Now there’s a question I get a lot. A bit of background for those not in the know. In 2002 I moved to Australia with my then wife. Our new life started wonderfully, but then through various faults and mistakes (some mine and some hers) the relationship slowly fell apart. This probably had a lot to do with the immense amount of pot I was smoking at the time but then it also probably had a lot to do with the fact that she did not want to be married. In fact she admitted later down the line that she should never have said yes when I asked her to marry me. But then I am not writing this article to lay blame. Far from it. As much as I struggled with the break up, I am not bitter about what happened. I spent 7 years in a beautiful country, had many great adventures, met some brilliant people (George, Asi, Tezka, Nadine, Ethan (RIP)) and even made some short films that have since become part of the Australian National Archive. But therein lies the rub. Whenever I talk like this (ie positively), there are some people who almost expect me to be bitter. Like the battles and experiences I went through should not have made me a better and stronger person but rather, I should be a dribbling bitter mess, unwilling to communicate or interact with society in any civil way. Now this may be the way some people live their lives but not me. It may sound like a cliche but I was brought up to believe what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger:  my head may have been screwed at the time and emotionally I was a wreck but, I wasn’t dead. This was an important realisation for me, a moment of clarity the like of which I had never really had before. It was at this stage that I started to concentrate on being me and proving to myself that I was more than an embittered divorcee with a grudge to bare. I started to smile again. I was able to listen to sad songs again without getting teary. But all this is not the reason I came back.

There are times and places in my life where everything is good and just as I want it to be. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. After 2 years living apart from my ex and ‘being Pip’, I felt the time had come to embrace the shores of our tiny island again. It wasn’t because I was unhappy. It wasn’t because I didn’t like Australia. In fact quite the opposite I loved it. There were many parties, gigs and festivals in the scorching Victorian desert that I hold as defining experiences for me. No the reason was, quite simply, that the UK is home to me and I never really felt that in Australia. You can dis this strange little island all you like (believe me, it’s a national sport for the Aussies) but I do love it here. I love how green the countryside gets after a couple of months of summer rain. I love our rugged and spectacular coastlines. There is a huge list I could write but I won’t bore you with my affection for these isles.

This is me, Nathan and Stuart about a week before I left for Aus in 2002. The pic on my tee is my ex as a little girl. Yes she had a matching one of me!

I also have my rather brilliant family here of course, and two wonderful nephews. Most importantly I have no regrets about any of this. To me, as sad as some of my experiences were, it was all part of the bigger adventure that is defining me. And no I don’t hold anything against my ex wife. I miss her and what we had but I fear if it were not for these experiences I would not be the ‘Pip’ that is sat here writing these words.

The Mythical Catflap

First off, the twice tried and never finished revenge short I wrote is almost ready to go into production for the third time.We have @thefredmk1 playing the male lead. I was very impressed with Fred (as was my production assistant @jethrobelman) when he came to the auditions last Saturday: After all this time I think I have found the perfect person to fill that role. All we need now is his ‘Wife’ and ‘Girlfriend’ (*hint* if you know anyone you know where to find me!).

Scoring goals

Second up, after two years of trying I am finally getting published in Ole, the office and lifestyle magazine. Its only a 350 word article on life in the office but I feel I have achieved one of my goals I set when I first started blogging 18 months ago, to get bloody published! I will keep you posted once it goes live (end of this month).

And if anyone else needs me to write anything you know where to find me.

The Soulman

The Soulman is looking to be one of my most epic projects yet in all ways: Lots of people to cast, realistic effects to be figured out, locations to be sourced etc etc. But its all a big challenge and progressing slowly but very well. All being well the first episode will be available for your PMP/iPod/iTampon in early 2011.

Epic Bike Ride

OK this project I am really really looking forward to. A friend of mine wants to ride his bike from Lands End to John O’Groats this summer in the name of char-i-dee. He has done this before but on his own. This time around he wants a support team and someone to blog/film it all for him. That’d be me and @jethrobelman then!

Film Night

You may or may not remember me trying to organise a local indie film night. To be honest I was never really happy with the venue (it being a pub) and I am looking at other places but with the budget of free this is proving hard. I am in discussions with various people on this and will keep you updated. I am also looking at setting up a small aggregating website to support the film night pulling together any content and linking out to indie producers websites etc.

There is a myriad of other news but for now I must keep stum. I will update you  as and when the time comes.

Stay tidy peeps.

-Pip

eMbRaCe ThE gEeK!

Once again, William Wright has allowed me on his drive time show on BBC Radio Lincolnshire (listen here), this time to talk about the new open source operating system from Google, Chrome OS. At this stage it is meant mostly for netbooks, but Google are saying there will be eventual support for laptops and desktops too. Now when I say OS, that’s not really meant in the traditional sense of the word(s): everything Chrome OS does is ‘in browser’. In fact that’s all Chrome OS is, a browser, in particular, the rather nippy Chrome browser. So how does that work? Take a look at the screen shot below:

As you can see, any traditional desktop type software is replaced by a web application. Your photos are stored with Picasa, your documents with Google Documents. There are no on board applications, everything is server side. This ‘thin client’ style of computing means that your computer will be uber-nippy. From switch on to editing documents/surfing the web should take you no more than 10 seconds. You sign in with your Google account and everything flows from there, much like the Android OS for smartphones.

As we all know, Google have been pushing for a while now for you to store all of your information in ‘the cloud’, in particular their cloud (Gmail, Google Documents, Picasa etc). This of course has benefits for us all: no need for personal hard drives, backups, photos and documents are universal and easy to access from any computer & of course, no duplicate files because everything is stored centrally, on one far away computer. Unfortunately this has its downfalls also. Internet connections can be shaky & unreliable. As much as I hate to say it, but we don’t have 3G/WiFi coverage everywhere we go, leaving you with a very shiny, nice looking, but useless brick if your running Chrome OS and have no connection. Having said this you will still be able to access the applications in offline mode thanks to the genius of Google Gears and the advent of HTML 5 but of course without being able to send anything over the tubes.

Ultimately, Chrome OS is a fantastic idea: a light, fast & simple OS meant for secondary use to your main machine, mainly for browsing, web video & photo/document editing. In my opinion cloud computing is also a brilliant idea, but there needs to be some sort of balance. I would rather have the option to back up the information locally as well as in the cloud, just in case. I would also like the option to install my own applications on there. Having said that its still early days yet and I’m pretty sure most users feel the same. Hopefully the big ‘G’ will open up to the users needs and wants and build these functionalities in. Watch the video below for the official run down of Chrome OS.

So once again William Wright has been kind enough to have me on his Drive-time show on Radio Lincolnshire (It’s on now (or 94.9FM on the actual wireless), why are you reading this and not listening?!) to talk about the much hyped Google Wave. I have spoken about this before on this blog and rather than repeat that article I thought I would update you with a couple of links I have found useful since and I will be talking about on the show.

1. Diana Adams Bit Rebels article, Lost inside Google Wave?

5 waves to make your life easier, these are all made for the community by the community and therefore low on jargon, high on easy to grasp knowledge. From community based wave support groups to a suggestion box for wave its all very useful indeed.

2. The Lifehacker guides to Google Wave

Written by Lifehackers Gina Trapani and Adam Pash the Complete Guide to Google Wave will always be free. Absolutely invaluble and full of useful info for the beginner right through to the advanced user.

3. My Waves

As I spoke about, I have waves embeded in all three of my websites as chatrooms/messageboards/contribution areas. To visit those click on any of the following links;

Avin A Giraffe Wave

The Cocknose Wave

Pip Wilsons Wave

4. Business implementation of Wave

For anyone that is really interested, here is the link to the article on SAPs implementation of Google Wave. Its not that interesting but gives a very good example of how Wave can be used in the business world.

Thanks for listening all and thanks once again thanks to William and Tom for letting me on. Any questions we didn’t answer please drop me a line, either in one of the waves, on twitter or via the contact box in the navigation bar above.

-Pip

eMbRaCe ThE gEeK!

thegrainsilo industries – My umbrella company, under which all my projects (including thegrainsilo) occur.

thegrainsilo – My production company, a constantly evolving, on going multimedia project involving film, music and design amongst many others.

The Base Project – My first film project under thegrainsilo productions. This is also an open source project released under a Creative Commons licence. In other words the synopsis and character base is available under CC for other film makers to play with as they choose. Contact me for more details.

‘Avin’ A Giraffe – A blogroll of funnies, meant mainly for my mates but it seems to of taken on a life of its own.

The Cocknose - A webspace dedicated to the worlds idiots. Sunday is the main post (Cocknose of the Week) but other posts are made during the work on general idiocy from around the globe as well as the midweek Cocknose Review.

The Jolly Brewer Film Night presented by thegrainsilo – Starting this winter (2009) the Jolly Brewer in association with thegrainsilo will be hosting monthly film nights. Keep your eyes on PipWilson.org as well as thegrainsilo.co.uk & theJollyBrewer.co.uk

Lincoln FridayDrinks Tweetup – Once a month the Tweeps of Lincoln step out from behind their computers and smartphones and meetup (normally at the Adam & Eve) for a few bevvies and lots of laughs. For more info visit the webpage, follow @FridayDrinks on our beloved Twitter and get in on the action in real time with the #FridayDrinks hashtag. A wide range of people come along it’s not just geeks! So if your on Twitter, don’t be shy come and show your face! Here’s the most up to date Twitter List of the Friday Drinks tweeps so far..

http://www.musiconthemind.co.uk/ – A music blog from one of my mates @luke_morton. Informative, incisive and  on the edge of the citizen journalism/blogging vibe…

twinlizard.blogspot.com - The home of Twin Lizard, some choice free and legal slabs of Hip Hop for download courtesy of @needlegroove

http://www.lifehacker.com/ – Essentially daily reading for any geek, Lifehacker is always jam packed with hints, tips and downloads for making your digital and real life easier.

gdgt.com – From the minds behind Gizmodo and Engadget, Peter Rojas and Ryan Block comes the social networking website for geeks. Have genuine discussions about tech, list your wants/haves/hads in your Gdgt list or just hang out and drool over the thousands of products they have listed.

cnet.com – A whole heap of knowledge and resources over at Cnet, from podcasts to product and gadget reviews to downloads to webware, it’s hard to pick out one single thing I like about Cnet. Make sure to check out the404 podcast as well as Mollys Mailbag.

VLC Media Player (Windows/OSX/Linux)
Top of the list and easily one of my favourite video players has to be VLC media player. Light and quick with a simple UI, this will play almost any video file including quicktime and the dreaded real media format (yup you heard right, no more having to download the hideous Real Player). Available over at the Videolan website.

DoubleTwist (Windows/OSX/Linux)
A viable alternative to the behemoth iTunes, this little beauty will sync to multiple devices (now including Android), download music from the Amazon market and (possibly the best feature) download, convert (to your relevant format) and sync videos to your media device of choice. From the mind of the amazing DVD Jon again this programme is light and simple, although it is sadly lacking a playlist creation function. Available here.

Spotify (Windows/OSX/Linux)
The now infamous cloud based streaming media player. I have to say thanks to Spotify I very rarely use my mp3 collection these days unless I’m on the move. The beauty of Spotify is that you can create a playlist in the cloud so it is therefore accessible from any computer in the world running the software. You can also create shared playlists and email/facebook/twitter the links so anyone can add to them. That’d be the social media revolution knocking at your door then.

Chrome (Windows/Linux(under WINE))
Now officially the fastest browser on the planet, Google have taken the browser, stripped it virtually naked and left you with pretty much the basics for browsing which to be honest was all I ever wanted. I was never a fan of plug ins in Firefox as they slowed an already sluggish browser right down. Chrome has a bookmark manager so you can import from FF and IE and a decent full screen view so you get to see as much of the page as possible. Whilst it does have certain issues with flash (I’ve noticed this mainly with Youtube and the stats section of the twitter client Hootsuite) it is otherwise a swift and reliable browser. Available here.