Journey to Vancouver

Travelling has become less enjoyable for me lately, not quite sure what it is but I think it's a combination of, tiredness, crampedness, dread at what I might have forgotten or might go wrong, and massive guilt about the amount of carbon I'm releasing.

I was tired, and I was terribly worried about the US immigration, but after a drive down to London, a Taxi to terminal 4, check in, a drink and some duty free shopping, we crossed the threshold to board our flight to Seattle and settled into NWA's comfy and well appointed seats. Each seat had it's own media player so you could pick from around 30 movies to watch at your leisure, pause and rewind too.

When NWA released "Straight out of Compton" I thought they could do no better. But since Ice Cube and the boys have started their airline they've gone from strength to strength.

The real fun started when we got to the US border. For those who haven't visited the USA in the last 5 years, they now use both fingerprints and a photo of your face to make sure they know who you are. When Cat (my wife) scanned her finger the computer raised it's eyebrow a little and went hummm. Soon we had a large red card stuffed into Cat's passport and were sent to go and sit in the naughty kids room with the other dodgy looking characters.

Security Officer Webb found the situation quite amusing which is a good job really or we might have just been turned around. The story goes like this. Last time we visited the USA was in August last year, we travelled with my Brother and his wife Clare. At the immigration desk Cat and Clare's finger prints and photo had been mixed up. So when we arrived at Tacoma International Cat scanned her finger, and a crack anti terror squad was put on high alert. It took a bit of explaining and a photo of Clare on my phone to convince Officer Webb that we weren't a threat to National security and it was in fact one of his Boston based colleagues that had ballsed up royally.

Our stay in Seattle was brief but very enjoyable. Our hosts Al and Xumin, are friends of Steve and Alli, and made us all feel very welcome. We had a trip to an American Dinner, and a drive around Redmond, home of Microsoft. I have a love hate relationship with Microsoft, but it was very cool to see the campus.

We entered a Top Gear style race from Seattle to Vancouver. Steve and Alli were catching one bus and we were on another. Both buses were timed to leave and arrive within 10 minutes of each other so we had a "loser buys the beer" bet which we lost by such a massive amount that Steve was already supping his third pint with a smug Jeremy Clarkson face on when we arrived.

Our Quick Shuttle to Vancouver was neither quick or capable of orbiting the earth, but give me chance to have a good chat with John Liddicoat from Australia open. Fascinating to hear his opinion on Aussie chances, Japanese threat, North American tactics etc.

UBC is a dream university Campus, watch the show for a guided tour. There is secure Wifi everywhere and kick ass net access in every room. A better venue for our needs is hard to imagine.

Last night we had more sushi than 4 people could eat, for $49 dollars. That's ridiculous. Awesome value.

Its a big day today, I'm so excited to see GB Mixed play Canada. We are also doing the commentary and interviews for the live webcast on Ultivillage. You need to register but that's free.

Tom

New Blockstack.tv Website live

The new Blockstack.tv website is released on the world. Check it out and if you find anything wrong, put it in a comment and we'll fix it. We're hoping the new site will allow you to keep up with all things Blockstack.tv much more easily.

Myself and Steve have been working very hard in preparation for the trip to Canada. Steve has got some awesome gear for us to wear and I've been sweating over a hot laptop make the new site. We're a good team. We've also got some "things we prepared earlier" which we hope you enjoy on the shows. We've also got CanterburyNZ back to help us out with some more sponsorship.

We've got a great set up in Vancouver. We're going to be right in the middle of the action with a base in the athletes village. We're also going to be working really closely with the guys from Ultivillage so you'll get to see some of their awesome coverage on the show.

Here's hoping everything goes well out there.
Tom

PS. Myself and my wife will be travelling by car and camping around BC for the week after the tournament, if you have any advice or tips on things to see and do please leave a comment.

Blockstack in Vancouver

Blockstack TV having been making plans to go to WUGC2008 in Vancouver for what seems like years now. To be honest the whole project has been building up to the World Championships this August. Both myself and Steve have been to a few big championships, they are always so exciting and this one looks like it's going to be one of the best ever.

We just hope we can bring you a flavour of what it's like to be out there

Our coverage will include:

• Daily podcasts from the players village
• Results from all the GB teams
• Interviews with major players and teams throughout the tournament
• Atmosphere from the players village
• Myself and Steve inimitable style and sense of humour

Get a taste of what we are all about.

Anja Haman interview about GB Women trip to USA

The other day I heard that GB Women, had beaten Canada women while in a recent tour of North America. I had to find out more.

The original idea was to record a phone call with Anja Haman (GB Women player and coach) and video me on the phone, then edit it down to a sensible size and include it in the next show.

As it turned out, we chatted for a bit too long and syncing it with the video would have been impossible. Plus the sound quality was very average.

However the content is interesting, you can listen to the interview on mp3.

You can find out more about Anja and the other GB women at www.gbwomensultimate.com. Check out those lovely photos.

Steve on the Couch

Just for all the kids out there who may have watched Episode #5 and thought, those guys are absolutely smashed and are filming themselves rambling on about Ultimate, please drink responsibly.

We're not saying that alcohol is cool and that drinking lots of it prior to doing anything is a great idea. It just happens to be that it works rather well prior to filming a internet TV show or even filming the same episode of an internet TV show for the 3rd or 4th time.


Really though this show was such a pain in the butt, yet at the same time a complete party to make. I would have loved it if Take 1 had worked. As it was, the night pressed on and what is normally around 2 beers/glass of wine for a show became 4...then 6 and now as a result I get to see how silly I look/act when I'm drunk watching this episode completely sober. I'm my drunk self's sober friend, slightly embarrassed yet thoroughly entertained.

All that said the entire blockstack experience so far has been a riot! Paga was insane, Copenhagen was awesome and the regular couch shows are more fun that we had imagined it would be. Also much much more work. Thanks for watching and expect some pretty outrageous stuff in the future.

-Steve

Adventures in Podcasting

Occasionally the rollercoaster ride that is Blockstack TV, takes a dip. The dip was the realisation that we had made another dud. The first recording of Episode 5 was so bad that even with 10 minutes chopped off the end it was still unwatchable. YAWN.

Problems included:

• Too much self indulgent banality
• Me and Steve fighting to have the last word (Steve usually winning)
• No energy
• We look bored
• Even Clary wasn't very funny

Sometimes it may not seem like it but we do want to be professional in some ways, so we made the tough and time consuming decision to film it again.

That was last night at my house . Here's how it went.

• Tom goes to post office to fetch new adapters to simplify mic cabling
• Steve arrives with the rest of the crew
• Test new mic adapters - thumbs up
• Put camera on charge
• Talk about loads of stuff, none of it related to show (iMac, growing tomatoes, blah blah blah)
• Drink
• New member of crew arrives
• Have nice meal, more drink
• Call Clary
• Mic up and plan show (Do you think we should have done this earlier???)
• 10.45pm start recording show
• 11.20pm Battery goes flat
• Check video to see where it got too, realise there was no sound all night!
  
• Decide that we are going to do this thing if it kills us, more drink
• Some crew goes home, rest of crew concede that staying over is unavoidable and get stuck into more drink
• 12.15am Start recording show take 3
• Nail it
• 1.30am Play Star Wars Lego on XBOX 360
• 2.00am Go to bed

Of course for every dip in the rollercoaster there is a high point too. The episode is good, Clary is brilliant, we had great fun making it.

I'm editing this one so look out for it coming up very soon.

Also you can now subscribe to the show through iTunes.

Making of Episode 4

The making of episode 4 has been a bit of an odd affair. Firstly it's important to note that it was filmed before Paganello, so there are a few mentions of Paga being in the future, obviously it is now in the past. We had to record an intro in a pub after practice to explain the problem, which Steve is going to strap on to the front of the show.

Episode 4 features our new agony Ultimate uncle, Clary. Clary is the oldest living Ultimate player, we manage to call him on the show and ask him about an incident from last years EUCF. Clary has to break off from his bathtime to speak to us, but it's well worth while. Got an Ultimate conundrum? Maybe Clary can help, what he lacks in tact he makes up for in wisdom. Send us an email with your problem and we'll put it to Clary next time we speak to him.

There's also a heap of exciting sofa based chat, photo news, some emails, and my photography section which I hope you find useful. If you have further questions about photography
then feel free to send them in, if we think that answering them in the show will be useful then we'll do just that.

One of the things we've learnt from Paganello is that simple is good. Our one mic, one camera solution didn't give is much scope for messing around with fancy camera angles, but it did mean we were fast. Easy to set up (approx 90 secs), and easy to move around (only one cable).
By contrast our home sofa set up involves two wireless mics, two receivers, a mic mixer, numerous cables and things that need to be plugged in and several batteries that can run out. It take us about 45 minutes to set up and we do a ten minute sound check before every episode, even then we have issues. As you can see from this episode where both my mic and Steve's mic take it in turns to go dead. We may well be trading down to a simple cheaper wired mic solution in the future, probably before Episode 5.