Monday, 4. June 2007, 23:39:33
fire, work
There's been a big fire near where I work today, in a chemical factory. Lots of small explosions, huge amounts of roiling black smoke, giant fireballs, huge flames. Luckily no-one's been hurt.
We had a good view from our tea room windows, so I took several photos, including the attached one, which is of a giant smoke ring which hovered for a while after a giant fireball rose up. I missed the fireball, but the smoke ring is probably more interesting in some ways, hovering almost placidly above the swirling, billowing mass of smoke. Kind of spooky.
Monday, 23. April 2007, 12:56:36
work, music
On Friday one of my work colleagues, Jean, retired. Lucky woman.
Friday night saw us (about 24 people) in a local restaurant going into overdrive on the presentation front, including some very silly in-joke gifts, followed by a CD and DVD specially done for the occasion. This is the music project mentioned in an earlier post.
It started with a song about Jean invented by a former colleague (Els), which got expanded when some bright spark (Julie) suggested we record it for a CD. Then I found a MIDI file of the tune (Little Donkey) with, bizarrely, a country feel, so having recorded a bunch of us singing acapella in my office one morning, I set about attaching the singing to the backing track... yes, that is the wrong way round!! Anyway it achieved a suitably amateur finish, by which time someone else had suggested doing a video. So we did a shoot one morning using a digital camera, complete with daft dancing and I set about editing it together with the finished music. At least this was the right way round!
Well, the result was mightily funny. A CD of the acapella version and the country mix, a DVD of the country version, and suitably daft covers hacked together in Photoshop.Brought the house down on the night, and Jean has a permanent reminder of just how daft her colleagues could be.
A triumph of the Blue Peter approach to media production, too!
WIDGETIZE