I’m done with blogging, at least for now. There are a few reasons for it, but the main one is how much I enjoyed being away from a computer this past weekend. I’ll probably still put some guitar/banjo/ukulele chords occasionally, but that’ll be about it.
It’s been very cool/weird to see all the people who have read/commented on the blog–thanks for reading! If you’d like to chat about anything, send me an email to my first name at my full name dot com.
Yo brother…where have you been???
I want to connect with you…
DeeBee Ital feat MC Robotman…
we can be like Kanye West and Daft Punk…hahahha
Get back to me mang…
Last year, I had this great idea to be a robotic MC and make hip hop music. I did one full track, a few beats, and got a hold of the perfect voice synthesizer software. I even made a MySpace account, made up a backstory, and started collecting friends for “collaborations”. Then my free time disappeared and “robot MC” wasn’t a big priority anymore.
But, I still got fan mail from an Ontario MC named DeeBee Ital; I think I replied as a robot. I thought it was absolutely hilarious and assumed he was in on the joke. Anyway, I logged in today for the first time in about a year and he’d written the above comment. I think he’s serious.
Things I really want to buy, but probably won’t:
One day at work, Melnick took the usual bathroom break when a light bulb went off: He wondered if a plume of contaminated water droplets was ejected into the air every time a toilet flushed.
[...]
During the study, gauze pads were placed around the experimental bathroom. Close-up photos of the germy ejecta, according to Gerba, looked like “Baghdad at night during an air attack.” The study showed that significant quantities of microbes floated around the bathroom for at least two hours after each flush. Gerba discovered that a lot of virus fell on those gauze pads.
[...]
“If an alien came from space and studied the bacterial counts, he probably would conclude he should wash his hands in your toilet and crap in your sink,” says Dr. Germ, with cheerful bluntness.
The latest statistics indicate that more than one in five, or twenty percent of all children in Canada live below the poverty line. Many of these children, they come from families with little or now formal education. Without a high school education, employment opportunities are limited and this causes of the cycle of poverty to continue.
The Cinderella Project was started to help encourage youth to stay in school and achieve the milestone of high school graduation, giving young people the opportunity to break the cycle of poverty for themselves and their families.
My hair dresser was telling me about this today. Her school/salon, Future Hair, is participating in the event this weekend. Essentially, it’s a group of volunteers and sponsors from the beauty community (hair dressers, make up artists, etc.) giving what they can to some unfortunate local youths. Low-income and homeless students are set up with a mentor to help out with fashion and self-esteem. The end goal is have these youths proud enough of themselves to participate in their graduation ceremonies. There’s also a Cinderfellas program for the guys.
A couple weekends ago, Travis and I got a little too obsessed with GiggleSugar’s “Who’s Douchier?” quiz. Travis ended up registering an account and we set about trying to get on the top 10 list.
Matthew: This is going nowhere. I think I know a way to figure out the actual rankings so we can cheat.
Travis: Yeah, I was thinking about writing them down and trying to figure it out, too.
Matthew: Write down? Like with paper and pencil? No no no, I mean I’m pretty sure I can make a little application that’ll do all that for us.
Travis: …what?
Matthew: Give me a few minutes and I’ll show you.
So I went about creating this:
The person on the left is the douchier one. So in this example, the battle was between Carlos Mencia and Chuck Norris. Mencia, obviously, is the douchier of the two so you put him on the left. Put Norris on the right, hit go, and it switches their positions on the list below. Theoretically, with enough input, the list will be exactly the same as the one from the quiz.
Even now, at it’s incomplete state, you can consistently score 20+. I was about to start writing an algorithm that actually saves the matches to prevent some colossally bad switches but, well, it’s a douche bag quiz. I wasn’t exactly motivated to go beyond the initial five minutes. But, here it is. Please feel free to use it and contribute to the cause.
My money is on Spencer taking the crown.
I think a lot about the magazine industry. I work for an academic literary journal, which isn’t really the same thing as a magazine, but there is a lot of overlap between the two. An important part of my job is keeping on top of what’s going on in the industry and figuring out ways to apply and develop good ideas into something usable for us. Anyway, a couple blog posts got me thinking more than usual about the way magazines work online.
Masthead Online is the online extension of Masthead: the Canadian magazine about the Canadian magazine industry. They relaunched yesterday with a ton of new web-friendly features including, finally!, the removal of its pay wall. But I spent some time looking around today, and wow is it cluttered. A four-column web layout! The information, as per usual with Masthead, is the top of the tops but I can’t see myself returning very often. I also don’t read Folio very much because of the clutter (I just noticed it also has a four-column layout! What is going on here?).
One of their big sells is the MastheadOnline Forums, with the Independent Publishing section moderated by “Michael Brooke, member of the Independent Publishers Association of Ontario (IPAO) and publisher of Concrete Wave magazine.” This I don’t get. Michael’s certainly active, even posting what turned into a very awkward (to read) discussion with Masthead’s editor about Adbusters not getting on the 20 Most Influential Mags list, but this is Masthead and I can’t see the relevance. I don’t read Masthead to discus what my magazine would be if it was a song; that’s why I read personal blogs. I read Masthead for industry news.
A post by Vaivoda, someone who works in publishing, got me thinking about my office’s effortless to move into a paperless environment. There’s such a push for journals and magazines to have web content right now, but there’s really no good way to do it yet. I’ve been exploring the options that have been made available to the industry and, objectively, they’re awful. In an effort to wrap my head around the system we’ve decided to use, I’ve had to spend a ridiculous amount of time just learning how to parse their documentation. I’ve had to create my own print out training manuals for each individual who will use it because nothing is clear enough. We’ve wasted a lot of time and paper trying to save time and paper.
I think the industry’s confused. I don’t think it understands the Internet. I still see magazines who claim to be “online”, but just link to a PDF. I think that Canada has an incredible magazine/journal industry that deserves world-wide recognition. We have online magazines like The Tyee, great magazine blogs like Quill and Quire’s, and print magazines like Geist who seem to understand what it means to publish online better than the rest of us.
What can be done? Lead by example? A couple days ago, I think I thought that was enough. I’ve been talking a lot lately with a friend who is trying to start a literary magazine and its eventual website. There is a lot of misunderstanding between us (probably due to statements of mine like “If you use the WYSIWYG view in Dreamweaver, I won’t be your friend anymore”) about how one should be online, but it’s definitely helped me understand the argument of shitty magazine websites.
Magazines need websites. Tools like Dreamweaver make it really easy to make websites if you know print design. People with magazines tend to know print design, so they make their own sites. The problem is that web design and print design aren’t the same thing and most people don’t know that. When you really enjoy a website, it’s probably not because it looks good, but because it works. You understand what you need from it, and how to get that; same as a magazine (think about the disconnect when you pick up a magazine without a table of contents). Transferring print technique to the web, while hopefully resulting in beautiful typography and white space, usually is a colossal failure.
Beyond immediate problems like poor site searching, unintuitive menus, and inappropriate fonts, there’s also an entire world going on behind the scenes that most people won’t ever (need to) know. Most magazine websites I see are coded horrendously. They’re inaccessible to screen readers, use all kinds of proprietary code, and rarely degrade gracefully. This is equivalent to publishing your magazine at Kinko’s, but people know that you won’t get a good product at Kinko’s.
In general, I don’t know. The people who would be in a position to make a big impact are obviously as confused as everyone else. I’d love to see Magazines Canada learning how, and then creating a series of tutorials on how to make a good magazine website. I want to see more magazines using Wordpress for their online presence. Hire a university student and $500 later you’ll have a site you can administer yourself, submits itself to search engines, and has already worried about accessibility issues. I want to see Masthead Online get a complete redesign by someone who knows what design means on the Internet.
I want to get the same passion from reading online magazines that I do from reading print and it’s just not happening.
Spring, Vancouver. It’s SPRING.
If you’ve never tried Matzo Brah, now is the perfect time (impress your Jewish friends for Passover!) It’s delicious and ridiculously easy to make:
As with most Jewish cooking, the more butter/salt/oil the better. Also like most Jewish cooking, you can add raisins and cinnamon to sweeten it up. I’ve known people who eat it with jam or maple syrup, too.