Feb 1, 2009
Update
I’ve not been blogging much lately as my life has gone crazy. Along with being pregnant, I’ve sold my house, am looking for a new place to rent (I have to move out by middle of Feb. gulp) and I’ve been filming a new tv programme for BBC4. Along with all of that, I’m still helping Jonathan Ross out with his website.
The tv programme I’ve been doing has been pretty fun to do. It’s by the same people who did 1900 House and 1940s House, but this time it’s effectively 1970s/80s/90s House. The working title of the programme is Electric Dreams and will be on BBC4 this spring sometime, perhaps April.
The family is living from 1970 to 1999, with each day a new year. I am one of the on-camera ‘experts’ – aka the Tech Team- whose job it is to introduce bits of technology into the household at the appropriate time (ie when 50% of the country has that bit of tech). The family start out with a virtually technology-free home and every day new things are added. The 1970s is pretty sparse and the rate of new technology introduced into the home is pretty slow. They start off without central heating, have power cuts, a black-and-white telly and a Mark 2 Ford Cortina. By the 1990s, they will be getting deluged with technology – perhaps even getting one mobile phone in the morning and another by lunchtime!
I’ve enjoyed decorating my area of the Tech Team set with things from my house.
My desk (click for larger pics) with Star Wars, Mr T, Scully, Beetlejuice, Pee-Wee Herman figures, a PacMan table top game, a Little Professor and a guy made out of Lego by my son:
One of my shelves with various annuals and retro tech books:
Another shelf with a PacMan boardgame and Microserfs by Douglas Coupland:
My favourite bit of filming so far was at CERN where I interviewed Robert Cailliau about the development of the World Wide Web.
Tim Berners-Lee’s original proposal for what would become the World Wide Web:
The computer the World Wide Web was developed on:
Anyway, when I know when it’s coming out, you can be sure I’ll be telling everyone. In the meantime, I’m on Twitter all the time, so if you want to keep up w what I’m doing (Mom ;), then follow me there.
production 
QR Code DVD 
Hi Gia, This show sounds great. Any idea of the odds of it showing up on BBC America so we can see it in the States?
Lee, I’m not sure to be honest. I think BBC America tends to pick up things that are *super* popular on the BBC. The first thing that would happen – if this series does well – is that it would probably be repeated on BBC2. After that, there may be a chance of BBC America picking it up… but we’ve still not even got through the 1970s yet so there’s still a long way to go until filming is finished, so I’ve no idea what the final programme will be like!
If it gets picked up by anyone else (eg Discovery), then I’ll be sure to let people knwo.
The 1980s House?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JEUkWrSZ_s
Pac-Man table-top game–cool! I’m a big Centipede fan myself. My husband and I have a lot of stuff like that around the house, like a Buddy Jesus (from the movie Dogma) that my husband bought before we met and my figurines from the first Star Wars prequel.
I remember my first computer that my Dad got me in 1989; he raved on and on at the time about how powerful it was, but the thing had almost no storage space on the hard drive and was slow as molasses. I did use it during undergrad, as it had a decent writing program on it, and Dad had loaded Mathcad on it at some point. I think he upgraded it a few times by adding more memory chips, etc. Finally junked it after I crashed my car with it in the trunk, and I couldn’t get it to boot up.
Tech advice question: I have a bunch of data from grad school on some zip disks. Other than digging up an old computer with a zip drive from god-only-knows-where, are there any converters I can buy that can get those data off that disk?