What ifs & What’s Up
Posted 3 months, 2 weeks ago at 7:50 pm. 1 comment
After a bit of a break Nick’s Video Thing is back this week.
I also added a channel on Vimeo here
Riotous Leaders
Posted 4 months, 2 weeks ago at 10:13 am. 0 comments
Episode 3 is up and posted below. I also created a new Youtube account and will be posting all the episodes on there as well as Vimeo (which I prefer). The link is here. I think you can subscribe to it or something.
A quick episode today, just a couple humorous clips and some shots from a show in London I went to. Enjoy.
Banks, Sports, & BAFTAs
Posted 4 months, 3 weeks ago at 1:28 pm. 1 comment
Episode 2 is up. Still getting used to iMovie 09 and starting to fool around with adding stuff from Garageband. More polish to come.
Let’s Try Again Shall We?
Posted 4 months, 4 weeks ago at 12:13 pm. 1 comment
New semester, new country, same old laziness.
So I shot the first episode of a video blog I’ve thought about starting for a few months now. The plan is to have a new one every Wednesday.
To be honest this one was completed in an active couple of hours while I was putting off working on something. A similar occurrence of events that actually led to the creation of this very blog.
This new bit of content comes with yet another blog redesign. I managed to find a wordpress template I don’t completely despise and will be tweaking it over the next couple weeks.
Please comment or let me know on facebook or twitter what you like, don’t like, or want to see.
Here we go:
Lists and water creatures
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago at 4:20 am. 1 comment
Alright. Best laid plans….
For those of you who thought that traveling to Japan would surely mean I would be blogging more frequently, sorry to disappoint you.
For today, I have a list or two. Why lists? Well, primarily because they are much easier to write, but also they help organize thoughts.
First list*:
Things I miss from home**
- Sugar free Red Bull
- XXX Vitamin Water
- Fajitas
- American movie theaters and releases
- My Xbox and PS3
- Rock Band (2) — separate of course
- Using a full functioning iPhone
- Driving or just not paying every time to get somewhere, be it in yen or sweat
Next list:
Things to do as soon as I return
- Drive to get a SF Red Bull and a XXX
- Buy RB 2 on way home and play all day
- That evening, go to Chile’s and get fajitas
*numbered, but in no particular order
**excluding things like friends and family (cause that’s boring to read and write)
Finally I bring you a short video of footage I shot yesterday at the Osaka Aquarium. It was good times.
Montage - Osaka Aquarium from Nick Saunders on Vimeo.
Danjiri Matsuri
Posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago at 3:13 am. 0 comments
Last night I was in a place called Kishiwada in Osaka for, what I found out after-the-fact was, Japan’s largest annual Danjiri Matsuri. What is a danjiri matsuri, you ask. Check here for a detailed explanation, but it’s basically a cart-pulling festival. The danjiri are wooden carts that weigh around 4 tons and usually carry musicians and celebratory dancers and are pulled by a few hundred Japanese.
That’s pretty much it, they pull these things through the streets at different speeds for a couple of days and a huge crowd comes and eats a ton of food from street vendors. It’s neat.
I took a couple videos of the danjiri. The first is on an open street which is why they aren’t going very fast. Apologies for the light artifacts, my camera doesn’t like the night.
Danjiri Festival in Kishiwada, Osaka (1 of 2) from Nick Saunders on Vimeo.
The next video is taken before the street was opened to the public, so they run while pulling this danjiri. Had I known then what I learned about the danjiri later (e.g. there is allegedly a death a year due to danjiri crushing) I would have probably not stood in the direct line of fire. Lesson learned.
Danjiri Festival in Kishiwada, Osaka (2 of 2) from Nick Saunders on Vimeo.
Simply Incredible
Posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago at 11:54 pm. 0 comments
Embed below is a three part interview with inventor Dean Kamen taken from Walt Mossberg’s All Things D conference back in May. It mainly covers the bionic arm project Kamen’s team has been working on for the last 2 years, but he also mentions his non-profit at the end. The content is incredibly impressive and really highlights that there are brilliant people who are changing the world and then there are brilliant people who are changing the world.
Oh boy
Posted 9 months, 4 weeks ago at 4:31 am. 0 comments
No it wasn’t arriving in a strange place where I knew practically no one.
Nor was it the overwhelming feeling of not have a great idea of what was going on.
Nor even sitting in a foreign living room listening to a family of strangers banter in a language you’re lucky to know every 4 words of.
Nope, the scariest thing I’ve experienced in the last 8 days has been riding a bike for the first time in something like 6 years.
Good lord, is this how everybody else feels on these things? I hope not, for the greater well being of mankind’s sake.
So, my host father rolls the old bike they’ve kindly offered for the semester in front of me and effortless mounts his own. It is bad from the start as I need a good twenty feet to get the peddling started. The rest of the 6 blocks or so to the sushi bar I spent white-knuckledly griping to the hand brakes and holding my breath whenever there was a tight squeeze.
Who’s fault is this? I could blame my own coordination or maybe my laziness in having never ridden in 6 years, but I’m going to go with the United States of America and its cities (mainly Morgantown). I never needed to ride a bike, so I didn’t. Thanks college education.
Classes start tomorrow and I’m quite excited about my two business ones. For one they are taught in English (by a Briton!) which I am guessing will become more and more refreshing to hear. Plus there is a good chance that I will actually find them interesting. Kind of a not-so-dirty-secret that I quite like all this business tomfoolery I know.
Just noticed there is a poster of Bruce Lee behind a bookshelf in my new room. Nice.
Quick tour of a Japanese Shinto shrine
Posted 10 months ago at 3:50 pm. 0 comments
Below is a quick look at a Japanese Shinto shrine. This is the second I’ve seen and it is located about 25 minutes from Kansai Gaidai on foot.
Shinto Shrine in Hirakata-shi, Japan from Nick Saunders on Vimeo.
Land of the rising (and rising… and rising) sun!
Posted 10 months ago at 4:50 am. 0 comments
First some blog talk:
I’m planning on updating the design of this blog (I hate it) but am having trouble getting into my site over the crazy firewall at this university. Hopefully I can figure something out.
That’s all of the housekeeping.
So I’m in Japan. Have been for about 48 hours. Quite a lot of stimuli and different experiences. Right now, what is most prevalent is the exhaustion and trepidation with my Japanese. I’m certain that I have never walked so much in my life. Plus it is incredibly hot. I’ve had one shower for every twelve hours here.
Random thoughts and observations (I know, lazy):
- The food is AMAZING (see my flickr for pictures)
- I love meeting global students!
- The campus I’m on is very nice
- The proliferation, and low-keyness of the technology
- Looks like I’m going to put that memory of riding a bike thing to test
- I wish the sunscreen wasn’t so expensive
- Quite a lot of subtle and not so subtle Westernization
- Japanese people very friendly
- I can’t wait for fall weather
As I mentioned earlier my flickr is being updated frequently with a ton of pictures. Check it out if you like.
All for now. Hopefully more soon; I would like to talk more specifically about the Japanese people and their culture. We’ll see….