http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/index.htmlLiving in T&Tennospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comCopyright 2007 Mark Lyndersay2008-07-22T09:23:45-04:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:27:25 -0400nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comMovies2008-07-22T09:23:45-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/happening.html#unique-entry-id-188http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/happening.html#unique-entry-id-188It was one of those curious coincidences. After seeing M Night Shymalan's new film, The Happening, I happened to catch the last half of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.
It's a stunning thing to realise but The Happening IS The Birds.
It would probably be more polite to describe it as being inspired by the earlier film, but that's just trying to avoid the blindingly obvious.

When two films are about a mysterious, unexpected and never adequately explained attack by nature on apprently innocent people, when the key protagonists are a man, a woman and a young girl, when they end up in a crazy old lady's house during the final attack, well inspiration doesn't really quite cover it, does it?
The curious and lingering similarities also seems to cast a deeper meaning on Shymalan's appearances in his films, another characteristic of Hitchcock's career.

Now if Night could get a bit more consistency going in his movies, we could set aside the embarrassment of comparing them.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-07-22T09:17:01-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth637posted.html#unique-entry-id-187http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth637posted.html#unique-entry-id-187posted here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-07-15T16:08:07-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/macupdate.html#unique-entry-id-186http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/macupdate.html#unique-entry-id-186A note on my process for updating the Mac OS is posted here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comMusing2008-07-15T11:23:27-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/rbc.html#unique-entry-id-185http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/rbc.html#unique-entry-id-185Sometimes career opportunites intersect with personal experience. I’ve been doing some photography for the Royal Bank again. The bank was a great opportunity for me 25 years ago when I was trying to get my career as a freelance photographer off the ground.
Back then, I shot a metric buttload of events and handovers under the guidance of Sandra Bernard, who was the Public Relations Manager of the day.

I had the opportunity to do portraits for their most recent annual report and got the call to photograph the formal announcement photo of the proposed merger with the Royal Bank of Canada.
The photo linked on this page is the cementing of the deal, a pivotal moment in Trinidad and Tobago’s history as a foreign bank returned to buy back their old asset and resume control.

I fear that I’m not financially savvy enough to pontificate about the ultimate meaning of the deal, but my nodding understanding of world finance and the initiatives driving globalisation make me inclined to accept it as one of those inevitable consolidations that are rippling through the world today.

I should note, though, that on my mother’s insistence, I bought shares in the bank long before I ever submitted an invoice to them. A few years shy of attaining legal adulthood, the idea of spending money on a share certificate was as remote a notion as buying a ticket for a flight to the moon.

Over the years, though, the performance of those shares has been an ongoing instruction to me in the value of investing and the final return, relative to the sums I handed over to my mother more than 30 years ago, was a potent financial endorsement of even conservative investment.

I like to think that the bank invested in me as much as I invested them. I hope that the photos I did of the signing were as grand a return for them as their shares were for me.
The photo curious can see a breakdown of the shot here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-07-15T11:20:28-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth636posted.html#unique-entry-id-184http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth636posted.html#unique-entry-id-184BitDepth 636, a look a superhero deconstructions as offered by the new Will Smith movie Hancock is posted here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-07-08T13:37:14-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth635posted.html#unique-entry-id-183http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth635posted.html#unique-entry-id-183BitDepth 635 on the wisdom of careful upgrading is posted here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-06-30T21:17:07-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth634posted.html#unique-entry-id-182http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth634posted.html#unique-entry-id-182BitDepth 634, a look at the newest version of Mozilla’s Firefox browser is posted here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-06-24T12:18:44-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/macftp.html#unique-entry-id-181http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/macftp.html#unique-entry-id-181A new Mac Blog posting on software for handling FTP chores on the Mac is posted here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-06-24T12:15:50-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/pixels.html#unique-entry-id-180http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/pixels.html#unique-entry-id-180A new Photo Blog posting is available on the real cost of digital images...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-06-23T22:46:37-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth633posted.html#unique-entry-id-179http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth633posted.html#unique-entry-id-179BitDepth#633, a hands-on look at Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader is posted here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-06-16T23:11:23-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/stock.html#unique-entry-id-178http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/stock.html#unique-entry-id-178The stock photography galleries have been revamped significantly. The collection is far from complete, but images will be updated over the next few weeks. View the samples that are available right now here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-06-16T23:10:19-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/mcblog.html#unique-entry-id-177http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/mcblog.html#unique-entry-id-177Macintosh blog moved to here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-06-16T23:08:28-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/phlog.html#unique-entry-id-176http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/phlog.html#unique-entry-id-176Decided to move my ruminations about photography to a new blog. The first few entries consolidate information about my photojournalism projects and contemplate an egg. Read more here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-06-16T23:11:18-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/emeagwali.html#unique-entry-id-175http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/emeagwali.html#unique-entry-id-175Phillip Emeagwali is an African scientist who has done pioneering work with parallel computing. Read more here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-06-14T14:01:35-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/520ff9a1a8529e6bc250c5576fb69f5a-174.html#unique-entry-id-174http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/520ff9a1a8529e6bc250c5576fb69f5a-174.html#unique-entry-id-174BitDepth 631, a look at the magic of the double feature is posted here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-06-02T18:38:14-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth630posted.html#unique-entry-id-173http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth630posted.html#unique-entry-id-173Flash has been a boon to designers who wanted predictable glitz on their websites, but it may also have become something of a bit in the teeth of web development. Read more here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comBitDepth+2008-05-26T21:06:51-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/vistaplus.html#unique-entry-id-171http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/vistaplus.html#unique-entry-id-171At least one reason why users may balk at installing Windows Vista is the footprint on disk that the software requires. Having migrated directly from Windows 2000 to Vista; I wasn't prepared to have the barebones OS to balloon from less than 2GB to more than 11GB.
For a user who is juggling space on a laptop, this can be a challenge on an older system or one with a smaller hard disk. I run Windows in virtualisation using Parallels, so I essentially have an 11GB folder on my drive that I access only occasionally. 
Regular users will just have to plan their systems to allow for the extra space that Vista needs, and it may not be out of line to “nuke and pave” your system, copying off crucial data and reformatting the disk before reinstalling the system.
IDG News reported on April 17 that Steve Ballmer said of Vista at a Microsoft event “Vista is bigger than XP and it’s gonna stay bigger than XP. We have to make sure it doesn’t get bigger still.”

There’s another interesting aspect to the continuing presence of Windows XP on Wintel computers. Quite unlike the sluggish reception of Vista, upgrades to Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s market commanding web browser have been rapidly adopted.
The weblogs for this site suggest that the largest percentage of visitors, 34.5 percent, are using Internet Explorer 6, the default browser for XP, but those numbers are closely followed by those for IE7 at 27.2 percent. IE5 is way down at the bottom of the chart with just .4 percent of users.
Updating a web browser is much cheaper and far less labour intensive than updating an operating system, but this points to an interesting trend in computer use, one that suggests that for many users, maintaining a compatible Internet experience is more important than upgrading the desktop experience.

Microsoft has kept its advertising for Windows Vista low profile since the launch, suggesting the company has clearly chosen to pursue a path of attrition and replacement in the migration to Vista. 
But for that strategy to be successful, every new computer that ships must arrive with Vista preinstalled on it and that hasn’t been the clear-cut case that greeted the arrival of Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
With those launches, the improvements from the previous OS to the new one were so glaring and self-evident that system builders were falling all over themselves to licence the newest Windows.

In contrast, some system builders have successfully fought to hold on to the right to include XP on their systems.
In one remarkable example, Lenovo has instituted an “XP Downgrade” for its computers which allows users to buy an XP installer disc for a system that shipped with Vista until January 2009. 

Dell Computer, Hewlett Packard, and Sony have all announced plans, as of April 2008, to take advantage of this “roll back” proviso in Microsoft’s licensing agreement, essentially allowing these volume licensors of Windows to sell customers two options of Windows (only one can be installed at a time on each system) when they buy a computer.
Dell plans to offer XP Professional preinstalled for qualifying customers for free on certain systems under the downgrade licensing arrangements. Sony and HP plan to allow the process to proceed through their channel partners or to allow customers to handle the downgrade themselves with the XP installer disc.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-05-26T21:06:48-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/vistapickup.html#unique-entry-id-170http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/vistapickup.html#unique-entry-id-170BitDepth 629, a look at Vista's adoption is posted here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comCable Guys2008-05-19T20:53:50-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/awt.html#unique-entry-id-169http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/awt.html#unique-entry-id-169A Winter Tale
Written by Michele Lonsdale-Smith and Frances Solomon
Directed by Frances Solomon

I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't seen any of Frances Anne Solomon's films before this. From the assured, unsentimental vision that's on show in her newest film, A Winter Tale, I've certainly been missing out.

It is one of the cruel realities of Trinidad and Tobago's history with motion pictures that there is no archive of the works of local films and the availability of such productions hinges almost entirely on who has a copy and is willing to share it.

Last year's Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival offered a beat up old VHS copy of Bim, arguably one of the most valuable films in our short history of movies produced locally.
If we ever get around to the kind of viewing library that would have locally related films of value on call, then A Winter Tale should be on the roster.

The film isn't really local, though the links back to the Caribbean are strong generally and are more specifically delineated through Solomon and Dennis "Sprangalang" Hall.
This is a tale of the diaspora, of black people from warm countries drawn to the small huddles striving to reproduce the warmth of home that some travellers cultivate.
In A Winter Tale, the nexus is the Caribbean restaurant of Miss G (a riveting Leonie Forbes) a nook that has the patina of spicy meat pies and bubbling callalloo.

One evening, gunshots bring a tragic halt to an evening of liming and tragedy begins to pull casual friendships apart.
As Gene (Peter Williams) tries to pull the group back together to talk through the experience, ugly truths about the reality of the social dynamic that allows these men to hang out, play cards and have some drinks begin to surface.
It's a taut human drama, well seen and evenly paced. Solomon and her co-writer Michele Lonsdale-Smith decline numerous opportunities to place the blame on an uncaring Canadian society and keeps the focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the third world hustle in a metropolis.

The brisk cutaways to city streets and passers-by as they glide past the principal characters place their personal drama on a much larger stage, a fast moving, vaguely menacing blur of a city, too large and all embracing to fit into the frame of a camera so relentlessly focused on the intimate details of this story.
Solomon does something quite remarkable with this film, keeping the human drama intriguing and mysterious all the way through to the final few minutes.

There are a few missed tones along the way, a confrontation between Miss G and her estranged son Ian (Peter Bailey) collapses into some melodramatic weeping that seems miles away from the unresolved conflict both characters had been nursing for two years.
And the final fate of the ruthless bad guy, his cruel nature unmasked in the last quarter of the film is really just Hollywood justice. In the real world that Solomon has crafted a riveting simulacrum of, he would just move on, his search for profit continuing in some other section of the city.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-05-19T19:43:44-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth628posted.html#unique-entry-id-168http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth628posted.html#unique-entry-id-168You could just scan a photo or you could digitize your analog images with the utmost fidelity. Read more here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-05-14T22:25:47-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/macwp.html#unique-entry-id-167http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/macwp.html#unique-entry-id-167On my Mac blog, the inside story on two software tools I've used for years in preparing my writing for publication.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comCable Guys2008-05-26T20:42:10-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/hepburn.html#unique-entry-id-166http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/hepburn.html#unique-entry-id-166Roman Holiday, a hilarious lark of a film that couldn't possibly be made today.

It's the princess and the pauper in high gear, a frothy, impossibly romantic confection that depends on an unlikely confluence of compacts that don't exist anymore in today's world, the most remote of which is a journalist with a conscience who keeps a secret that could bring him fame and fortune. Hepburn would win the Oscar for the role, her first major part in a Hollywood film.

The very next year, she married an uncute fellow actor, Mel Ferrer, a serious thespian with whom she won her first Tony award in the Broadway production of Ondine.
Today, Audrey Hepburn is best known for the glamorous yet down to earth profile she cut as a UNICEF cultural ambassador, travelling to downtrodden countries and bringing media attention to the poor and suffering.
But remembering Hepburn that way doesn't really capture the astonishing presence she had on film in her prime. What started as a tolerant husband's duty to his wife, viewing a collection of Hepburn films I bought as a Christmas gift in 2006 became a shared pleasure.

Donna is constantly charmed by the simpler pleasures and more sophisticated plots of films on the cusp of moving from the carefully staged propriety of black and white to the tentative whimsy of colour, but Hepburn's films transcend such casual distinctions.

The actress' precise oval shaped face, so easily transformed by attention to her eyebrows and hairstyle (was there ever such a difference between a ponytail and a close cut?) drew out the best in her cinematographers, who lavished their best efforts on lighting her.

In the denouement of Roman Holiday, as she stands revealed as Princess Ann, royalty of an unnamed domain, there is a delightful moment when Hepburn turns in telephoto closeup to listen to a question from the reporter Joe (Gregory Peck). There are no less than five distinct lights on Hepburn's head and shoulders, each designed to pick up and highlight an aspect of her beauty. I paused the DVD and pointed each of them out to Donna, slowing down for her appreciation something I saw and recognised instantly.

There are similar moments in Sabrina, Breakfast at Tiffany's and Funny Face, pivotal moments of the plot when the honesty and truth of the film turn on a word and a look from Hepburn. She doesn't disappoint and her cinematographers pay her the ultimate accolade by framing her face with a care and attention that speaks of the essential romance carried on from behind the lens and spotlight.

Regardless of what you think you remember, you haven't seen Audrey Hepburn until you see her in the best of her early films and see the blossoming of a talent, unhindered by a remarkable beauty, that spoke of a toughness of spirit far greater than her tiny frame might seem capable of containing.

Postscript:
Just saw My Fair Lady, one of Hepburn's more memorable roles in a film and the one that really cemented in my mind that her lasting charm as an actress is the "transformation," the change from a dowdy duckling to a elegantly attired swan.
Despite the famous score by Lerner and Loewe, the truly remarkable thing about My Fair Lady is just how horrible the story (based on the play Pygmalion) underlying the film actually is. Even allowing for the very different social mores of 1964, the character of Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) is unremittingly misogynistic. Higgins is a svengali inspired by Machiavelli.

Harrison's commitment to the character is professionally thorough (and won him an Oscar), but the final plot twist, which delivers a transformed but (despite well performed scenes of fierce independence by Hepburn) conspicuously unliberated Eliza Doolittle into the home and untender care of the male lead is a bitter twist after the inspiring theatrics which preceded it.

Recommended:
Roman Holiday (1953)
Sabrina (1954)
Funny Face (1957)
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-05-12T23:46:36-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth627posted.html#unique-entry-id-165http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth627posted.html#unique-entry-id-165Flow's broadband is fast and affordable. The tech support needs some improving though.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-05-05T20:22:11-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth626posted.html#unique-entry-id-164http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth626posted.html#unique-entry-id-164Derren Joseph believes that he has the right mix of hands-on and virtual for Trinidad and Tobago's credit card shy society. The story behind his cellphone driven ticketing system is here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comPhotography2008-04-28T19:30:46-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/polaroid.html#unique-entry-id-163http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/polaroid.html#unique-entry-id-163
Polaroid's J66 Instant Camera

That Edwin Land was brilliant is beyond question. His two contributions to modern technology, the concept of polarizing light passing through a lens so that reflections were eliminated and the idea of a camera that processed its own images was so far out of the field of normal thinking that it would be decades before they settled into casual use.
Sunglasses that aren’t polarised are now commonly thought to be useless tinted glass and the idea of a camera that develops its own images, well that changed fundamentally between the time that Land through up his light sensitive paper and caustic processing gels.

I don’t often talk about my first experience with a camera because it was so clandestine. My father left boxes of his belongings behind when he separated from my mother, and they were supposed to be stored out of bounds at our home on Mucurapo Road.
This didn’t stop me from exploring during the July-August vacations, and I found what I remember as a Polaroid J66 model instant camera. The manual was written for a savvy adult, but there were a few packs of black and white Polaroid in the case, so I set about making a happy mess of both camera and packs. I may have shot one or two blurry, developed images during that first, furtive exploration of photography, but what I remember most clearly was how pungent and searing the chemicals in those early packs were.

Much later on, when I entered the field of professional photography for the first time, I shot with a Mamiya medium format camera which had a Polaroid back that was invaluable for proofing complicated lighting setups.
Digital photography essentially ended the allure of 60 second development with split-second gratification on an LCD. Land’s idea was sound, as the overwhelming acceptance of modern digital photography attests, but the execution went swiftly from ahead of its time to hopelessly behind the times.

It wasn’t the first time that Polaroid’s chemical technology was superseded by electronics. An early movie format, Polavision, which made use of a version of the sandwiched processing of Polaroid instant packs was killed almost as soon as it was introduced by VHS recorders and cameras.
In February, the Polaroid Corporation, a shell of the company in its heyday, announced that it would stop manufacturing the packs of film and chemicals used by the cameras, shutting down its factories and laying off the workers. Fujifilm continues to manufacture a small subset of the Polaroid range.

Sixty years after producing their first instant camera, the instant camera revolution was all but over, replaced by cameras that develop in a split second and display the results on an LCD.
Or is it? A number of specialist applications kept Polaroid cameras in the game, including quick forensic snapshots, machine specific applications in dentistry and dermatology and travel photographers who used the cameras to give their subjects an immediate keepsake.
The SX-70, possibly the most famous of the cameras that the company produced, created a particularly interesting image, one that could be pushed around with a firm stylus to create painterly, one of a kind images.

You can see some of this work done by my friends Sonya and Fernando here. They even did one of me working on an early hand coded version of my website when we were supposed to be relaxing down the islands.
SX-70 users are among the many petitioners hoping to convince a better off photography company to acquire the manufacturing assets and licencing rights that Polaroid is about to shutter.

Save Polaroid website]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-04-28T19:28:36-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth625posted.html#unique-entry-id-162http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth625posted.html#unique-entry-id-162BitDepth 625, a memoriam for software that's gone the way of old code is posted here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comMovies2008-04-21T23:48:15-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/ck.html#unique-entry-id-161http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/ck.html#unique-entry-id-161Gerard goes bad to get good

Michael Walker, Tricia Lee Kelshall, Gerard Joseph and Cauri Jaye in a promotional photo for Men of Gray - Flight of the Ibis. Photo by Mark Lyndersay.

As I walked down the reddish carpet to the reception at the Trinidad and Tobago premiere of Contract Killers, I had an idle thought, the realisation that I was there not because I was a valued member of the media, a local film buff or even because I'd been in a Gerard Joseph film once in the past. I was there because Gerard is a fiercely loyal friend, the kind of guy who won't give up on a pardner until he's been beaten bloody and taken limping from the scene.

Ria, the woman who often reaches in to pull Gerard from his most humanitarian impulses was there too, a tall, rangy presence, as always right next to her husband, shaking hands, smiling and supporting Gerard, just like I remembered her the first time we met almost two decades ago.
Gerard Joseph was back in Trinidad after making his school film, Men of Gray, to produce its sequel, Men of Gray II - Flight of the Ibis. He remembered me from a story I had commissioned for the Guardian's Sunday Magazine, SG, and more specifically from the photos I had done of him with his co-star, Charles Applewhaite for the story.

Gerard insisted, in that way that he does, that I had to do the photos for the film. So I tagged along on some of the shoots, learning once and for all the glamour of film making is on the screen. Shooting stills for a movie is dull, the kind of thing that makes you long for the excitement of watching paint dry. Then you get a narrow window to shoot in before the crew shoves you out of the way to get their work done.
Gerard did his own learning on that shoot, discovering just how hard it is to move production wheels for moviemaking in Trinidad and Tobago. He went back to the US for a good long while after that, returning to film local scenes for Backlash, an action film that used Carnival as a backdrop.

Give the boy that. He's been more determined to use Trinidad and Tobago in his movies than anybody who talks about doing it officially.
What Gerard Joseph has been missing all this time, despite his indefatigable enthusiasm for the movie business, his bull-headed loyalty to his friends and the country of his birth, is a vehicle that puts his hard work up on the screen for the world to see.

There's no delicate way to put this, but most of Gerard's films haven't been great. They have been enthusiastic and passionate, they have featured his love and skills in the martial arts, but the unsung hero of Contract Killers, easily the best film he has produced that I've seen, is Justin Rhodes, a 28 year old Texan who polished the screenplay, directed and edited a slick action film that's heavily influenced by the style of the Bourne trilogy.

In Contract Killers, there are no good guys, just varying shades of bad, and for an adamantly nice fellow like Gerard, it marks a moment of maturity, I think, a realisation that the world is mostly shades of gray, many of them unpleasant, not the starkly black and white hatted protagonists of his earlier efforts.

In the film, Gerard takes a low profile role as Monoven, a terse, efficient killer and allows his three stars, Frida Farrell, Christian Willis and Rhett Giles to carry the film from Florida to Port of Spain to a miscellany of scenic sites around Trinidad and Tobago, including the "Chaguaramas Jungle," which earned the film a laugh.

It was great to see Gerard score with a slick, well put together film that rewarded his hard work over the years.
It's going to be interesting to see whether the Film Company, the location promotion arm of the local tourism agency, learns from his experience; the lesson that success with a film comes after two years of shooting and production and twenty-five years of being disappointed, picking yourself up and refusing to give up.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-04-21T23:45:53-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/macpix.html#unique-entry-id-160http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/macpix.html#unique-entry-id-160A look at current options for managing images at a reasonable price is posted here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-04-21T23:44:30-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth624posted.html#unique-entry-id-159http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth624posted.html#unique-entry-id-159BitDepth 624, a look at the success of the fan continuation of the Star Trek TOS story is posted here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-04-14T23:23:40-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth623.html#unique-entry-id-158http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth623.html#unique-entry-id-158BitDepth 623, an overview of current versions of image browsing and editing software is posted here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-04-07T23:39:36-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/air.html#unique-entry-id-157http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/air.html#unique-entry-id-157A new note on my experiences with the MacBook Air has been posted here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-04-07T23:36:54-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/nugtv.html#unique-entry-id-156http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/nugtv.html#unique-entry-id-156New images of actors and presenters for Gayelle TV have been posted here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-04-07T23:35:15-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/dfc7763bf18f8cfbf1dc12383cb3d007-155.html#unique-entry-id-155http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/dfc7763bf18f8cfbf1dc12383cb3d007-155.html#unique-entry-id-155BitDepth 622, a look at two online image editing applications is posted here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-03-31T21:40:24-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/ll.html#unique-entry-id-154http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/ll.html#unique-entry-id-154After a hiatus of almost a year, my photoessay project Local Lives returned this Sunday to the Guardian with a profile of a the Ramrick Sadhoo Chowtal Group.

To mark the occasion, I've revamped the web presence for Local Lives, with extended galleries of the first four installments and "The Return of Ramrick Sadhoo."

The other three installments will be posted over the next week.
View the new web presence for Local Lives here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-03-31T21:35:47-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/mac.html#unique-entry-id-153http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/mac.html#unique-entry-id-153A new section on the Macintosh begins here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-03-31T21:14:55-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth621posted.html#unique-entry-id-152http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth621posted.html#unique-entry-id-152BitDepth 621, a look at how musicians are taking more direct paths to their customers, is posted here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-03-24T21:29:08-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/61165e8e68f6dce522bf08ff7a4f9c88-151.html#unique-entry-id-151http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/61165e8e68f6dce522bf08ff7a4f9c88-151.html#unique-entry-id-151BitDepth 620, a look at online options for wordprocessing software is posted here...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comEditorial2008-03-21T09:00:14-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/response.html#unique-entry-id-150http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/response.html#unique-entry-id-150I did not cut off the microphone

Your editorial of March 17 contains a factual inaccuracy which I am quite certain you cannot substantiate, and an allegation about my conduct of the post-Cabinet press conference of March 13, which is equally without foundation.

In its fifth paragraph, the editorial asserts that “Information Minister Neil Parsanlal simply cut off the reporter’s microphone.” There is absolutely no truth to this statement.

As the moderator of the post-Cabinet press conference, I have no control over the microphone system, and therefore I am in no position to cut off any reporter’s microphone.

This matter was first raised publicly in a report carried by the Newsday reporter the day after the press conference, in which he alleged that “I was cut off by moderator, Minister of Information Neil Parsanlal.” He went on to add that “mysteriously, the microphone set up for this reporter went dead.”

It is indeed a pity that the Guardian, before compounding this inaccuracy, did not afford the minister the traditional courtesy of the right of reply, but rather accepted without question and repeated the Newsday reporter’s unfounded allegation.

What is indeed even more troubling, is that the Guardian’s editor-in-chief (ag) was present at that press conference and could easily have prevented his paper from committing this journalistic travesty.

The post-Cabinet press conference has a structure which follows closely the pattern of similar international briefings. Reporters are asked to identify their names and media houses before posing their question. Having done so, I usually allow sometimes two or three follow-up questions, before moving to another reporter.

With ten-15 reporters in the room, it would be improper to allow any one reporter to dominate the press conference, particularly when the question has been posed and answered by the minister.

If a reporter does not get the answer s/he is looking for, that does not give him/her the right to stall the press conference and prevent his/her colleagues from being able to pose their questions. As moderator, I have an obligation to all reporters in the room.

The second point of contention is the editorial allegation that my purported action underlined “the Government’s apparent position on questioning intended to result in answers that might reflect an addressing of public concerns.”

Working with syllogisms, one would be forced to conclude that the wrong premise would always result in the wrong conclusion, which is the precise error in this case.

Since assuming office I have deliberately set an agenda of openness and public disclosure. I have engaged all sections of the media, including both employers and employees, as well as their umbrella organisations.

I have been available and accessible to the media, sometimes at great inconvenience to my family and myself but, I hasten to add, I accepted this job and recognise that as par for the course. To impute therefore that I am part of a plot to prevent reporters from asking questions is ridiculous at best and libellous at worst.

I continue to be available to the Guardian, as I am to all other media houses, and pray that in the interest of journalistic integrity and fair play, that your error will be publicly corrected.

Neil Parsanlal
Minister of Information ]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comEditorial2008-03-17T19:51:27-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/browne.html#unique-entry-id-149http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/browne.html#unique-entry-id-149A media in service of people, not politics

The palpable arrogance of Junior Finance Minister Mariano Browne’s responses at Thursday’s post-Cabinet press conference sends a dangerous message to media practitioners about the attitude of the Government regarding our essential business.
The silence of the government on his startling statements suggests official endorsement of troubling trends in policy regarding information availability and transparency in public governance.

Questioned about the possibility of a removal of the two billion dollar gas subsidy which directly affects the cost of transportation, Browne launched into a lengthy economic discourse.
After the reporter pressed on with his questions, Browne rebuffed the line of questioning, suggesting that the reporter “read economics.”

Underlining the Government’s apparent position on questioning intended to result in answers that might reflect an addressing of public concerns rather than a tertiary level financial discourse, Information Minister Neil Parsanal simply cut off the reporter’s microphone.

During this “discussion” period with the press, the Junior Finance Minister also made clear his position on financial transparency, telling a room full of reporters that he would not recommend that the Government share information about feasibility studies or cost-benefit analyses related to the purchase of a TT$400 million jet because he did not believe that the business of government should be articulated in the media.

If one wished to be charitable, it could be noted that Minister Browne was appointed late to the Cabinet and missed the one week beachside coaching opportunity for new Ministers of Government. Coming from the upper echelons of the private sector finance, his sense of reserve at sharing financial information is understandable, but absurdly out of place.
Efforts at muzzling the scope and freedom of the media to report on issues of importance to the public have been a consistent part of the relationship between governance and reporting.

Much of the time it finds expression in courtship and charm, the pleasant selling of a governmental perspective accompanied by updated versions of “rum and roti” offerings designed to divert focused attention from areas of concern.
At other times, however, the effort becomes more focused and draconian, finding expression in odious attempts to apply artificial barriers to the reporter’s scope of inquiry. The late 1990’s attempt to float the notorious Green Paper on Media Reform by the UNC finally collapsed in the face of media outcry, and a libel lawsuit brought against Basdeo Panday by Ken Gordon.

The media practitioners of Trinidad and Tobago are among the most admired in the Caribbean region, but such regard must continue to be earned, and efforts to circumvent our effective articulation of the concerns of the public to those in power and to report on the realities and ramifications of their decisions cannot ever be curtailed.
Perhaps it is necessary to respond to Minister Browne and say it directly so that members of Cabinet understand; the business of the government is the business of the people and the actions of the stewards of the national economy must be reported to them in all the detail our published pages and broadcast time will allow.

It is to be expected that the agendas of the Government and the media will sometimes be at odds. Our respective ideas about what constitutes national development, for instance, will probably always diverge at their roots.
But no clear thinking, rational representative of Government could ever reasonably expect the media of Trinidad and Tobago to calmly accept having the essential role of their business dismissed, their capacity to report insulted and then silenced by a dead microphone.

Such actions stand in direct defiance of the Government’s lip service on transparency and the fundamental right of nationals of Trinidad and Tobago to know what is being done with their money, in their name.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comMusic2008-03-17T19:49:02-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/jazz.html#unique-entry-id-148http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/jazz.html#unique-entry-id-148here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-03-17T19:25:50-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/9b2cada58fdf92fc4773fd70bed97a07-147.html#unique-entry-id-147http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/9b2cada58fdf92fc4773fd70bed97a07-147.html#unique-entry-id-147why that might be important for you to think about...]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-03-10T17:54:29-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth618posted.html#unique-entry-id-146http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth618posted.html#unique-entry-id-146BitDepth#618 a report on the launch of Windows Server 2008 is posted here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-03-03T20:26:34-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth617posted.html#unique-entry-id-145http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth617posted.html#unique-entry-id-145Taping television has gone digital. You can buy a box from your provider or create your own solution. Read more here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comCable Guys2008-02-26T11:09:55-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/inawell.html#unique-entry-id-144http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/inawell.html#unique-entry-id-144There is a great movie to be made about personal teleportation.
The idea of instantly moving from one physical space to another has entranced science fiction fans ever since Captain Kirk, First Officer Spock and the guy with the red t-shirt who was going to die stepped into a transporter.

One of the finest science fiction novels ever written, The Stars my Destination, by Alfred Bester deals with personal teleportation, which Bester describes as "jaunting" in the 1956 novel. This book is so good that I've bought it three times, first as half a graphic novel adaptation by Howard Chaykin (the second half was notoriously hard to find) then twice as novels after lending and losing the book the first time out.

You will normally find Bester's book published as Tiger, Tiger and even though it's basically a rewrite of The Count of Monte Cristo, it holds up fifty-two years later as one of the best bits of sci-fi conceptualising ever written.
There's a great film to be made from Bester's work, hell, there's a great film to be made from stealing two ideas from Bester's novel, but Jumper isn't it.
Not that Jumper cribs from The Stars my Destination. No, it's source material is much humbler, a sci-fi story for "young adults" written by Steven Gould, so I suspect that the book is long on post-teen angst and painfully short on high concept.
But there's no way that the book can possibly be as bad as the film it inspired.

I'm frankly confused by this.
Doug Liman, whose staccato direction of the last first instalment of the Bourne Identity trilogy and fluent handling of almost continuous violence in Mr and Mrs Smith is the director here and David S. Goyer, who wrote the last two Blade movies and kind of directed the last one is on hand to contribute to the script of Jumper.
The thing is Jumper isn't a bad film, it's a great setup with a black hole at its centre and it reminds me of nothing less than On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which boasted experienced direction by Peter Hunt, excellent writing by Bond vet Richard Maibaum and George Lazenby.

OHMSS was enthusiastic, well produced and full of action but Lazenby was a giant sucking presence in the middle of the film, draining every scene he appeared in of enthusiasm, excitement and, well, Bondishness.
There's an amazing scene in the film as Bond talks with Gabriele Ferzetti, playing Draco and you can see this accomplished actor lowering his game to try to slow down enough for Lazenby's laconic pace as the scene goes on.
Bu the end of OHMSS, you can't help but feel that if the part of Bond had been played by a man-shaped hole burned in the celluloid, it couldn't possibly have been any worse.

Hayden Christensen is kind of like that in Jumper. He starts the film off with a sulking pout, clearly dissatisfied with his ability to go anywhere he likes, take anything he wants and take beautiful women to bed all over the world. Once the Paladin knight Roland (Samuel L Jackson) gets on his case, he has even less to be happy about, but he's got nowhere to go emotionally from where he starts out except through the special effect that's lifted directly from Nightcrawler's moves in X2.

There are other people in the film, including an almost invisible Thomas Hulce and a cleverly almost absent Diane lane, but the only presence in the film beyond Jackson's remarkable silver haircut is Jamie Bell, who seems to be the only person who is having fun. At least Jackson gets to beat Christensen up... repeatedly. It might be vengeance for their last appearance together, but it's hard to begrudge Jackson his dark side when faced with such monotone acting.

It's troubling to see Christensen in a leading role being even less of an actor than he managed to be in the last two Star Wars prequels, but it's even more troubling to realise that the film was made with one eye on a sequel.
That's not science fiction, that's horror. ]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-02-26T10:24:44-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/Bitdepth616posted.html#unique-entry-id-143http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/Bitdepth616posted.html#unique-entry-id-143BitDepth#616, an overview of Microsoft's new Office Communicator product and Unified Communications concept is posted here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWeb2008-02-26T11:16:56-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/ttweb.html#unique-entry-id-142http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/ttweb.html#unique-entry-id-142michele@ritualsmus.com.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comMusing2008-02-18T22:19:48-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/boissiere.html#unique-entry-id-141http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/boissiere.html#unique-entry-id-141The house, one of the remarkable old homes around the Savannah, though not one counted as part of the row described as the Magnificent Seven, is on the market for TT$63 million and the prevailing fear is that anyone who buys the property will promptly bulldoze 12 Queen's Park West to make "better" use of what is now prime real estate overlooking the city.

Blogger and published writer Nicholas Laughlin has triggered a wave of concern about the eventual fate of the building, wisely stepping in before it has actually been sold and the discussion changes from preservation to salvation.
The first entry on a blog that I can find is on The Bookman's site here, but Laughlin's blog entry raised the ante to activism.
Since then, Georgia Popplewell, Sean Leonard and Laughlin have done admirable work in bringing the issue to national attention, and there is now a website dedicated to the issue, though it would be churlish to point out that the TV6 report on the issue used extensive footage of Mlle Fleur, one of the Magnificent Seven in particular disrepair. One collapsing national treasure might seem to be as good as another for cutaways.

Almost 20 years ago, I assisted a similar movement initiated by the Citizens for Conservation which stepped in at a critical juncture in the history of the George Brown house, which was in danger of being bulldozed to make way for a modern structure. In the end, the house was clumsily grafted into the development, but remained standing. Citizens for Conservation moved on to Stollmeyer Castle, successfully pushing the Government to take control of the building and stem an alarming degree of rot.
The CfC was, I believe, a presence that made the refurbishment of the adjacent White House, once the seat of Governmental planning, one that conformed more closely to international standards of conservation, rather than the sort of haphazard, "whatever de hardware have" replacement of rotting wood and fixtures and the careless painting of delicately gessoed detailing.

CfC eventually ran out of steam, which wasn't surprising to me after attending one of their meetings, after which I always joked with member Christine Millar that they were really citizens for conversation.
It's alarming to me that today the issues remain disturbingly the same. Any current attempt by the Government to respect the notion of national heritage remains a token effort, as gutted by bureaucracy and toothlessness as the Environmental Management Agency, whose directives are routinely ignored by developers.

The dialogue surrounding the preservation effort is still riddled with the kind of expressions of upper-middle class disdain that turns off possible supporters and raises the hackles of government representatives who want their efforts to be respected by that nebulous group they think of as "the masses."
Comments like "If we destroy this building, we are savages with no hope," "Let us cherish our heritage" and "save us from ourselves" left on the petition page for the website position the dialogue in a space that leaves the most powerful voices in Trinidad and Tobago politics out of the discussion.

Compounding this sense of exclusivity is the history of most of the architectural treasures around the Savannah, the former homes of wealthy, landed gentry, the sort of folk who were at some remove from the man in the street then and now.
I believe that the effort being put into directing the sale of the Boissiere house would be more sustainable if it embraced all of the heritage of Trinidad and Tobago. If we are going to help the Boissiere family to sell their home in a way that their contribution to the history of Trinidad and Tobago is preserved, then we should also be working to save Juggassar House in Chaguanas built in 1919 by the son of Ocha, an indentured worker from India.

The pressure has to be more effectively placed on the Government to develop, support and deploy resources to preserve all aspects of the nation's heritage. At this juncture, that is more clearly necessary than ever, as President's House and other buildings which are part of the national patrimony and are unquestionably Government property, fall steadily into ruin. Blogger Sharon Millar takes note of that issue here.
But lasting change won't happen until everyone feels involved and invested in the preservation effort, until the issue is brought home in that kind of personal way, the issue will continue to be largely ignored by the larger public, whose concerns are the first items on the agenda of the politicians who can change the nature of this discourse.

Doing that is going to mean identifying many different and geographically dispersed examples of our national heritage and creating discussion and interest around them where they exist, encouraging knowledge tours by schoolchildren and bringing history back to communities in a way that excites and intrigues. When a politician's child comes home and asks if they are going to knock down a house, building or historical site that they have drawn and studied at school; the discussion about saving our heritage will have a fundamentally different tone.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-02-18T22:14:07-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/d573368d26e1f1b3ed627b03465c05d9-140.html#unique-entry-id-140http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/d573368d26e1f1b3ed627b03465c05d9-140.html#unique-entry-id-140nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comBitDepth+2008-02-18T22:06:00-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/deane.html#unique-entry-id-139http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/deane.html#unique-entry-id-139
We've had to seamlessly integrate some legacy  equipment with new IPDSLAM  systems at our exchanges and make all of this work on a new Multi-protocol Layer Switching core inclusive of  SMTP and DNS services. At the same time we increased our outbound bandwidth.

Unfortunately, being the national communications service provider,  we did not have the luxury of shutting down our entire network for a few weeks to put everything together so we had to do the next best thing. Incrementally roll out, test, refine, expand, test, refine and then start the process again. Regrettably, the service issues experienced by the customers that wrote to you were examples of  our early learning experiences.

The good news is  the technology transfer that has been happening between TSTT and our partners means that new issues which we anticipate will still arise, will become fewer, of shorter duration and much farther between. Within the next 3 months we expect that we would have returned our service to '5/9' reliability that is  99.999% uptime- as one of your customers alluded.  

We must concede however that more could have been done to keep customers in the loop. Although most of the service outages were unintended,  we could have shared with customers that our improvements works were being done on live systems and that there would have been a chance service interruptions at random times.  

I am nonetheless pleased that in spite of the difficult circumstances the project team remained steadfastly committed to correcting issues as expeditiously as possible.
I can understand how some customers, in the absence of knowing the situation, might have concluded that TSTT's emphasis was on sales and not service but that couldn't be further from the truth.

In addition to local training, we hired additional staff and at the same time employed the services of a technology support centre overseas. Frankly, the initial wave of customer interest was far greater than we anticipated, given the existence of competition, so we had to beef up our resources. Unfortunately in this highly technical, high-stakes environment, we have had to make a greater effort to get the best. It would do us no good to compound a bad situation by hastily ramping up out tech-support with underskilled personnel.

So we've had to bite the bullet and accept the early criticism of what seemed to be a slow response to customers but what was in fact a necessary quality assurance process.
In light of these issues which did put our customers at a disadvantage, we took the decision in December, that until we got Blink to existing residential TSTT High-speed Internet (ADSL) customers, we would  cut their existing monthly rates in half. This 50% discount will continue until their service is ungraded to Blink Broadband.  

We are also making improvements with our Help Desk facilities, both in terms of manpower, troubleshooting ability, and diagnostic systems.  The goal is to equip them with tools to remotely repair internet issues, inclusive of re-setting modems, changing configurations, etc.

We are making the patient investment in resources to support Blink Broadband now so that in the very near future we can offer customers other innovative products and services that will capitalise on the reliable high bandwidth Broadband services from Blink.  These will produce a truly unique on-line experience for all, and put TSTT on course to make good on our promise of delivering the highest quality Broadband product in the nation.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comReader Response2008-02-18T21:46:31-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/broadbad.html#unique-entry-id-138http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/broadbad.html#unique-entry-id-138
First TSTT. I have had a fast TSTT dsl line for some time but in recent months [quite a few] it has become extremely unreliable. When you use e-mail for business applications as our firm does then reliability, more than speed, is paramount.

In recent months the e- mail environment has become exceedingly unreliable with possibly as many as 25% of e-mails not getting through. This is quite dangerous because when you think your communications have gone through you may not even get to know if they have arrived or not. Chances are, these days, is that they haven’t.

This really makes the use of e-mail as a business tool for communications questionable. Another problem in recent times is that the system just goes down – maybe ten times a day! Look that sort of service is totally unacceptable in the first world. Remember that is what we are striving to become. Reliability in the first world is measured in ‘nines’ – like 99.99% reliability.

In Trinidad is probably somewhere around 75% these days. So, when it comes to e-mail, while speed is important – reliability is paramount. Someone needs to explain this to TSTT. It really comes down to an attitude about ‘service’ as opposed to ‘sales’. So as TSTT pursues the holy grail of kilobytes we should remind them of these basic needs we, the customers, have.

So hungry is TSTT to ensure market share in the quest for speed they will pay for huge newspaper advertisements whipping up a frenzy appetite for speed at the blink of an eye that they will ignore their own customers who have paid for dsl lines for years without even offering them preferential terms to convert from dsl to blink. And when they actually get around to providing you the blink service your mail will probably shut down completely. Why? 

Because TSTT is not really interested in service – just your sale – you, as a customer, must now spend hours on the phone trying to get the service, which is all you really want. You will be shunted around from India to a whole bunch of people who are trained to be polite but who actually do not help you at all – though they all promise to help because that is what they know you want to hear.

Eventually, if you are really persistent and enterprising you will get a number of a local guy in the field who is the guy you really need to speak to – he is the guy that can actually help you. But then he has to run a whole series of test – some of these tests are done by different departments. First they have to test the line. Then they change the router.

Then they have to check the exchange ports. Then they have to help you reset the router. You ask yourself – did anyone bother to think this through?  FLOW is not much different. They advertise sales. Try and call them. No there is nothing wrong with your phone.

(Response from Rhea Yawching... Yes we still continue to face this problem especially over the last 2 months when thousands were trying to subscribe to the new movies and sports packages. Right now we are waiting on our telephony service to get up and running and then we will be launching a new number with our own new lines.)

I learnt a little trick – dial all but the last number and hold it for about 30 seconds before completing the number (RY...never heard of this) with luck you might get through– then you have to get through the dial this number, then that extension – eventually they give you an appointment to inspect the premises – “December 04 in the afternoon”. But do they come? No. Try calling them again? Get the drift yet? It’s the same story.  

LISA is different. You do get service here. They do turn up when they say they will. You do get a dedicated broadband speed that is ideal for an office situation. They do install a demo to let you try their service. Then you have to reset all your settings. Only to discover the cost of get a reasonably fast speed that is needed for a modern office situation where you need to upload/ download large files to extranets. The price is exorbitant. What a pity.

This could have been a solution but can you afford it?  Well this is my story. I take the time and trouble on this Christmas morning because I would really like to see this attention to sales rather than service end it reminds me too much of the cell phone service. No joy for many this Christmas!  


From V...

At the office -in Woodbrook- we've had for a couple years now, TSTT's fastest available business connection- 1.5 mb. It worked as advertised most of the time, topping out at 1.3mb. We switched to TSTT from Carib- Link's wireless service which was giving too much trouble for too long. As with everyone we were excited about the new broadband services that rolled out, and signed up online immediately to "switch" to blink's service.  

We were going to go with a business package that was faster but cheaper than our existing one. We spoke to our corporate rep but she said that our area wasn't as yet Blink enabled so we sould have to wait a couple weeks. A week or so after we spoke to the rep our connection went dead for 4 days straight after a period of unusually spotty service.

Calling support only put me through the same script that they follow each time, and ended with the (local) support tech saying that they would have to talk with their technical people to solve the problem.

I kept calling and was finally told that they were in the process of switching networks and that we wouldn't have service for 4 days (including Sat and Sun). Could you believe that? No warning, nothing. Typical TSTT right? They knew all along what the problem was.  

A couple weeks after that I noticed our speeds increased dramatically. 3.5- 4MB downloads was now the norm. I contacted Blink again and they still maintained that our area wasn’t yet Blink enabled. It has been about 2 months now that we’ve we have had our 3.5mb to 4mb connection while still signed on to our original 1.5mb high speed package. 

Normally that would be a good thing but the problem is that we’re still paying the higher price that we originally signed on to. So we have Blink Broadband (it seems) but paying the old higher price.  The service itself? Pretty good I think. We would get the occasional blackouts but it doesn’t last for long, a few minutes max. With Azureus I’ll get 400-500k downloads. Upload is about 65/75k.

The best results on a speed test I’ve had is 4.2mb down 660k up  Flow is always an option but we’re a bit wary about their being new, and would probably wait a few months until they’ve stabilized their systems and tech staff to really consider it. (RH...we have extremely good levels of stability in our systems right now, and constantly improving. Where we need improvement is the quantity and quality of our help desk people who are bombarded by “newness” questions not even related to the connection, but the internet / computer stuff in general.)   
So that’s my broadband experience.  

(addendum) By a strange coincidence, on the very day i emailed you, I finally received a response from our service rep as to whether we had unknowingly been switched to Blink. She said that indeed we had been switched to Blink, and that we would be given a rebate on the excess paid from the time it was implemented. So that chapter ends.  


From F...

Here's my TSTT Blink story. I hope it helps you in getting a wider picture on the state of TSTT's non-service. 

I would be very interested in learning what the truth behind these problems is.  TSTT has done it again! After a couple years of relatively minor problems with their service (which as most people can attest is not very common) I have been experiencing problems since mid-November with my ADSL and land line (suspiciously this time period coincides with when I was told that “Blink” was being implemented in my area).

Continuously, on average 4 or 5 times a day – while I am on the Internet – my DSL connection drops, stays off for a few minutes and then connects again. I tend to listen to Internet radio so I am aware of every “drop” that occurs. 

After numerous calls to 824-TSTT and many conversations with some very foreign sounding help desk support agents with very English sounding names providing me with many different stories as to what was the problem and what was the solution, a “trouble ticket” was opened for me.

I was told that this would be dealt with in 6 to 7 working days. 6 days later I called to inquire what progress had been made. The help desk agent supposedly asked someone in repairs to call me, but no one did. I called back the following day and was put onto a very rude repair support agent who basically told me that the trouble ticket is normally takes 6 to 7 working days of it being opened for it to be assigned to an agent.

When I inquired how long after that it would be before someone actually looked into the problem, he said he could not tell me. I asked to speak with someone who could tell me when, to which he replied that no one would be able to tell me, but he offered to let me speak with his supervisor. Interestingly enough, when transferring my call to his supervisor, my call was dropped (just like my DSL connection – except this time it didn’t automatically re-connect).

I cannot recall how many times I have spoken with the help desk, but it has probably been over twenty times since the start of these problems. I also cannot recall how many different “stories” I have been told as to what the problems are. Eventually, I managed to speak with someone (in “Residential Services” I believe) who then forwarded me to what was supposed to be the Blink help desk. 

The person I was put on to explained that they cannot help with “technical” problems, but she promised to have her supervisor call me. Lo and behold, the supervisor did call me, at 7 pm that evening. 

She very politely apologised for the problems that I was encountering and admitted that they had some major technical problems that they were unable to solve and they were trying to get the vendor of their system to come and rectify the service.  Well, more than a week passed, the service got steadily worse, and eventually died altogether on or before Christmas Eve. 

Magically, it resurrected itself at 8 am on the 29th of December, but as of that evening it had slowed to a crawl, so much so that it was almost unusable.  On the 2nd of January the speeds seemed acceptable and so far my Internet radio is playing smoothly. Hopefully this means they have sorted out their problems.

An interesting side-bar to this episode is that at the same time these DSL problems started, my land line (the one with the ADSL on it) also began giving trouble. Calls from and to Digicel mobile phones resulted in neither party hearing the other and when a voice mail is left on the phone, the dial tone does not change to the one that indicates a message has been left.

I know that these symptoms also occur on another line belonging to a friend of mine in Barataria.

As an addendum to the letter I sent, from the 3rd of January, the dropped connections started back.  Today was the first day, since my problems started, that I have not had a single drop out that I noticed (but I was away from my desk for a major part of the day), so maybe they are getting better, but I still have problems with Digicel calls and presumably international calls on my land line.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-02-11T21:11:39-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth614posted.html#unique-entry-id-137http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth614posted.html#unique-entry-id-137BitDepth 614, my final rumination on the state of the Carnival in 2008 is posted here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comCarnival2008-02-11T19:40:44-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/masmeds.html#unique-entry-id-136http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/masmeds.html#unique-entry-id-136
Carnival is one of the most surprising festivals in the world.
It is a time when the Yamina Warriors, black men led by an elderly rastafarian, portray Native American warriors in enthusiastically feathered headdress in faux tribal dances, all to the rhythms of cutting Tassa drums.
It is a time when the Rhapsody Steel and Brass Orchestra (above) roams the streets playing a curious blend of small band steel and big band brass.
But we are in danger of losing the very thing that makes Trinidad and Tobago's Carnival celebrations so very special, the quirky, individualistic touches that are such a personal expression of our creative nature.

There is a strange and terrible symbiosis between today's masqueraders and the cameras they play to. After almost three decades of covering Carnival, I've seen a steady evolution from masqueraders who were flattered by the attention of the camera through masqueraders who enthusiastically court the attention of the camera to today's lunacy, in which camera and masquerader are both engaged in recording something that hardly reflects the original idea of Carnival at all.
These images have now become the visual language of Carnival, an abrupt, sexually charged shorthand of collaged photographs that distils two days of partying and masquerade down to lunges toward the camera of hip and face.
For the second year, the mas took place on "the road" a stretch of roadway just to the north-east of Prince's Building grounds, now the scene of massive construction works geared toward the establishment of a culture academy.

Along the road, bleachers were constructed to accommodate a south facing audience who viewed Carnival as it petered out passing the judging area through the keyhole arches of trees which shadowed the players as they wandered away from "the stage."
That stage won the attention of both NCCTV and CNMG, with CNMG offering the feed of masqueraders as they faced the judges and just a few yards on, NCCTV picked up the parade as it meandered along.
Why?
With two state underwritten media outlets offering a live feed of Carnival, why not offer more variety and push NCCTV to offer feeds from other parts of Trinidad and Tobago which were putting on their own celebrations?

What would it have been like to switch between mas in Downtown, Chaguanas, San Fernando and Tunapuna when nothing special was happening at the Savannah? Why not create a special space along the route where the DJs can be easily silenced and small bands can have a space in the festival that respects their scale in the same way that the four lane wide runways at the Savannah and Downtown respect the scale of big bands?
Management of the media resource was just slightly more polite this year but just as ineffectual. The space allocated for coverage by the media was largely patronised by non-media workers and the toilets quickly became appalling.

Photographic views and angles were often blocked by crowds of unaccredited photographers and the large banners that announce to the judges what band and section they are looking at.
Why are these banners even necessary anymore? Why not have electronic banners in the judges area that are guided by input from masquerader representatives which display this information in a clear and accessible way?
Why not ask AMPOTT to appoint a team of representatives for photography and video to plan proper media access for Carnival without leaving the job up to people who have never eaten the dust of tramping feet or been jostled by every enthusiastic spectator with a camera?

When a popular band appears at the Savannah venue, it is quickly mobbed by people with cameras, some of them wearing spurious "media" t-shirts and badges that were clearly not sanctioned by any NCC organisation.
The media mix at Carnival is changing rapidly, as bloggers and websites offering massive collections of photographs from the festival feed the public need to know both here and abroad. Large bands are also providing masqueraders with their own photographic services, and those photographers will join the coverage on Carnival Tuesday.
If there is to be any real policing of the media area on Carnival Tuesday, then the new realities must be recognised.

Issue a reasonable number of media passes to bloggers and image aggregation websites, who do a better job of keeping people up to date with detailed developments in Carnival than most established media and offer vast databases of photographs that may be poor in quality but are also intimidating in their depth of coverage.
Issue band-specific passes to photographers working with a specific band during the day to expedite their coverage when their band crosses a venue but won't allow them to stick around after the band has moved on.
Related stories: BitDepth #614, Making Mas.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comBitDepth+2008-02-10T21:16:51-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/bbissues.html#unique-entry-id-135http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/bbissues.html#unique-entry-id-135Is anyone having issues with their broadband service with either Flow or TSTT?
I'm working on a piece that aggregates information from customers about their experiences with broadband upgrades, new installations or problems with Internet speeds and the support responses they have experienced with these providers.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comMusing2008-02-08T22:06:17-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/wecops.html#unique-entry-id-134http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/wecops.html#unique-entry-id-134I know exactly what the guys are talking about and as a matter of fact, I do have investments in the road they happen to be talking about. And so do you.
Sledge Construction has been doing some quick and admirable work on a new house around the corner from me at the junction of Luckput Street and Carlton Avenue.
But at what cost? Nobody would like to be moving into a house these guys built after they managed to piss off everyone on the block.

The work has been fast and focused on the construction but almost no attention has been paid to the community in which the work is taking place. Right from the start, as the land was being cleared, the bulldozer completely demolished the pavement and the entire section had to be cordoned off with a makeshift wall that effectively made foot traffic in front of the western side of the construction site impossible.

But no worries, as the work progressed and the foundation was laid it became clear that there was no plan for containing the work on the jobsite as raw materials were summarily dumped on the northern sidewalk and large trucks ran up on the sidewalk to discharge materials, breaking up the sidewalk as the work progressed.
But even that wasn't to be the limit of the lack of concern for people passing by in the street as the work moved further off the jobsite into the middle of the street for cement mixing.

Now the corner of Luckput Street and Carlton Avenue is a hub for traffic going north off Mucurapo Road and east to merge back into the main traffic along the Western Main Road, here.
From around three o'clock in the afternoon, traffic begins to pile up here alarmingly and with a casual insouciance, I found these young men repeatedly mixing cement as lines of traffic crawled by their construction work with no care for the chaos that was building up around them.
So I stopped one day and pointed out what their carelessness was causing. This was not received well, so I called the Construction company to complain.

Then I kept doing it, asking for the senior people on the job next to make the point that what they were doing was both avoidable (concrete can be mixed equally well onsite if you lay down used plywood with galvanise sheeting over it) and not a little bit uncivil.
That's how I became the guy who feels he owns the road, but here's the thing, we all do. I live here in St James, in Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago and the only way that we can establish who really owns this country is to step up and claim it.

The wife thinks I'm going to get hurt doing this, but how much hurt will we all have to endure trying to ignore a blizzard of casual instances of carelessness, incivility and loutishness that demands to be called out as the nastiness that should be shouted down until it's no longer cool to fail to care about the people who share this island with you.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comCarnival2008-02-08T23:42:08-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/masmess.html#unique-entry-id-133http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/masmess.html#unique-entry-id-133Making Mas series.
Several of these sites are really focused on the business of getting ready for Carnival Monday and Tuesday and one of the fascinating themes that cropped up in the week before Carnival was the disparity between costumes as delivered and as advertised.

Two particularly thorough and interesting entries appeared on the blogs of Saucy Diva and Carnival Jumbie.
After covering Carnival for almost a quarter of a century, an issue like this simply never occurred to me. Have a look at what the committed masquerader has to say. These are blogs that deserve to be signed.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comCarnival2008-02-07T06:35:48-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/rmcurse.html#unique-entry-id-132http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/rmcurse.html#unique-entry-id-132I trace the genesis of this Carnival phenomenon back to 1974, when The Mighty Shadow (as he was then known) was either placed last, or so close to last that the indignity of it was indistinguishable, for his Dimanche Gras performances of "I come out to play" and "Bassman."

An outraged public promptly went out into the streets and made Bassman one of the most thorough trouncings in Road March history to that date.
Since then, the tradition of street revenge for perceived injustices in judging have continued, and include Bill Trotman's "Mammy, Mammy, I want to go back to school."

The curse in the equation kicks in when performers return to face the judges, who have always seemed keen to stick to their guns by placing such "popular" performers even further down the line. It took Shadow almost 30 years to claim the Calypso Monarch crown, but he never stopped being the people's champion and remains the third most well-known and popular calypsonian after Sparrow and Kitchener.

That's hardly bad company to be keeping, for either Mr Bailey or Mrs Lyons-Alvarez.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comCarnival2008-02-08T23:42:03-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/mmchamps.html#unique-entry-id-131http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/mmchamps.html#unique-entry-id-131Congratulations are in order to several of the people profiled in the Making Mas series. Brian Mac Farlane (MM4) won the George Bailey award for Large Band of the Year, with Trini Revellers (MM3) came in second in that competition. Tribe (MM2) placed sixth in the Large Band category.

San Fernando bandleaders Ivan and Wendy Kalicharan (MM6) won the South Band of the Year title. De BOSS (MM7) took the Lil Hart award for Small Band of the Year, closely followed by Tribal Connection (MM7) in second place. Wade Madray tied for third place in the King of Carnival competition.
View Making Mas online here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-02-04T19:21:01-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth613posted.html#unique-entry-id-129http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth613posted.html#unique-entry-id-129BitDepth 613 explores what I've found in the fields of mas making and what it means for Carnival's future. The Making Mas series is found here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comMusing2008-01-31T22:59:34-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/daly.html#unique-entry-id-128http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/daly.html#unique-entry-id-128Jason Daly died on January 29. Jason was one of the first of GayelleTV's presenters to visit my studio for the series of portraits that I've been doing of the all-local station's presenters. I didn't know him particularly well, but he always acknowledged me whenever we met and he was a cooperative subject.
I began shooting GayelleTV's presenters partly as a personal project, partly because of my long association with Banyan and Chris laird and Errol Fabien, but mostly because the station is just around the corner from my studio and as I told Chris, it would have been ridiculous for anyone else to be doing their photography.
Having a record of the presence and vitality of Jason wasn't the reason for doing it, but I'm glad that the photos exist.
GayelleTV has created a virtual condolence book for Jason here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-01-28T19:47:51-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth612posted.html#unique-entry-id-126http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth612posted.html#unique-entry-id-126BitDepth#612 a report on calypsonian Crazy's first attempt at online sales of his music is posted here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-02-07T07:03:15-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/mmupdate2.html#unique-entry-id-125http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/mmupdate2.html#unique-entry-id-125Making Mas is just about finished. I've added a new page, Made Mas that's linked from here. This new page shows some of the costumes and band covered by the series on the road at Carnival. You can find new images and outtakes from the entire series here , the stories are extracted here and PDFs of all the published pages are here. I've also posted for download iPod friendly video clips of an interview (here) I did with GayelleTV's Cock a Doodle Do and a smaller version of the supporting video (here) that I prepared for the broadcast.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comMusic2008-01-24T21:04:30-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/fifty.html#unique-entry-id-124http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/fifty.html#unique-entry-id-124
At 40, my mother had a grand celebration for me at my home and I shared the company of friends in the absolute certainty that I was now a man. A particularly frivolous and unfocused one, but certainly no longer a boy.

Now I'm fifty and the last ten years have been particularly life changing. I managed to live one of my oldest dreams, working first in editorial administration at the Guardian and finally getting my chance to set up and run a daily newspaper, The Wire.

Now that I'm back in business for myself again after eight years in corporate life at the Guardian and Petrotrin, I find that making money needs to be balanced by making meaning. That's very much where my head is at these days, with projects like Local Lives and Making Mas, which bring me back to where I started in photography and writing, with the ten years I spent photographing theatre in Trinidad and Tobago.

So I didn't have the little do I planned on January 23. I didn't even have time to compose this blog in time for the date because I'd commited to delivering the last three installments of the Making Mas project. So I worked through my birthday on something I loved doing, some presents are different than others.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-01-21T18:58:56-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth611posted.html#unique-entry-id-123http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth611posted.html#unique-entry-id-123BitDepth #611, about my experiences with social network sites and Facebook in particular is posted here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-01-20T01:09:09-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/blogupdate.html#unique-entry-id-122http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/blogupdate.html#unique-entry-id-122Updated the Blog page with a new design from Gary at RapidWeaver Themes called Headliner.
This new theme demands a monitor with a resolution of at least 1024 pixels (pretty much any modern monitor sold in the last four years). My test run using OpenTracker, a pricey but powerful visitor tracking tool reveals that just three percent of you use a smaller monitor that will require some scrolling to view the whole page.
I get to pack a bit more information in to a new left side column, which may make accessing information about page a little easier for folks who don't scroll down very far.
I plan to develop this a bit more as I go along.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-01-21T09:12:20-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/numas2.html#unique-entry-id-121http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/numas2.html#unique-entry-id-121New entry on Trini Revellers and Brian Mac Farlane in the Making Mas series here. I've also added the stories on a new page, so you can view downloadable PDF files of the pages as published, the full take of selects that I worked from in developing the layout and the stories.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comPhotography2008-01-16T20:45:39-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/hosay.html#unique-entry-id-120http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/hosay.html#unique-entry-id-120Hosay is approaching its climax again this year. It's Flag Night tonight. Have a look at the photoessay I did on the Panchaiti camp last year here and there's a look behind the scenes at how it got put together here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-01-15T00:24:23-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/mm.html#unique-entry-id-119http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/mm.html#unique-entry-id-119Making Mas, a new photoessay series that I'm working on for the Trinidad Guardian is a celebration of the unsung heroes of Carnival, the hundreds of people who build thousands of costumes for the annual festival.
The introduction page is here. Galleries of published and unpublished photos are here. Downloadable PDFs of the published Guardian stories are here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comWebsite Updates2008-01-14T23:15:58-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth610posted.html#unique-entry-id-118http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/BitDepth610posted.html#unique-entry-id-118BitDepth #610 a contemplation of the state of Carnival is posted here.]]>nospamplease@lyndersaydigital.comMedia2008-01-11T10:42:05-04:00http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/terry.html#unique-entry-id-117http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/brain/dump_files/terry.html#unique-entry-id-117
Terry Joseph was a friend of mine. He died a week ago of cancer in the US.
We were journalism buddies, but our first meeting almost 20 years ago was as writer and subject.
I was producing a column for the Guardian called Portrait. I'd sift through the paper, find something or someone that seemed interesting, and go talk to the person in charge or the pivot personality in the situation.
I was aware of complaints about the condition of Queen's Hall, so I scheduled a chat with the manager, who just happened to be Terry Joseph. He gave me a story that pretty much finalised his annoyance and frustration with the job, blowing a whistle that started the process, which took almost ten years, of refurbishing the famous performance space and costing him his job.

It was the first time that one of my feature stories triggered an editorial at the Guardian, and I was proud of what I'd done with a column that was pretty much devoted to profiles.
Even then Terry knew who I was. He was aware that we had attended the same school (Trinity College, Moka) and had been educated by the same English teachers, Charlene Ogle and Hugh Spicer. That, and whatever he had seen of my work up to then, was enough for him to trust me with a story that would soon put him on the breadline. The picture that ran with that story is part of this gallery.
We later got to know each other at the Guardian, when I joined the madcap team that Alwin Chow was putting together to herald in the digital age of production at the paper.

In that fermenting brew of acrimony, rapid change and general madness, four journalists found common ground and good company. Lennox Grant was the news editor, Romeo Kaseram was the Features Editor, Terry was a feature and news reporter and I was the photo editor.
Together, we dubbed ourselves the Four Skins, and we would "pull back" for a drinking lime on most Friday afternoons to make sense of the turmoil we had found ourselves in the middle of.