small window to get the projectors in and playback setup before we were kicked out of the control booth for another gig happening in the space that evening. I had travelled down from from Newcastle and met Steve at the hall where we proceeded to get the kit into the booth, Richard Bleasedale was popping in as we had some issues with playback in Catalyst and h said he would try and figure out what the problem was, we managed to get the projectors in thanks to the local crew in the hall, and all the playback setup.

With 4 x 20k projectors in the booth it got rather warm! Richard arrived around 16.00 and and a look at the setup and programming, if you don’t use catalyst the following paragraph will probably boring and nonsensical, you have been warned! After looking at things and replicating the problem, (we had random video clips freezing onscreen but displaying that they were playing) Richard suggested a few things about changing the play-mode and being more defensive with the programming of the lighting desk. Low and behold his suggestions worked and I now understand the issue, thanks Richard, to anyone who is interested heres an explanation:

Random Video Clips not playing in catalyst

During some instances of programming we are pre-loading up to 16 video clips prior to fading up the intensity to display them on the screen. This process involves sending a packet of data (Artnet) from the lighting desk to Catalyst which changes multiple parameters such as the location of the video clip (File & Library) and the playback mode. For everything to behave as it ought to that packet of data needs to be read in to the system in the correct order and if any of those bytes of data are missed then the end result is not as expected. In this case Richard concluded that because we were updating so may things at once, coupled with using the Chamsys (were unsure how it packages and orders its data) that in some cases when we were triggering a cue, Catalayst was receiving the packet to locate the video and set the play-mode in a different order. This resulted in the correct in-frame of the clip being displayed but the play-mode not acting as should (possibly referencing the previous loaded clips parameters) because it had been triggered before the clip was loaded. This is how i understand it and after going trough the show and tidying up the programming we were in business! No freezing!!!

Back to Bluebeard…….
We left the venue at around 18.00 feeling happier with the progress grabbed some tea/dinner (Nice chinese restaurant down the street form the Old Vic) and headed back to the Travelodge. We were due back in the venue at 02.00 so after finishing off some work in the hotel I attempted to sleep for a few hours. The alarm went off at 01.30 and steve and myself headed over to the RFH for a setup rehearsal, when we got there the set guys from deadline had begun to put up the set under the guidance of Richard Slaney from RiteDigital, we proceeded to setup the rest of the system and got as-much lineup as we could whilst we waited for the rest of the set & sails to get put up. Nick & Nickin had joined us at around 03.00 and we continued on updating programming and tweaking things. In what felt like no time it was close to the first rehearsal, time seemed to have vanished but Nickin and myself with Steve operating Automation managed to get all of the masks drawn up and in the system. The rest of the day involved 2 rehersals, a quick lunch, many tweaks to programming & labelling up the system until 14.00 where we had to strip down the system and get our minibus to Birmingham for a repeat of what we had just done, although this time we would have our first audience.

Right to left: Steve, Richard, Nickin, Marina & Davids hand

These are the happy faces of people who have worked silly hours under pressure to get things right at the mercy and time constraints of an orchestra, mental or happy, you decide :-).

Posted in Work | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Home for a few hours!

Posted on October 16, 2011 by andy

The past few days seem to have vanished into a flurry of activity since last posting which has generaly consisted of, hard graft and funny banter.

This is what happened in order starting from friday the day of Sandance beach party on the Palm in Dubai. For us, the technical team today was the least labour intensive day, all the rig was up, everything was plugged in we just had to be onsite as technical support for the gig and for a couple of follow-spot calls for Richard Ashcroft and Chicaine.


SAD (Lee) points at Shaun

In the industry Follow-spotting is generally seen a newbies job so when we got asked to do it from the PM (production manager) a silence descended between us as we looked at each other and probably spoke at the same time in our heads “Im not fucking doing that!” We decided to have a think and decide who would do it, tempted my the ‘after midday’ start for spot operating I agreed along with Shaun.
We got onsite around 15.00 catching a lift with Steve, checked the follow-spots, cans and basically hung around till Ascroft was on, Example & DJ Wire & Chicane where after that no more spots were needed. We got down to ground level and hung around following Chicane were David Moralis, Joris Voorn, Sasha in that order. I’ve checked out some of Voorn’s stuff since hearing him DJ planted some on my ipod :-), the Moralis & Sascha seem a bit dated now.

The next day (Saturday) was an 08.00 start followed by 10 hours of work, stripping down the rig sweating our tits off in the heat, we all must have drank over a litre of water per hour over the course of the day to keep hydrated which was just as well as we were all going out for some drinks later on. By 18.00 we had all managed to drop (derig) all lighting from the stage and site whilst the local crew stuck the last of the boxes on the truck. To everyones amusement, but not the driver. One of the locals had parked his van too close to the water and the tide had came in before he realised!

Much to our amusement, poor driver :-/

We eventually got back tot he hotel at about 18.30, with a quick shower shave, fresh clothes we went out for some food and beers with the rest of the Gearhouse crew. We met in a sports bar, had some food, had some beer, had some more beer, had some gin and tonic, had some more beer, then we left and went to a kind of nightclub place on the third floor of some hotel like building. Im not entirely sure where it was but we all ended up drinking these blue drinks, thats all i need to say, they were blue and contained allot of alcohol. Before we knew it we were back at the hotel ready to get picked up to got to the airport, we arrived at the airport, checked in, got on the plane and slept…………….

Dan & Sad

Shaun

Although some of us woke up to pay silly buggers……. Cheers Shaun.

Me and a Gerordie Chav 😉

I finally got home after picking my car up from Nitelites, helping Pimpy (Andy Magee) unload a truck, all in all a top week, lots of graft and lots of laughs. I have approximately 18hours at home before I head off again to Yorkshire for a couple of days!

 

Posted in Work | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sandance DUBAI!

Posted on October 13, 2011 by andy

Its hot, humid, dusty and this week im working on a beach in Dubai! Im lucky that working in the industry i do takes me to different places arround the world and this week just happens to be a the Atlantis Hotel Dubai prepearing for a beachparty called Sandance where around 10,000 peoople will be enjoying a party on the beach. One of my good friends Shaun Moore asked me to be part of his Geordie lighting team working for Gearhouse who are looking after the technical side of this gig.
Its currently the morning of day 4 and so far it has been a really busy/productive fun week. Its my first time out here and as with all new places, I wasnt 100% certain what to expect. We landed on Sunaday evening late and got picked up on Monday at 09.30 (local) and taken  to site by one of our new work colegues Andor. We met the rest of the team, Neil, Dave, Matt, Steve, Jules, Chandi allong with a load of local crew. The following 12 hours of work consisted of hanging and cabling many lighting fixtures, rigging truss, dringking LOADS of water in the baking heat and sweating most  of it back out again. The only thing whch slowed down the day was whist we were waiting for the tide to go out s the truck carrying out generators could drive around the stage (Stage right of the stage meets the shoreline when the tide is in) to put the generators in place. Whilst doing this the truck managed tog et stuck in the sand  with one side on the dry part of the beach and oneside almost in the water, you dont see that very often!


The truck with our generators on being towed out of the sand!

Luckily for everyone we had a Telehandler onsite to tow the truck so our lighting power could be delivered! The working day finished arround 22.30 and we were taken to a local bar for a few afterwork pints which was very much like the Cantina bar out of Starwars, this was great craic and a good end to a long day!

Tuesday we continued to place the rest of the lights getting all of the rig up and runing way ahead of schedule, it great when that happens! We finished arround 20.00 and Chandi offered to take us (Geordie techs) out and show us arround some of Dubai. After a grabing some quick food and having superfast shower we were onroute to “The Mall” to see the ?Burj Khalifa, the wolds tallest building standing at 828 meters. The tower is actually amazing and without actually seeing it, it is hard to describe the scale, so big I had to take a picture of it in 2 as as it was too big for the lens on my phone!

Burj Khalifa, taken on my Iphone

The tower is surrounded by a huge shoping complex, bars, places to eat, its all a little bit like Vegas in allot of ways. Walking tough the mall on the way back to the car I couldnt beleive it when i saw a Gold vending machine, where you could buy small gold bars, Krugerrands and other solid god items!!


Shaun & Sad (Lee) with the Gold vending machine!!!!!!!

The evening ended with a drink in a nightclub/bar called Bar Zar next to the Burj Al Arab hotel with some really cheesy club singers provinging the entertainment, even next to the worlds first 7-star hotel you get cheesy club singers, another fun end to a hard days graft.

Wednesday was a later start for myself and Shaun as we were working the later shift to finish running power & data arround site to the sitle lighting and focusing whilst is was dark. After bing onsite for a couple of hours it was arround 16.00, Matt, on of our production managers startd shouting for ous to get down of any structure, ground all of the hanging PA towers and strap things down as a sandstorm was comming! Looking over the bay the building s and cranes had dissapeard outof sight! we had a small time window but we managed to make everything safe and everyine managed to get down fromt the trusses in time. The picture below doesnt really do it justice but you should be able to see the hotel behind the stage.


Our own personal sandstorm, normally you can see the hotel behind the stage!

The dustcloud eventually passed and we continued to work through till the early hours, continuing with site lighitng to make the rest of the site look pretty for the gig.

 Jules, Andor, Sad(Lee) & Neil catching some ‘shade’

There has been allot of graft done in the past 3 days as well as allot of fun squeezed into a couple of hours of free time, its a good bunch here and we all seem to mange to continually take the piss out of each other for evereyones amusement.

Posted in Life, Work | Leave a comment

I think it has been a good week…….

Posted on October 7, 2011 by andy

I began writing this blog at what I had anticipated was going to be a very busy work period in my life, if you don’t know me then you probably don’t now what I do professionally for a living and without knowing what I do this wont make sense so now is apt to tell you a little about myself. First of all, as a pre-cursor, this is what this week has entailed.

Monday:
Drove to York to start a week of work at SOCS, arrived at the workshop and went over the custom LED strip which had been built for Cirque’s move to Madrid with Zarkana, in the evening went to the gym and rowed 10k in 44minutes.

Tuesday:
Worked with Karl going over the point hoist electrical drawings updating and modifying things.

Wednesday:
Drew up the panelwork for the track power & point switching cabinets for this current job we are working on, also updated the electronic interface board for each winch cabinet. In the evening went out for steak with everyone who is working together, English Canadian Australian & Chinese, its a good mix 🙂

Thursday:
Spent all day modifying drawings & updating drawing to the electrical drive cabinets, non stop working with the designer, electrical wiremen and other freelancers like myself to get things moving. Went to the gym at Weatherby leisure-centre, almost couldn’t get in because of the rude woman serving behind the counter didn’t believe we hand been before without been ‘official members’, eventually got in, rowed 10k in 44.44mins

Friday:
Collated the patch & schematic for an LED system comprising of around 600 Schnick Schnack B50 LED panels, spread over an arena size area, fully pixel-mapped and controlled by Artnet. Finished work, gave Joe a lift to York train station and drove northwards home.

Friday night:
Popped in Dance city to catch up with my friend James and others to socialise for a bit, now currently writing this!

So, as mentioned earlier, that maybe doesn’t make too much sense, so a little about me from almost the beginning.

IN THE BEGINNING
I was born on New Years Day 1980, Andrew Coates, Son of Jennifer & Alan Coates, younger brother to Dianne & Janice Coates. I grew up in a small village outside Newcastle called Burnopfield. I expect my childhood was very similar to many other counterparts around that time in that area. I played with friends, got into scrapes, messed around in the local woods and had a healthy fascination with trying to climb things such as fences and trees.
I guess school was also standard, there was a good mix of friends and  enemies, we got picked on by the older kids and thus passed this onto our younger counterparts when we eventually became the older kids, I guess thats some form of twisted karma?
Memorable events from ages 0 to 11 are…….

Sitting next to a garden gnome on the Isle of White whilst on holiday with my parents and getting my picture taken (That photo is still arround somewhere and I have no idea why I remember this)

Getting a very stern smacking and telling off from my Dad after climbing up onto the back of the sofa during December sometime and opening all of the windows on the advent calendar which had been placed “out of arms reach” to retrieve all the tiny plastic figurines hidden behind the doors.

Building tree-houses and dens in the local woods with friends and coming back to find that 2 weeks of hard work over the summer holidays had been trashed by someone. Undeterred we rebuilt a underground hide which blended into the pine needle covered forest floor which was almost impossible to find. The weekend later  we returned to find what looked like someone had stepped onto the roof of our den and fell in the big hole we had created leaving some shredded bits of denim jeans and a bit of blood, oops!

Kissing Anna Lucas in the corner at the bottom of the Yard whilst the rest of my class watched and possibly cheered. I remember it been allot of peer pressure to do something which at the time wasn’t very nice (due to age, not due to Anna, she was lovely, and a good friend who I have not seen since arround 1997! wow!).

Leaving Burnopfield Primary school age 10 to move onto the big scary place they called Tanfield comprehensive, where good live lessons were learned.

PAUSE: I dont want to make each blogpost too long so I think I’ll stop here for this one, I guess ive just set myself up to write a brief overview of ages 11 to 16 next!

Has this week been a good week? Yes i think it has!

Posted in GENRAMBLINGS, Life, Work | Leave a comment

A Week of Video Programming

Posted on October 2, 2011 by andy

Its been a hell of a busy week or so since last posting here, I’ve just spent week down London programming video for a new production of Bluebeards Castle, click on the link for more info about the production but a super quick summary would describe it as an opera immersed with visuals to tie in with the story. Working with Yeast Culture who have produced the visuals and set design I’ve been responsible for programming the playback of the video using a Catalyst media server.

Our Versatile & Nimble programming setup!

The backdrop to the orchestra consists of many turret like shapes which we use as projection surfaces as-well as a large set of automated sail like surfaces which we project onto whilst moving. There is allot of viideo to pay back synchronised on many different surfaces at the same time as-well as taking into consideration the ‘Live masking’ we are doing enabling us to project onto the moving surfaces. Technically it has been a hard week but nothing we couldn’t figure and overcome.

Pre starting work I drove down London on saturday night with my good friend Mitch as a day holiday(ish) and intentions of seeing UVA’s Video Installation piece High Arctic. We walked form our accommodation though to Greenwich and discovered the sunday market which is really good if you like wood carvings and nice arty stuff , this guy, Tom Biddulph had some very nice wood turnings. We eventually went to the maritime museum and had a wander round, its a good place to visit and you can easily fill in half a day. This is where High arctic was being shown. The installation in short is set in the future as a monument to the currently melting ice caps with interactive projection you can activate using the UV torch given to you upon entrance. There wasnt as much wow factor as I was expecting but worth a look. Also in the museaum here is a instalation by the Light Surgeons which was quite nice. For a full better review check out CreativeReview.

The rest of the day was taken up meandering through london via tube/water ferry and foot interspaced with eating some cracking food! The following day I needed to drive to Holloway in Islington, dreading London morning traffic I tool the Blackwall Tunnel to avoid going through the city centre!  Eventually we got there and typically, just as we were about to enter the traffic had stopped as a vehicle had broken-down in the tunnel, Damn!  Eventually 20minutes or so later we were moving again, i dropped Mitch off at bow to make his way to kings Cross and i carried on to holloway with a surprising amount of time to spare. The following 5 days consisted of many hours of programming Catalyst on the Chamsys, quite allot of coffee and good company and squeezing in time to meet up with some London friends.

This weekend has also kind of vanished with work, home life and generally doing stuff! On saturday I was working at Dance City here home in Newcastle with a great company called Ockhams Razor. They are a dance company who combine dance/performance/ariel and circus skills to tell a story, all Ill say is if you see them advertised performing close to you go and see them!

And today, Sunday, a morning of washing, a midday of lunch with friends, an afternoon of visiting my parents and an evening tidying up the bluebeard video programming whilst it is fresh in my mind!

 

Posted in Work | Leave a comment

Steak, Rowing & PCB’s

Posted on September 22, 2011 by andy

The past few days seem to have flown over, it doesn’t seem like 5 minutes since i was going to sleep on monday night after writing my last post and now its Thursday (22/09/11). Im currently working near York and have the ‘joy’ of stopping at Wetherby services ”Days Inn” for my duration. Its actually ok here, the hotel is clean the staff are good and friendly, and I know most of them now from a long haul previous job where I was stopping here.  On Tuesday night a couple of friends traveled down from Newcastle, Chris & Mitch, to swap cars. I had borrowed Mitch’s car to get here whilst mine was in the garage back home getting fixed, here i must say that Mitch’s car is a Golf 16v GTI and compared to mine it is an awesome piece of kit to drive, a fucking flying machine. I only had a lend of it for one day, any longer i may have gotten  myself into trouble.

Chris & Mitch met me after work at the services where I suggested we go for a steak, which i didn’t have to suggest twice as a thank-you for sorting my car and the borrow of Mitch’s.  I took us all to the Ryther Arms Steakhouse near Tadcaster for what I knew from experience served fantastic steaks. between the 3 of us we had a mixture of Sirloin steak Rump, beer battered haggis as a side, garlic mushrooms and the usual veggies, all i can say is that we were well fed and again the steak was superb! Anyone wanting a good steak I would recommend checking this place out. All in all we were 3 very full, happy chaps!

Wednesday was the mega rowing challenge day, I had arranged to meet my mate Simon to go to the gym at Bannatynes York and carry on our rowing challenge, 20km in less time than previous. Si had some guest passes which I had already used so I had to re-register under a different name to sneakily get the second set of 3 sessions free, it was quite amusing to see Simon nearly piss himself laughing after signing in a Sandy Boates, aaah the things we find amusing!  My last two 20k rows had been 100mins and 96mins, this was going to be a challenge. I worked out that I needed to stay under 2.19mins for every 500m to be on track. For some reason this time was especially tough, I didn’t feel I had the energy and I was counting down in 500m sections at a time, the last 2000m was an absolute killer but managed to smash my previous time by doing this 20k in 91mins 48seconds, get in!!

This was the week for some of the PCB to be delivered for a job I’m currently working on at the moment, its always quite exciting getting things manufactured and delivered after only seeing them on a computer screen in design form. These were the prototype versions before getting the finals made for production. I mounted and soldered the components and beginning testing I discovered I had miss tracked the board and a couple of things needed modifying, nothing which a few cuts and re soldering couldn’t rectify. After an afternoon of updating drawings testing and modifying things were looking good. Almost at the end of another exciting and varied week, which has flown over, off to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy this evening in York which looks promising.

 

Posted in GENRAMBLINGS, Work | Leave a comment

It’s not Facebook, it’s a blog!

Posted on September 19, 2011 by andy

So, I’ve set up a blog once again, why you may ask? Many reasons but mainly as a kind of online diary ramblings etc, etc for no-one in particular. If people like what I write, have wrote/written, fantastic, its always nice to inform or simply entertain another.

One of the said reasons for beginning a journey through the Bologosphere again was a few weeks after ditching Facebook, it is currently 22.35 on the 19th September 2011. I deactivated my account 2 weeks ago after a conscious decision to get “More Stuff” done. Dont get me wrong, I like/liked Facebook but couldn’t help get a sense that most status updates either veered towards how great someones life was, how hard working someone was, or how bored someone was. This didn’t rifle me piss me off or even offend me, neither did it make my day better (Even though I miss some of the funny comments and friends musings I now just have to wait to hear them in person).
Secondly  I was unconsciously loosing valuable time to FB which was mostly my own fault, checking updates, notifications, event messages, etc throughout the day on my phone could easily total  30mins split into 2 minute update checks on my phone throughout the day. On top of that  the distraction when doing work on my laptop of “Just glancing” every now and again would also eat up time.  You do the math, over a week or even a month it soon totals up.

So that was it, just a couple of reasons to ditch (deactivate), not necessarily forever, but after 2 weeks of going cold turkey on FB I may just close it. Currently I seemed to have substituted indoor rowing for FB, sweating my tits of for an hour on a sliding seat surrounded by women currently seems to be doing it, maybe more of that in another post.

Andy

 

 

Posted in GENRAMBLINGS | Tagged , , | Leave a comment