Here we have, in nice HD coding, a walk around in Prague, showing some of the flavour of the experience of being in the Czech Republic – including this very strange thing that happened to me last Spring.
Here, in the city of Kafka, I was seriously summoned to court without being informed why. Just like Joseph K in ‘Der Prozess‘ or ‘The Trial’ by Kafka. You really couldn’t make it up.
I don’t want to talk about the facts of what the case turned out to be, (especially as one party of it graces some films of mine on YT, which will also be shown here) but to my relief I only actually needed to be a witness. I have no wrongdoing as such on my conscience, but I have been known to sack people, and they get given more rights than I do when it comes to court, even if there’s no earthly justice in it. But this wasn’t even someone I had sacked. Because I didn’t know that, I had to go to the expense of a decent lawyer who naturally deserved to be paid for his appearance despite not in the end having a decisive role. But in the end I didn’t get annoyed about it, as it was something truly Kafkaesque in the city of Kafka which I’ll be able to remember and joke about for the rest of my life.
I also talk a little bit about learning Japanese and the kitsch for sale to tourists in Prague.
I thought I’d spice things up with a poll! Remember this is not the number of cases you’ve seen – you may have been more than once. Count is as number of days you’ve ever had to turn up. Don’t count it if you went along just for entertainment.
OK, I got to the end of January making a post each day so at least one month of the resolution has been achieved.
However, instead of driving views, the regular postings seem to be actually diminishing the daily views, and my stats have actually shown less in January than they did in December, in the time before daily posts.
Is the readership telling me that less is more? By all means let’s have your comments on whether you welcome the Postaday challenge being followed by this vlog, whether you’d prefer less width but more quality, or whether you don’t care either way.
I wanted to say just a couple more things to you today as we come to the end of January. Firstly, this is the month in which I have piloted a couple of new ideas, mainly ones that I planned to do, some that came along unplanned and I will just re-write my plan to include them as I would have done if I had known about them earlier.
One planned thing I piloted was to listen to the Michel Thomas Method Greek Course, which I have nearly completed 6 CDs of. It is very good, as have been all of the new courses made by MT acolytes.
One unplanned thing was that I discovered the website http://www.readthekanji.com – it is a very well constructed staged repetition system including all the cards and materials and all the research done, really the ultimate resource for learning Japanese and once you get the hang of it very addictive. I am seeing how far you can go with the free sample – it’s given me a good twenty hours’ worth of drilling so far, and I don’t think I’m even a half way through what you can get on the free trial so that seems very fair – I already made up my mind to buy a proper annual sub as they really do deserve it, but in the mean time I just wanted to see what happens if you just keep going until the JLPT 4 vocab is all at 100%.
It seems to be fairly close to Ebbinghaus compliant as far as the repetition algorithm is concerned. I’m not sure if there is a bit of supermemo style code in there or not.
So I am quite happy to admit that it is a good alternative to the gold list method for Japanese. The only advantage that the Goldlist might have here is that you don’t get your hand in, you type Romaji and the Java interface magically turns all the answers into Hiragana. Sometimes you have to watch out to make a double n for “n”, and care needs to be taken over some of the bya, cha, etc characters (the ones with the small soft vowel following) as the way I was expecting to write them different from the way the programme accepts them, but you can always see the right answer if you get it wrong the once.
So January seems to be a good month for piloting. Now is the last day and after three months of not using my car I also got it back today and paid a huge amount for the repair. But I will need to drive it tomorrow, and I needed to get it working.
So I’ll pilot my own car, as well.
I also started reading Shogun this month, which tells the story of a pilot they called Pilot, or anjin-san, as they could not pronounce “Blackthorne“.
And “Lost” final series started to show on Polish TV – all in all a month full of pilots.
So it reminds me of the song by the group Pilot about January, from way back in 1975:
When I was 11 years of age, I thought that the lyrics “January, sick and tired, you’ve been hanging on me” was all about how this dingiest month of the year seemed to go on forever.
Now that I am old I assume that the lyrics refer to a woman, but I still don’t fully understand whet the poet is getting at.
I think I’ll stick with my initial interpretation.
January is now nearly over, and a good thing too. The days will be getting longer day by day and there are only four weeks of February to go until it’s March.
February and March are both quite capable of delivering challenging conditions in Poland, but we will have to see how we fare. November gave us one of the earliest starts to a really tough winter, so we are now I’d say just over half way there. We have to just grit our teeth and work hard and not notice, and soon Spring will be here. I’ll be able to go and use my terrace again and the pleasant days will be here again.
And I have to use every opportunity to walk and lose weight, which was the idea of not repairing the car in the first place, but now I have places to go that aren’t well served by trains.
Let’s see how it develops. Please give me feedback on whether to keep up with the daily postings.
Number of days this video was up at time of posting:
1 500
Number of views at time of posting:
2 560
Number of views per day:
1,7
Number of comments at time of posting (don’t forget to click through to read the comments!):
11
Comments per thousand views:
4,3
Likes at time of posting:
4
Dislikes at time of posting:
2
Likes to dislikes ratio:
2,0
Votes per thousand views:
2,3
Ratio of comments to votes:
183%
The hotel I stayed in last weekend had this fishtank in the lobby. It had many technical things wrong with it, being overstocked, underfiltered, underlit, and with many issues in the mix of fish, but quite a pleasant film came out of it, with the vocal efforts of V. Gotovtseva singing “Oh snowball tree in blossom” as a makeshift soundtrack, mixed with the sounds from the lobby bar.
The Irbis Hotel in Moscow is quite well placed, and was quite cheap. I used it just for the one night after getting back from the Russian Far East. I was getting pressured to fly straight on, back to back to Warsaw to go to the baptism of my old boss’s new child, but I would have been ridiculously tired after the trip back from the far east and I wanted to go into Moscow and debrief the colleagues on the audit anyway, so this hotel was just the place.
“This tank is doomed” comments quite rightly one commentator you can click through to see. It is a text book example of people buying fishes and not understanding what they are doing. Some of these fishes will become seriously large, and they will be the only ones left.
Production date: 10 June 2006
Playout date: 16/6/2006
Camera: Fuji Finepix
Post Production: Windows Movie Maker with various effects
Location: West Poland
This was on the way back from Copenhagen, I was about to go on to Gorzow Wielkopolski and meet one client there – someone who later became a firm friend and still is – and just kept on with the experimental filming and photography here and there, but it’s still small because of the tiny memory card. Looking back I really regret not getting a bigger one sooner and not starting filming sooner. Thanks to this hobby my memories of the last four years will always be crisper and newer than those of the previous time.
I would liken having film with the motion and the sound included in comparison with pure stills photography as something akin to the comparison of having a still camera and not having a camera at all. Video with sound adds more than you might think.
However, it also enables you to add your own sound, and what this may well be my first ever attempt at is adding own recorded sound (this one was a recording taken with a sony dictaphone in Church) on an “environmental” vid (that is a video taken outside where you would be going anyway – your natural environment. It’s not about environmentalism) or “travlog”. I had already added bits of mp3s not recorded by myself to films, but I think this is the first to do this. It was a nice match between the Church choir singing a song – not very technically excellently, but with a fine spirit – the Church is http://www.kosciolbozy.org – and the scenes of a girl feeding her goat which I was lucky enough to spot, and the poppies growing by the roadside and the stork footage (the latter gets repeated in its own film). There is something of Poland in the film.
The sepia effect you’ll see on this film, by the way, is a technique which I only ever used the once, although in theory it wouldn’t necessarily hurt to use again – this is in fact the holding of polarising sunglass over the camera lense. No sepia after-effect was actually used here. This could be useful in situations where there really is too much glare of the sun.
This was my first ever of what I’ll call my “gallery” videos. Basically that’s a slideshow, like the old “gallery” in Vision On with Tony Hart. Here the music is Moscow Nights. Here on HTV there should also be a categorising of background music used in these films. I’ll be trying to include that here too.
All these photos were taken by me in the Moscow Zoo aquarium with the stills function of my mini DV cam. I haven’t been able to transfer the video footage as yet from that, but I’ll no doubt get to it one day…
