Seek not orientation along the business

Viennale is the name of a film festival in Vienna. They sure seem to take themselves seriously, from the sound of their mission statement. What they don't seem to take seriously is the importance of good translators.

The VIENNALE has set itself the target to make cinema approachable in all its variety, its affluence of languages, history, and forms of narration, as well as its aesthetic and political perspectives.

The VIENNALE's intention is - in sharp contrast and opposition to the prevailing hegemonic and narrowing tendencies of a profit-orientated cinema - to spread the fan of this world's images and sounds as far, freely and openly as possible.

The VIENNALE, as well as every single one of the works shown in its context are supposed to be an offer, an invitation, a proposition. It is the individual work of art that constitutes both the smallest and the largest entitiy of the festival.

The VIENNALE does not seek orientation along the business, the daily fashions and fortuities, but along the inherent matter itself. Most ideally, the festival - just as any good film - is but the idea of one such matter.

Retroactive predictions

Question of the day on the G&M's online sports page: "Will Detroit sweep Pittsburgh?"

Nearby headline: "Penguins make it a series."

What you don't want to hear from your web host

I have a domain parked with Globat, mostly because I have been too lazy to transfer it. (It's one of these deals where it's cheap to sign up, but you would do better renewing with someone else.)

They don't host a site for me -- like I said, the domain is parked -- and, after receiving an email from them this morning, I know that I never will host a site with them either.

Dear Philip,

On Saturday, May 17, 2008 Globat.com experienced a partial disk failure on a storage device attached to two of our web servers.

And you're telling me about it now? Six days later?

Normally a disk failure is not catastrophic.

Right. Because you've backed everything up, and you use best practices when it comes to data redundancy. I assume.

Unlike most home PCs our web servers use a storage technique that allows for a drive to fail without loss of data.
OK. Good.  
The disk failed completely at some point during the night and we switched over to the backup storage device.  After the failure and switching to the backup server, we began to discover that the backup procedure had been corrupted by the earlier partial disk failure and some sites had no backup available.
The backup process "copied" the data from the failed storage server to the backup server and essentially deleted the files on numerous websites before the error was detected.
Not so good.
We think that your website was among these.
Interesting, considering I don't host a site with you. 
Most of the dynamic data including all email files, addresses books and all database files were not affected by this incident.  The server is back online and running normally again and you can restore your website by uploading a backup copy of your website files.  We are extremely sorry for this incident and our Technical Support will try to answer questions related to getting your site back online.
Translation: We don't have a backup, so we sincerely hope you do, otherwise you're screwed.  And "addresses books"?
If by some chance you don't have a current backup copy of your website files handy
.. just like us!

please consider these possible sources:

1. If you originally used a website designer they should have a copy. Most website designers keep copies of the work they have done for clients.
2. You may have a copy on an older computer or stored CD.
3. Your site may be archived on the Internet.
4. You may have an older, non-current backup copy.

But didn't you say at the start that your data is backed up, unlike that on most PCs?
If none of these are possible, we can install a temporary page to explain that the files have been lost. 
Just don't expect it to say it was our fault.
Please contact our Technical Support department and we will see if there is anything we can do to help to get your site back online.
But don't ask for any kind of refund for this screw-up.

NO SCREAMING ALLOWED

I love this.

Look at the title of the page, in the bar at the top of your browser.

Expecting the most on the environment from the Conservatives

Andrew Potter reprints this gem from an MP's Earth Day media release:

MP Cheryl Gallant Celebrates Earth Day

LAURENTIAN VALLEY, April 22 2008 – MP Cheryl Gallant, MP Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke celebrated Earth Day by taking a drink of water from the tap instead of a plastic bottle.

Broadcasters can't make money online, part 2

Progress on CTV's website for the upcoming series Flashpoint, I see. Last week, if you clicked on the link to see an excerpt, you got a clip of Feist shooting a video.

Now you get an ad for Nip/Tuck, followed by a clip on 50 years of CTV news.

I can understand having the wrong clip up in the first place. Harder to understand replacing it with another wrong clip.

Broadcasters' online woes

The Globe and Mail reports that Canadian broadcasters aren't making much money online:

Smaller audiences and fewer commercial minutes during Web episodes and clips make it difficult to earn ad revenues comparable to television, said Brahm Eiley, president of Convergence Consulting.

Let's add another factor to the list: broadcaster ineptitude.

I'm working on a story for an upcoming issue of Canadian Screenwriter magazine. As part of the research, I go to check out the websites for some current and upcoming Canadian TV shows.

Over at Global's website for The Guard, the video player on the front page shows the series logo. Very faintly, near the top of the screen, you will see these words: "There are no videos currently available. Please try again later."

Of course, you won't see those words unless you look really, really hard for them. So, you click that big ol' "Play" button in the middle of the screen. What happens then? An ad for TD Canada Trust plays.

The first time around, I assumed this was part of the price of watching the video clip. But there is no video clip. Just an ad.

Well, maybe it's a problem with the homepage. so I click the "Video" tab. It tells me no videos are available in this category. Up near the top of the screen, I note that the site is displaying only video for episode 7, and there is a little drop-down menu. I select each of the previous available episodes, but there is no video available in any of those categories either.

What videos can I see? Some behind the scenes stuff. To watch it, I've got to sit through that TD Canada Trust ad again.

Nice work Global.

But they're not alone. How about CTV's site? There's a soon-to-be-much-hyped show called Flashpoint in production. I want to know more. So I visit the Flashpoint site, and click the awkwardly worded "Watch a video preview of the new series 'Flashpoint.'" This takes me to a clip from eTalk, about Leslie Feist shooting her new video.

And these people can't make money online. Shocking.

Sparing the children

The Halifax Regional School Board uses a ridiculous computer filtering system -- one that blocks so many sites that teachers have a hard time finding sites their students can use. (Another absurdity is that exactly the same filters apply for all grades. What's unsafe for Grade 1 is unsafe for Grade 12, apparently.)

One of my kids, for example, says his teacher recommended a science site, but the filtering software won't let students access it. It's classified as "gaming." An unintended result is that the high school kids are learning more about computer science, as they access the forbidden sites they need to do their schoolwork through anonymizers and proxy servers.

Of course there are some sites that are so evil children must be protected from them. This one, for instance -- yes, the good old Muddy Hill Post. Try to access it from a computer within the Halifax Regional School Board and you will see this message: "Access denied. This site has been categorized as occult."

The company that provides the filtering software claims to offer the "most advanced proprietary global filtering and categorization service." That must explain why -- in addition to dangerous blogs that offer commentary on freelance writing, Halifax and Nova Scotia news, music and other satanic topics -- they also block access to certain government web sites, teen health sites, dangerous publications like Harper's and the Village Voice, and anything that will let you check your email. And don't even begin to think about researching a paper on the Second World War. Because Hitler, you know, was anti-Semitic. So sites referring to him are a no-no, apparently.

I wonder if the folks behind this software really think living in a CNN world with other viewpoints considered too extreme for young minds will make for a better society.

Closed captioning

I pity the people who have to rely on closed captioning of live broadcasts. If you had to rely on the captions exclusively to make sense of what you were seeing, you would be living in a very confused world indeed.

I understand that captioning something on the fly must be hard. Of course people will make mistakes occasionally. I fully expect typos, for instance. But there are a few mistakes that really stand out, and I got to see two this morning, on CTV Newsnet.

Exhibit A: A story on Benazir Bhutto's house arrest. On screen is Bhutto speaking to a crowd. The captions inform us that meanwhile, 5,000 of Bhutto's "support verbs" were arrested. She must be a truly extraordinary woman to have mustered this many verbs.

Exhibit B: A few minutes later, a story on how Canadian kids are hopeless when it comes to understanding the basics of our country's history. In fact, according to the captions, only a quarter of the kids surveyed could give the date of "confertion." You know, if I was asked, I don't think I could give it to you either.