mike[space] dot net

My need to express myself over the recent UK election have led me to bringing this blog out of hiatus ... 140 character chunks just won't cut it. Naturally it won't make much difference to anyone but the few people who I could probably express all this to over a beer ... but that could be said about twitter as well, and that's never stopped me.

I just signed up to the Power 2010 Pledge. As the site says:

They are a people-powered grassroots campaign who are organising for change in the UK. Over 100,000 votes were cast to decide their priorities - and the five most popular are now the basis of the campaign: the POWER Pledge.

The campaign will take these ideas to every candidate from every party at the election - real grassroots change in action.

So little time to say it. I don't quite understand how I can be in a position where I'm my own boss, but don't seem to be able to find time to keep my blog up to date. I suppose one of the impacts of twitter is that my need to spout off in public is served, without any of that tedious mucking about with writing coherent, cogent sentences.

Anyway, enough excuses, this is just a quick catch up to distract me from the process of colour grading November Rain, which is proving a little tricky with some of the lighting. So what's been going on since the half marathon?

A few months ago, I competed in my first 10k, and I enjoyed the experience so much that I decided I was capable of upping my game even further, and began toying with the idea of doing a half marathon. Unfortunately my brother took my toying seriously, and badgered me until I signed up for the Marlow Half Marathon, which it transpires is quite hilly (he was quite quiet about that).

I recently did some editing work on a couple of short sketches for together.com as part of their 1431 campaign. Obviously I didn't write them, but I think they're both pretty funny, and I'm pleased with the work I did. Check 'em out:

So I've finally got the film from the 48 Hour Film Project up onto youtube, check it out in the embed, or go watch it on youtube (where you can enjoy it in HD goodness) ...

This weekend saw the London 48 Hour Film Project. When the wonderful Beth (producer on Out of Office and Sandwich Rap) invited me to join her team as a writer and editor, I leapt at the chance. So Friday afternoon I moved into Beth's house, and prepared to meet a whole bunch of new people and work non stop with them for 48 hours. I was nervous, I was excited, I was wishing I'd managed to get hold of some hard drugs to keep me going ...

[for the really big news, feel free to scroll down, but if you have the time, why not enjoy the holiday with me?]

Several weeks back (and what feels like many moons ago), Claire and I did something pretty special. For the first time ever, we went on a summer holiday together. Generally, I'm more of a winter holiday kinda guy, and I had somehow managed to keep Claire on this path for 3.5 years. But sadly I gave in and we were jetting off (sorry planet) to Thailand.

As recently noted, I have finally got around to porting Claire over to my old iPhone (thanks to Dave for keeping me up to date by providing his hand-me-up). This would have been done ages ago, if it weren't for the fact that Claire's phone couldn't sync with her laptop, and I didn't relish manually typing in all her numbers.

Ever since I bought my iPhone, my approach to listening to music has been changing. When you have a vast collection of music, and a device with limited storage, you need to find a way of selecting music to go on that device. The approach I've taken is to start using the ratings mechanism - anything I've rated at 3 stars or over is automatically synced to the phone. I then have a random selection of music from the remainder (minus anything I have rated at 1 or 2 stars).