Currently uploaded video (CUV) – Tczew station

This is the next in the series of posts of video posted here within a week of it going onto YT. Such being the aim for all video uploaded to YT in 2011, but this particular piece is not several months behind like most of what I’m currently uploading – it was uploaded as it happened, just about.

For the first time ever with this piece, I’ve taken it with a telephone and uploaded it from a telephone. Some times before now I’ve made video with a phone if my other cameras were not around, and later put that raw vid onto a computer, processed it and uploaded it the usual way. There’s a nice video up of the Lazar Equestrian Centre in Hungary which I did that way, and a few others.

So what I tried here was the youtube thing on the Android phone, enabling immediate capture and transfer. As the camera has quite a high definition the raw footage came to 8.5 MB, even for such a short clip about a slob lounging about on a station power transformer box. And what the phone did was to offer to save the upload until I got into a WiFi net. That’s pretty good, it seems to me that most of what this new phone does is to cost me additional money, and I’m dreading the first phone bill I get from it. Especially as I sent about 500 Christmas and New Year SMS greetings off it to all continents on this here planet.

So I thing it’s a pretty good thing to be able to grab footage and have it online literally within minutes. It feels like a powerful tool, one that could be very advantageous in the right circumstances!

I can see it now. “You’re not allowed to film me”. “Well I already did”. “Hmmn, OK, but you can’t put it on the internet”. “Well, I’m afraid it’s already on there”. How cool is that?

Diary of a New Decade #2 – 3rd January 2011

The Treaty of Rome signing ceremony, at the Pa...
The signing of the treaty of Rome on the Capitoline hill, Rome. The reincarnation of the Roman Empire under the selfsame people who signed in Philadelphia.

If all goes well, this will be another technological first for me – this time the first post written on and posted from a train.

Anyone who has spent any time on my You Tube channel will know that I have made a number of films on trains before. In point of fact, I have made films on this very route before, on more than one occasion.
But right now, as my Creative Vado got wrecked by my son before Christmas while my wife was in hospital getting her mitoxantrone, I don’t even carry a camera, although this phone also has one and produced the shots of our New Years Day meal that you can see a couple of posts ago on this very blog.

But that is not the same as a dedicated HD video camera. So I did order another Vado, especially as I had just bought a lens kit for it and a couple of other accessories. The problem is that Amazon won’t ship electric goods to Poland. As a US company, they couldn’t care less about the free movement of goods in the EU enshrined in the Treaty of Rome. They probably respect all their own constitutional stuff very well, but have no idea how insulting it is to Europeans to have our highest laws entirely disregarded by US corporations doing business here. So I would have had to buy the replacement camera from the online creative.pl store, where it costs more than twice as much as in the UK Amazon.

So I bought it from Amazon, and asked my parents to send it on. Hence the shipment time has been doubled. It should arrive any day now, though.

Back to this train journey – I am in one of those good trains, an Atrocity, or whatever it is they call them, but this one seems to be stopping in fields every ten minutes.this may have something too do with the snow, but this train came to Warsaw from Krakow and arrived right on time.

I am supposed to be going to Tczew for a stocktake. This is the sixth year I have done this stocktake at this place at this time. In the first four years I drove up by car and that would take a big effort. One of those years I found myself driving through the thickest blizzard I have been in outside Russia. And then finally I started to use the train and things got a lot safer. You can complain about delays, but at least you don’t usually end up dead as often as you do in a car when conditions are treacherous.

And one thing’s for certain: there’s no way I could have written this post while behind the wheel of a moving car!