Ah, just Google it
For Doors Open Toronto, I visited Osgoode Hall, home of the Law Society of Upper Canada and several appeals courts. Among the most impressive rooms were the Hogwartsesque Great Library, and the enormous Reading Room beside it. Among towering stacks of reference books of all kinds (and one hell of a stack of paper), there's one single computer ... and you can see where it was pointed.
You figure those books will ever really be used again?
Facebook freaks me out
So, all morning I've been ranting (quietly - this is me, after all) about CBC's funding mess: it appears there will be no extra money, no bridge financing, no carriage fees, no guaranteed CTF envelope... no help at all to deal with a potential $145 shortfall. And now the CBC's own board seems to indicate that the $60 million in "one-time funding" we've had for seven years now may also be dropped. That part really scares me - it's not just a refusal to help, it's a willingness to cut. [update: That money was later promised by the heritage minister.]
Suffice it to say that "$60 million" on my mind. And then this afternoon, I go onto Facebook to post a link, and a "verification" window pops up:
Anyone know where Facebook gets their verification code words? Other than "directly from my brain"?
Ninja’d!
So, two of my photoshopped CanLit revisionist covers made the final cut in the Bookninja contest!
Give it a look, and maybe e-mail your votes (mine are The Whirlpool and The Handmaid's Tale). I'd love it if you voted for mine, but I'm not going to ask you to, as I think there are much better ones on the list.
It's too late for me to send it in now, but I had another entry idea yesterday. Margaret Atwood gets it pretty hard in the contest, since her titles lend themselves so well to spoofing. So here's another, particularly appropriate for Bookninja.
CanLit Redux
There's a very fun photoshopping contest that I noticed on John Gushue's blog the other day, and just couldn't pass up.
The competition, being held by Bookninja, is pretty simple: take a novel and rebrand it with a cover designed to boost sales.
Most of the entries so far lean proudly toward CanLit, so I thought I'd chip in a few entries in that vein. They don't hold a candle to the samples posted thus far on Bookninja, but this stuff sure is fun. Here's what I came up with:
The contest closes on Sunday Oct. 19th.
This was England
I spend most of my work week trolling through archival audiovisual material with an eye to putting it online. So I'm always interested when new archival resources turn up online.
Here's one that came my way courtesy of CBC photo editor Robin Rowland and his blog The Garret Tree.
Newsfilm Online launched a few weeks ago, a British venture that says it has over 3,000 hours of archival news stories. Unfortunately most of it is available only to students and educators in the UK.
(This makes me double proud of the CBC Digital Archives, which has about half the total hours of content, but is completely free to everyone, everywhere. The Newsfilm, however, is downloadable.)
The stuff that is freely accessible, however, is really interesting and the quality is very good.
Check out a British Paramount newsreel about the Suez Crisis or race riots in London's Notting Hill (interesting, especially for 1958 - black reporters interview white people, and vice versa.)
Dig a little deeper and you'll find mice drinking sherry (1986), more riots (absolutely wild Reuters footage of the 1936 fascist riots, again in London), the Hindenburg Disaster (British Paramount News, 1937) and so on.
There's also an interesting collection of the early work of David Lean, who would go on to direct films such as Lawrence of Arabia. You can see some of Lean's early film editing work on political gatherings, 1930 auto racing and a Noël Coward premiere.
gor[b] to iO!
To: iO! Staff
From: Paul Gorbould
Subject: gor[b]! gor[b]! gor[b]! gor[b]! gor[b]!
I have published something on my blog. Please go to my blog to see what I blogged.
Everything old is new again
Since I've been working on it for more than a year, it seems appropriate that I should give just a wee plug to the shiny new CBC Digital Archives website.
Known among us archives types as simply "Phase II", the new site has been completely redesigned from top to bottom - the first redesign in six years. Full details in the press release.
In some regards, the fact that the old site lasted six years is a testament to good design - hell, look at Google.com - a homepage designed by accident that has lasted for years.
Still, the old Archives site was getting creaky. In the YouTube era, people expect more video, and they expect it to be bigger than 240x180. And the new design fixed a few major limitations - bitty little graphics, the inability to properly house and showcase solo clips, no way to present classic CBC programs.
We've still got a few wrinkles to iron out (mostly pages that render too slowly, particularly in Internet Explorer) but overall I'm really pleased with the new design. I'd love to know what you think.
FYI, you can check out past iterations of the site at Archive.org's Wayback Machine - an absolutely invaluable site, if you haven't seen it.
On a similar note, I recently did some work with Joe Lawlor, CBC's original webmaster, to archive the Archives site. I spend all day creating an archive of CBC Radio and CBC Television, but nobody archives CBC.ca.
So now we do. Using a $30 product called Offline Explorer, Joe and I regularly capture all of CBC.ca (well, most of it, not including media) to DVD. Not exactly high tech or professional, but I now have a catalogue of CBC.ca's evolving site in a case on my desk.
I hope that one day the Archives site becomes trimedial - very few (if any?) corporations properly document their online development, and certainly not publicly.
As I found when I created the CBC.ca 10th anniversary site, even national broadcasters don't keep copies of their online journalism.
Even today, websites tend to be seen as transient, disappearing into the past the moment they are published.
It reminds me of the early days of radio - broadcasts simply went out into the ether; why would anyone want to *keep* them? In fact, during the early years of the Second World War, CBC Radio recordings were etched on aluminum discs - which were melted down to make fighter planes as part of our contribution to the war effort.
But today, storage is (for all intents and purposes) free. We can, if we choose, keep all data, forever. The hard part is the planning.
Know any websites that catalogue their evolution? Please tell me about them - I'd love to check them out. And do poke around the new Archives site, and let me know what you think.
The Great Purge
Inspired by a message from my corporate technology department.
Next GroupWise purge: Saturday, October 20th, 2007
On October 20th, 2007, we will purge all GroupWise accounts of non-archived mail dating from prior to October 19th, 2007.
We realize that the inability to store messages for more than 24 hours may cause some minor inconvenience to employees. To minimize the impact of this new policy, please follow these steps:
- Delete all messages as soon as you have read them (the existing Read/Unread functionality is redundant, and will be deprecated.)
- If you think you may need particular details at a later date, please commit them to memory, or write them down in a three-ring binder. But please purge the pages from your binder at least once a week, as binder space is expensive. NOTE: Information Technology is investigating an upgrade to 3" binders, but these may not work with all applications and are not supported.
- If you intend to be on vacation or sick for more than 24 hours, please set up an auto-delete rule on your GroupWise account. A simple automated reply message should be created, such as: "I'm sorry, I'm not around to receive your e-mail right now, and have deleted it. Please try again when you know I'm at my desk."
- Employees are encouraged to subscribe to a free Gmail account, where storage space is somehow almost unlimited. According to their website, such accounts have "Over 2910.863667 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message". We originally believed this counter was in fact counting down the diminishing amount of space, as ours does, but was not the case. We suspect witchcraft.
- Pay careful attention to the size of attachments, particularly audio, video, text or data files, which are often reasonably large. Do not send such files as e-mail attachments. Burn them to a CD or DVD, and put them in the internal mail. Or harness the power of the internet by placing them on a file-sharing system like BitTorrent so they can be accessed without undue strain on our capacity.
- Pay careful attention to the word count on messages you send. Where possible, use emoticons to convey context without using undue characters. Text message abbreviations and short grunts are often sufficient.
- To ensure efficient use of our finite resources, all libraries and archives will adopt a similar purge policy beginning immediately. If you subscribe to a periodical, a new issue will not be released until the previous one has put in the recycle bin and the bin has been emptied. Television programs are requested to reduce the number of shows they produce, as archive shelf space is limited.
The Access to Information law:
Each employee has the duty to safeguard in an appropriate manner business records that he/she creates or receives from an external source:
- Please delete all messages of a non-essential or essential nature. If possible, please avoid sending them in the first place. Work-related conversations must be plausibly deniable. If you must communicate with another employee, ensure nobody is watching.
- To understand how to distinguish business records from transitory records, please apply our new "year zero" filing criteria:
Did it happen prior to September 1, 2007? If the answer is "no", the information is transitory. If you believe the answer is "yes", you are simply incorrect.
Once again, thank you all for doing your part to reduce the load on the GroupWise system. This internet thing can't keep growing forever.
Please delete this message.
Too slow. I'll retract it. You didn't see me....
Taking care of me
Today is "Taking Care of U" day at CBC - a "wellness fair" where employees can check out exhibits and take classes on stress reduction, health, nutrition, etc. I'll probably drop by (but I'm eating a bowl of Smarties ice cream as I write this.)
Anyhow, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to update you on my ongoing battle with "internet elbow."
I first brought this up almost a year ago in a piece called More worn-out elbows. I had discovered that many of my shirts had developed holes in the left elbow, and I attributed it to computer use, and leaning my non-mouse arm on the desk. There wasn't anything on the internet about it, and in fact one of my commenters used that post to coin the term "internet elbow". The word has since found some currency.
It seems plenty of people have this problem; solutions range from elbow patches to rolling up your sleeves to using a stack of napkins (suggested this week by Darren.)
But none of those solutions get to the root of the problems, which is bad posture/bad desk layout. In May I had a visit from the official CBC ergonomist, who analyzed my desk and agreed that the posture of leaning forward into the crook of an L-shaped workstation was probably at the root of the problem (as well as that crick in my neck.) I wrote up those results in an entry called Fixing the 'Internet Elbow'.
Well, to their great credit, the folks at CBC took my issue seriously, and fixed it.
Here's how it was laid out before - CRT monitor back in the corner, so I leaned forward on my non-adjustable chair:
I was able to acquire an LCD monitor, and a new chair with many more adjustment features (including the arms.) This let me face the computer on the flat part of the desk, and sit properly with my arms resting on the armrests, not the desk:
So far, so good! No new holes in my shirts (though it has been mostly T-shirt weather...) and more importantly, my neck and back feel much better. And I'm pleased to say that it looks like a more ergonomic layout is coming for my colleagues too - when we move into new offices this winter, the workstations will likely feature adjustable, curved corner keyboard trays and flat panel monitors.
So, on wellness day, I must tip my hat to my employer for taking my posture seriously. I know that not everyone out there will be able to convince their boss to shell out $500 for a chair and $300 for a screen. But considering I had the last chair for 10 years and the last screen for five, it isn't a massive investment in the long run (it's probably about .2 per cent of my salary over that period.)
That's a bargain, really - one U.K. study suggested that more than 4 million working days were lost each year to work-related musculoskeletal disorders. In the U.S., one half of all working Americans report back pain symptoms each year - it's the number one cause of missed work, and second only to respiratory infections in doctor visits.
And have you seen the cost of elbow patches these days? (Actually, has anyone even seen an elbow patch these days?) Maybe the napkins aren't such a bad idea.
Fire hydrant
I've been on a bit of a water theme here recently - watering cans, car washes, hat washes - so I thought I'd give you another one.
You may recall my (completely unjustified) pride to discover that my photo of a watering can fountain had been selected for a Flickr group devoted to, er, watering cans. Well, just a week later, my achievement was matched by my three-year-old daughter.
She's really interested in the digital camera, so we've been showing her how to use it. There are megabytes full of blurry photos of the ground, but these are easily deleted, and she's really getting quite proficient lately. I've uploaded some of her photos to my Flickr account, including this one she took of the fire hydrant up the street from our house:
Well, wouldn't you know it? The next day, there's an inquiry from the owner and operator of the Canadian Fire Hydrant Museum. Yes, there really is such a thing, and yes, my little girl's picture caught its attention. Now, if there's a Museum of Toy Dinosaurs Encrusted in Dried Play-Doh, she's gonna make me rich.
She sure does take a lot of pictures of her toys, but it's her pictures of people that are really interesting. See, people just look at kids differently than they look at adults. Can't help it. So her pictures of people capture expressions that adult photographers never see. It's subtle, and I can't show you what I mean because I'm a bit of a tight-ass concerning privacy settings on family photos. But here are a few she's taken of me.
See what I mean? Unless you are three, and my own issue, I doubt I'd look at you like that - or let you take a picture of me half asleep. Anyhow, here's another smattering of their photos. I particularly like the fact that the Barbies are skinny dipping while the dinosaurs wear their clothes. Heck, it beats dried Play-Doh.
(Last minute update: Tonight, as she was washing them in the tub, my three-year-old told me the names of her Barbies: Leila, Janet, Princess, Skinny Legs and Good Hair.)
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