matthewgruman.com

A Parti Québécois member of the provincial legislature who wants to create a distinct Quebec identity on the internet will first have to get approval from a United Nations agency.

Longtime sovereigntist Daniel Turp has started a petition to persuade the international authority responsible for internet domain names to create the .qc national extension, similar to Canada’s .ca.

CBC.

Turp explains, apparently unaware of what “autonomous” and “self-governing” mean (hint: they’re the same thing, and neither applies to Québec):

Turp points out that Catalonia, an autonomous region in Spain, has its own national extension — .cat — while the same goes for Greenland, a self-governing province of Denmark, which uses .gl.

First prize to anyone who can think of a more irrelevant waste.

There are few commercial signs or posters in a recently opened Mile End bookstore, but one in particular appears to have upset a local resident.

That person formally complained to the Office québécois de la langue française, which dispatched an inspector Friday to check out and photograph signage at the Librairie Drawn & Quarterly on Bernard Ave. W. near de l’Esplanade Ave.

The complainant alleged there was too much English on signs, but on a visit yesterday, all a reporter could find in English only was an antique, hand-drawn paper clock on the door of the storefront.

The offending item, about 12 centimetres in diameter, says Open, Come In.

From The Montreal Gazette via Quill Blog.

For those who may not know, Bill 101 is a Quebec law stating that French must be more visible than any other language. Drawn and Quarterly is one of the best (THE best?) comics publisher in Canada. The ideal of Bill 101 is to help keep the Quebec culture and language alive. The ideal of Drawn and Quarterly is to keep comic culture alive and progressive.

The reality is that Bill 101 does little more than promote both subtle and not-so-subtle prejudice, while wasting taxpayer dollars, to satisfy the misguided ideals of a select few. Drawn and Quarterly, on the other hand, publishes awesome comics.

A more effective way to promote and sustain the Quebec culture would be to promote the Quebec culture. Believe it or not, its existence isn’t actually dependent on monolinguism.

In the e-mail, Trent wrote: “He overcame a subversively good defense by Matt Hennessey that had some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant and forced them to do the right thing.”

In fact, there were no Canadians on the jury, but there were some African-Americans.

The e-mail drew criticism from some who said the word “Canadian” is a racial slur against African-Americans, and questioned Trent whether he was using it in that context.

From Use of ‘Canadian’ as possible racial slur may be part of Texas probe at the CBC. Really, aren’t there enough problems in America? Why do we have to invent new ones?

My friend Dany is looking for graphic design work in Toronto and sent me this Craigslist posting:

* Don’t bother applying if you can’t read the following paragraphs and send me exactly what I ask for below *

I’m looking for an * outstanding * web graphic artist that has recently completed their post-secondary degree (MUST be within the last two years).
This is a requirement; don’t apply if you haven’t completed your degree / diploma within the last two years.

Although this candidate is a new graduate they need to have substantial experience in WEB DESIGN. You need to specialise in web design, I’m not interested in you if you only do print, or logos, or annual reports, etc…. you have to do web design and do it WELL.

Your professionalism needs to be high, not the typical “web design” that often comes from these post-secondary programs; you need to have high quality and I would expect you then would be at the top of your class.

You must be interested in a career starting with working FULL-TIME on-site in downtown Toronto. I’m not interested in you if you are just a contractor looking for a gig.

Please send:
1) Your resume
2) Web Examples of your work (I’m not asking for print examples)
3) Your salary expectations
4) Your design school and your ranking in your class

You’d expect the company posting that would have to be pretty fantastic, eh? I checked the website attached to their email address and got this:

A mess of Coldfusion errors on a really outdated, table-layout website.

I really hope that no one is bullied into applying for that job. No graphic designer, especially a recent graduate, should think that this is an appropriate way to look for employees. If you’re a company who is looking for a student, you should be very prepared to lead them through the employment process. The students who are already “amazing” won’t be interested in these kinds of job listings because they’ve already made their contacts during school.

I find it quite disgusting that a company who has so many Education clients would act this way.

I like Wired’s “new” design, but that inner column is ridiculous. That’s a full two inches of space you can’t read without straining the spine.

Getting your piece published there has to feel like attending your fourth back-up school.

We just found out that our colleagues in Indonesia were shot at while they climbed the cooling tower and loading crane of a coal-fired power station to hang a banner reading “Coal kills climate”.

- Via Greenpeace.

I had very long arguments with every digital arts professor I had in University about what actually defines digital art. One of them told me that yes, if I make a sculpture that included an LCD playing a video I made on an analog camera, it’s digital art. One of them told me that a computer was analogous to a camera, but couldn’t rectify the fact that my computer IS a camera.

The big argument came during a course whose final project was a website. I decided to do an experiment: I took a techno track I’d made the year before and re-recorded it with acoustic instruments. I put both tracks on a song review website, and logged the reactions to this song that exists in digital and analog. I put together a neat looking website and developed a really useful animation technique that I still haven’t found a way to improve four years later. I even came up with a snappy, art-school name: Reorganification.

During the critique, my professor came down really hard on me for not creating website art, but rather art that was being displayed on a (pretty) website. My argument was that it was all web-based: the site, the track reviewing, the animation, etc. How is it NOT website art? In fact, it was more website art than any of the “examples” that she had given the class, and far more than the rest of the class. Her argument was about the experimental aspect of these other projects she showed me, and that mine was still just a display mechanism.

So I was getting critiqued for not experimenting even though I went ahead and developed a technique I’ve never seemed before. I used the Internet’s immediate results to do an experiment that was impossible in analog life. I made a commentary on the parallel existence of digital and analog art.

I went home and starting thinking of ways to improve on my idea, but I was just annoyed and even more unimpressed with the “art” world as usual. So, I set out to annoy people. I made a splash page with a 1 and a 0 (yes and no, respectively). If you click on 1, you get a horizontal string of 1s and 0s that breaks the horizontal rule. The immediate next step for most was to click back, and then click on 0. 0 brought up a “loading screen” that was really just an animated .gif (I knew that the vast majority of the class was inexperienced enough to not check the source code/properties of the “loader”)–it gradually slowed down until it stopped at 70% and just blinked perpetually.

If you had the patience to mouse over the string of 1s and 0s, or check the source code, you’d have realized that random digits were links hidden by CSS. Links brought you to individual reviews of those tracks I’d recorded, along with an embedded mp3 (we were “taught” how to do that in class). The final 0 brought you to my initial, pretty, webpage with the animation and an explanation of the project.

I think 3 people “got” it, and went to the right spot. I saw at least 5 people waiting on the load screen for minutes at a time, getting more and more frustrated. Most of the comments I got were along the lines of “why didn’t you keep your original site?” or “this is SO annoying! I HATE YOU!” I got an A+ and realized that a lot of digital “art” is simply finding new ways to annoy your audience and calling it art.

Anyway, the point of all this is a Valleywag article on Seecoy, “two art and design students from BYU, [who] call their work vintage web. Circa 1996.” I went through my mental digital art checklist:

• Is it annoying? Yes.
• Are they using technology from 10+ years ago? Yes.
• Is it poignant? No.
• Do the artists understand their craft (i.e. the web)? No.

And yet one of the “artists”, Chris Coy, is part of an exhibit at New York’s New Museum. The silver lining is that maybe digital art is intangible enough to not survive for future generations to judge. It amazes me that people with the technology to create anything they want insist on not actually learning how.

The sad thing is that almost all the digital “artists” I’ve met are really, really nice people who are really, really excited about things. Somehow, the genre has evolved into this idea where technique and knowledge is counter-productive to creation. A nice-looking website looks too corporate to be art. Proper technique means you’re trying too hard, so it can’t be art. What is it that prevents digital advantages (i.e. instant learning, scalable techniques) from actually being used in digital art?

According to the Union Leader, Merrimack, NH has voted to update the signs at a local park in English only, not Spanish. 86 year old Finlay Rothhaus, a German immigrant and the councilor who made the initial objection to the Spanish-language signs, explains:

“My concern is that multi-lingual nations have a history of problems, and have no mechanism for unification. If you look to the north, Quebec made a move to secede from Canada, and the vote only failed at 49 percent. I don’t think we want that.”

Note: I lived in Quebec during the 1995 referendum. The 49 percent came (mainly) from spoiled ballots. For example, my largely-English riding had approximately 90% of the “No” (against Quebec separation) votes considered “spoiled ballots”. Also, the majority of inter-lingual problems are a result of the (subjectively) unconstitutional Bill 101, not being conveniently bilingual.

Police say that more than half of the visitors to the park on the weekends are often Latino, and a handful of those visitors do not respect the rules of the park by bringing alcohol, foul language and rough and tumble activity.

Rule-breakers often appeal to language barriers when confronted by police, saying they do not understand the park rules and cannot read the signs. Police, Parks officials and town staff supported an idea of a Spanish-language sign to mitigate those excuses.

The actions of a handful yet again affect the whole. So making signs bilingual will work towards REMOVING racism as an excuse – how is that NOT a good idea?

Proponents of English-only signs said that if the town were to adapt Spanish-language signs, the action could develop into a slippery slope with calls for signs in Vietnamese and Portuguese.

What? If there is a large enough population who can’t understand English, you SHOULD make signs in their language! I’m sure they can find 2-3 languages that accommodate the vast majority of park attendees.

Town officials yesterday learned the land had been purchased in two separate transactions, and Wasserman beach is not bound to public access. The finding means the town can close the park to out-of-towners, a proposal to be taken up early next year.

Yeah, this is all racist – or a cult.

A celebration of the black history of a former town in Halifax was marred by the discovery of racist graffiti throughout the park hosting the event.

As former residents of Africville and their descendants set up tents and trailers in Seaview Park for the annual event, they discovered at least five picnic benches with disturbing messages scrawled across them.

“Seaview park belongs to Whites,” one read, while another said, “Kill all black children.”

- Via cbc.ca.

Of the 30% of people unwilling to switch brands to iPhone the most common reason given was a lack of music storage, 43% and the dislike of all things Apple, 22%.

- via Apple Tech News.

So I guess 6.6% of those surveyed are idiots? Or maybe just incapable of making objective decisions?