The Beatles, Banksy, graff & light painting 8 January, 2008 at 5:12 am
Today I thought I’d have another crack at getting Neon v2 to work with other video formats again. I’m sure it used to work, but I’ve broken it somehow. Reinstalling Neon didn’t seem to work, so I’ve taken some drastic measures and tried uninstalling as many codecs as I could figure out how to uninstall… which led to uninstalling some other guff I don’t need and trying to clean up the mess. I’ve had this machine for over 2 years now, and haven’t ever done a format, so there’s a lot of shonky crap cluttering up the registry, etc. Not that I suppose the registry isn’t full of crap at the best of times anyway! I’ve been having problems with Firefox lately as well, probably due to a ‘crash’ a week or so ago (let the battery run out whilst lurking near the TV at the back of the house – Firefox apparently has some issues with starting up after not being shut down properly). One thing that bugged me was that it would hang when, for example, attempting to upload photos to Facebook (I think it had something to do with the Java plugin).
Anyways… Firefox uninstalled, codecs uninstalled (ACE Mega CoDecS Pack, recently tried XP Codec Pack, DivX, Xvid, blah), and making a ‘fresh’ start. Firefox is back on its feet, and it seems the Facebook photo loader loads now. Yay! Now what was I going to upload?.. Oh, yeah, maybe a photo with me in it some place from my travels last year. Fire up Picasa and start looking… As per usual, looking at photos very quickly leads to distraction. So many things to look at! I start photos with me in it, which leads to tagging some friends, adding captions, renaming video clips (I try to give them a descriptive name ‘coz clips are harder to quickly browse than stills, besides which I need a name for playing with them later as visuals), etc. I soon come across images shot in Abbey Road, outside the famous Abbey Road recording studios in London. This was probably one of the few touristy things I did during my stay. I don’t have a picture of myself doing the famous crossing (or do I?.. the others were taking pictures, and I might have a copy!), but do have a couple of photos of the others, as well as a Beatles Crossing video on YouTube.
Before that I’d spotted a (possible?) Banksy piece, and, having seen something about Banksy on TV in the past few days, decided to tag (ha!) some graffiti shots in Picasa as well. Now is it ‘graf’ or ‘graff’? I supposed it could be either, and had a quick peek to see what comes up in a search for ‘graff’ – of course stuff about Banksy, but also ‘GRAFF‘, a neat little web comic about graffiti.
From there I was led on to a couple of other sites, and found a new world of light graffiti… well, a new name for light painting, anyhow. Check out Lichtfaktor on MySpace for some great light painting photos, and the Graffiti Research Lab – these guys have made a projection system that you can use to ‘paint’ on buildings, etc, with a laser pointer. They’ve also done some neat bullet-time type shots with light painting around people. Anyhoo… just spent some time diving back in to the image archive and found the Banksy shots I was looking for. Tagged! Here they be:
Check out this interesting article about Banksy and the Israeli security wall from September 2005. I imagine that’s a fairly scary place to be making political statements – especially as a western foreigner!
By the way… Neon is currently even more ‘broken’ than when I started – now I can’t play the vast majority of the clips I usually use! Something has to be done about this…
-G.