RSS feedEach year it’s our tradition to enter a short film into Sydney’s Tropfest Short Film Festival. Each year we compete against 700 other entries, including at least 100 from advertising and television professionals who shit on everyone with their technical quality, but don’t know shit about storytelling. Each year their biased judges pick an undeserving final 16, based on unspecified criteria, and more often than not they pick a random winner from countless equally deserving entries.
And each year we get pissed off at the whole thing, yet still enter into competition anyway.
Why? Because regardless of how many professional big budget films enter (some of the finalists have upward of 50 crew, which sort of defeats the purpose of the festival), regardless of the bias of the judges, and regardless of the fact that it’s like sticking your art into a black hole (they never write back to you with anything other than “thanks, you didn’t win”), it actually keeps alive, in a small kind of better than nothing kind of way, the ideals of independent film makers and film making.
This year (2007) we decided to keep away from the typical Tropfest style cliched 7 minute redundant narrative with mandatory and expected tilt, and decided to remix someone elses work. Well, we’d originally planned one of those cliched short films, but for whatever reason we cancelled the shoot half way through, and decided to film our kitten Phoebe instead. Much more fun!
So here it is, a remix of the old Jam Handy film Easy does it, audio all taken from the original, and the visuals shot on the set of our other incomplete short film. Never work with children or animals? Phoebe starred in both films, and fortunately the outtakes from the first could be remixed as the second. 🙂
Software Development at Microsoft Observed: ItÂ’s about people … working together
“To understand Microsoft developers’ typical tools and work habits and their level of satisfaction with these, we performed two surveys and eleven interviews with developers across all business divisions. This report provides a summary of the resulting data.”
It had to happen. lolcode.com
RSS is a platform independent protocol, for sucking content out of a web site. Give or take. I’ve written a lot about RSS and web content over the years, and in 2007 you’d think the big commercial sites would start to get it right.
Comedy Central in the U.S. is not one of them. Go to their site, I’m not linking, you know where it is.
Problem #1 – the page loads 138 items. 138! And it changes every time you load it. I managed to get it down to 98 once. 98!
Problem #2 – their featured videos start playing automatically, nice if you’re at work or goofing off in a quiet environment.
Problem #3 – look at the page source, the DOCTYPE doesn’t start until several lines in, and there are 228 HTML errors according to w3’s validator.
Problem #4 – the page gets a load error in Safari.
So say you want to subscribe to the video for one of their shows. Look around, see if you can find where to go. Give up? You have to click on the “community” tab in the menu and then the “newsletters” sub-tab. From here you can click “RSS feeds” in the left panel, and finally you get to the list of feeds. All good… or maybe not…
The first in the list is The Daily Show Videos. All I want is the URL for the feed, so I mouse over the SUBSCRIBE button and… nothing.
Problem #5 – it’s all flash, so no, you can’t find the actual RSS feed URL.
OK, so we give up, let’s just click on SUBSCRIBE and see what happens. Click…
Problem #6 – some weird flash dialog appears with the URL in an edit box, giving the impression that I can change it for them.
But luckily there’s a list of all the readers I might be using, and a custom URL for each. What? RSS is platform neutral? Why do I need to select a reader? And what if my reader isn’t in the list? I can understand selecting a feed by enclosure type, I might want Windows Media instead of QuickTime, but seriously, between readers? If it’s just a handy way to automagically subscribe in your reader, then it just adds confusion, as anyone using a reader will already know how to add a feed.
Problem #7 – it gives the impression that RSS is locked to particular readers.
And that’s just trying to get an RSS feed. You can check out the rest of the problems with the site in your own time.
When will they get it? Make it simple stupid.
Gotta love the internets. From icanhascheezburger.
The video says it all really. They may be common elsewhere in the world, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in Australia. You drive into a car park, and you drive directly into the first available spot. Now if only they’d direct me to the closest to the shops available spot, I’d be a very happy man.
Back in October last year, 7 months ago, I introduced little Phoebe. Well, she’s not that little anymore, and she’s a bit of an adventurer at times, such as in this video.
Cats generally can’t work out the logic of going down things backwards, or backards as my mum used to say in our invented family language. She’s hard to catch in the act, but basically she goes forwards down the wall at first, and then quickly spins around and lowers herself down backwards. It’s funny, cute, and difficult to get on camera. Unfortunately in this case I only got the second part, but you’ll get the idea.
For some reason currently unknown to me, I typed “videoblogging definition” into Google today, and I amusingly found that 4 of the top 10 results had a reference to my post The definition of videoblogging as a genre in the result summary.
Good authority? Or just a good understanding of how Google ranking works? Although there are only 276000 results all up, so it’s not that difficult to get a high rank for it.