Archive for January, 2006
Monday, January 30th, 2006
My brother gave me a copy of Lloyd Kaufman’s new book
Make Your Own Damn Movie for Christmas, and I’ve been reading it on my lunch breaks. It offers a bit more practical advice than Lloyd’s first book—
All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger: The Shocking True Story of Troma Studios. Lloyd Kaufman is, as I’m sure you’re all aware, the prolific independent filmmaker behind the Oscar winning films
The Toxic Avenger and
Class of Nuke ‘Em High 3: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid. Lloyd’s lunatic anecdotes about the chaos of his productions is oddly appealing—at least to me. As I mentioned earlier, one of my resolutions for 2006 is to finally make a return to filmmaking in some form or another, and shoot my own Damn Movie.
The challenge of course is that I have very little money to put into making a movie, and Guelph isn’t exactly Hollywood—or even Hollywood North (aka Toronto). So I decided to see what resources we do have here…
It looks like the website for Ed Video recently received a much needed update, and is now considerably easier to work with. Ed Video is Guelph’s video arts co-op, offering a wide range of support for people interested in making movies. Filmmakers can rent DV cameras (including the Panasonic AGDVX100 which can shoot 24 frame progressive video), tripods, lights and audio equipment. They also make editing facilities and audition space available for aspiring film auteurs. Considering that they offer a handful of film production courses, it reminds me a lot of film school—only with more modern gear.
Ed Video had a link to ontariofilm.com, a new site intended to provide aspiring filmmakers that are outside of greater metropolitan areas access to a filmmaking community in Ontario. The messageboard is pretty quiet at the moment, but I’m not sure if that’s due to a lack of interest, the newness of the site, or people just not knowing about it. Maybe mentioning it here will help out with that last point.
Finally, anyone in the area who might be interested in working on an independent film this summer, send me an email and I’ll let you know when I’ve got things a bit more organized. Sometime after I finish the second half of Lloyd’s book.
Tags: books, designmeme, film
Posted in designmeme | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, January 25th, 2006
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have confirmed something I’ve had a growing suspicion of—meetings are bad. The longer and more frequent meetings, the greater the negative effects on the participants: anxiety, burnout, and depression.
Over at 37 Signals, they offer some suggestions as to why frequent and long meetings are bad — they usually contain a very low amount of information conveyed per minute, they drift off subject far too easily, and they’re normally all about words and abstract concepts, not real things. Their advice for dealing with meetings: don’t have them. Or if you absolutely have to have a meeting, keep it short. 30 minutes at the most.
Once the meetings are short, and less frequent, the next step is making them more productive. Manager Tools has some great tips and resources to help with this, including sample agenda templates to download and a very good podcast.
I’ve also heard very good things about John Cleese’s training video Meetings, Bloody Meetings, in which he is a thoroughly inefficient chairperson who dreams he is hauled up before a court for negligent conduct of meetings. Unfortunately the DVD is $650… so I think I’ll try and borrow it from someone who already owns a copy.
Tags: business, designmeme
Posted in designmeme | 5 Comments »
Monday, January 23rd, 2006
As we wait to see which of Guelph’s candidates is elected to represent us in Parliament, I thought I’d take a moment to review how well they did using the web for their campaigns. I was surprised to see how few of the candidates thought to run their own campaign blog, and even more surprised to see a few people either had very poorly designed websites—or worse yet, no website at all! Particularly for the smaller parties, it’s quite astounding that they didn’t try and take advantage of the web a bit better.
Here’s my impression of how the candidates did:
Candidate’s Blog
- Phil Allt—NDP
- Mike Nagy—Green
- Brent Barr—Conservative
Candidates who didn’t think to have a blog…
- Brenda Chamberlain—Liberal
- Scott Gilbert—Communist
- Peter Ellis—Christian Heritage
- Manuel Couto—Communist (Lenninist / Marxist)
Candidate’s Website
- Mike Nagy—Green
- Phil Allt—NDP
- Brent Barr—Conservative
- Scott Gilbert—Communist
- Brenda Chamberlain—Liberal
Candidates who didn’t think to even bother with their own website…
- Peter Ellis—Christian Heritage
- Manuel Couto—Communist (Lenninist / Marxist)
It will be interesting to see how this compares to the number of votes each candidate receives.
Tags: blog, design, politics
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, January 23rd, 2006
Today every Canadian of voting age will take to the polls in our nation’s 39th general election. Except for the folk who think it’s just too cold to bother going out today… or the people who just can’t stand the thought of any of the parties being elected… but all the rest, numbering in the thousands for certain, will take to the polls and elect a new national government. Just like we did a year and a half ago.
Here in Guelph the forecast is for temperatures around the freezing point and some snow. That’s a heat-wave for January! And to make sure there’s at least one name you can place your X next to on the ballot, we have not less than seven political parties to choose from. Here they are in no particular order:
Communist Party of Canada – Marxist-Leninist Flavour
Communist Party of Canada – Regular Flavour
Green Party of Canada
New Democratic Party of Canada
Liberal Party of Canada
Conservative Party of Canada
Christian Heritage Party of Canada
Seven choices might seem like a lot, but I miss having someone like Doug Henning or the Rhinocerous Party on the ballot. That made it a lot more fun.
Despite our TV media doing a shamelessly partisan job of reporting on the campaigns of the various political parties I really do think that the only poll that matters is on election day—and if you don’t vote at all, you might not like who the half-dozen people in your town brave enought to go out in the cold decided to elect on your behalf.
Tags: politics
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, January 20th, 2006
Wordpress is a great tool for blogging—it’s easy to setup, the interface makes it easy to use, and there are tons of plugins you can download to add new features. Unfortunately when you’re just getting started with Wordpress, the sheer number of plugins can make it hard to know which ones to start with.
After more than a little trial and error and a lot of looking at discussions of other people’s favourite plugins, I’ve found 11 that seem to stand above the rest. Here are my suggestions for the 11 plugins you should consider adding to your blog.
- Adsense-Deluxe
Place Google AdSense ads in your posts, or as part of your template. This plugin ensures you do not have more than 3 ads displayed at once—part of Google’s terms of use.
- del.icio.us – Bookmark this!
This plugin lets you easily add a “Bookmark this page on del.icio.us” link to your blog or individual articles. Del.icio.us is a personal favourite, and a great way to save, organize and find new links.
- Digg This
Detects if one of your articles has been linked on digg.com and adds a link to the entry. This might not be as useful for blogs that are unlikely to ever be bookmarked there—but for me it’s a nice find.
- Google Sitemaps
This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. Having a Google sitemap can help keep your site as up-to-date in Google’s indexes as possible.
- Feedburner Feed Replacement
Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner.com so you can make use of their various advanced features for feed presentation and subscriber analysis.
- Gravatar
Show the custom icons associated with the email addresses of users commenting on your entries. This is a great service more people should sign up for.
- Head META Description
Some search engines display the Description meta data for a page in search results. Since Wordpress normally uses the same meta data for all the pages on your site, this is a problem. This plugin builds a dynamic Description meta tag for each entriy based on the page content itself.
- Optimal Title
Moves the position of the ‘separator’ to after the title rather than before, letting you put the title of your post before your blogs name in the title tag for an entry.
- Related Posts
Displays a list of related entries based on keyword matches. This is a good way to encourage visitors to read more of the content on your blog.
- WP-Amazon
WP-Amazon adds the ability to search and include items from Amazon to your entries. Great if you’re an Amazon affiliate, but also a good way to add some extra images to your blog entries.
- WP-ContactForm
This plugin creates a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post.
Tags: blog software, designmeme, plugins
Posted in designmeme, tools | 25 Comments »
Monday, January 16th, 2006
This past weekend I helped Catherine setup her new blog at CatCanCook.Com. She’s planning on writing about cooking, crafts, creative projects, and the trials and triumphs of motherhood.
Yesterday she posted her Awesome Banana Muffin Recipe which is both very easy and very delicious. While I might have thought to register StuartCan’tCook.com—this is a recipe even I could follow, and they really are awesome. Catherine is going to be posting a lot of different recipes, so I’m sure there will be ones for all levels of cooking ability.
If you’re looking for recipes, craft ideas, or resources for parenting, be sure to add Catherine’s Blog to your bookmarks.
Tags: blog, Family, recipe
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
