the pod bay door

:: I watched The Passionate Eye tonight, which featured the fake documentary, “Dark Side Of The Moon“, written and directed by William Karel. It’s a brilliant mock-umentary, not unlike Peter (LOTR) Jackson’s Forgotten Silver. I’m sure more than a few people watching it across Canada actually believed it, even with opening and closing remarks from the host, Michaelle Jean, who made it rather clear that the film is a hoax. The film tells the story of how Richard Nixon, fearing that no live pictures could be sent from the moon after the landing in July, 1969, asked Stanley Kubrick to film the moonwalk on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey In return, five years later, Kubrick borrows a special NASA-developed lens, to film Barry Lyndon.

Uh huh.

The film, originally titled Opération Lune, is made more realistic by the appearances of Kubrick’s widow, Christiane, her brother (and Kubrick’s exec producer of his last five films), Jan Harlan, and – get this – Donald Rumsfeld, Alexander Haig, Richard Helms, Lawrence Eagleburger, and – yes – Henry Kissinger, all playing “themselves” in the movie.
Read more »

:: Geoff and I gave a presentation on Thursday afternoon called biblioBLOGS: Building Blogs and Sharing Information. During the session, we were asked about the difference between blogs and online forums. This is something I’ve thought about in the past, and the one difference that comes to mind first is this: forums seem to exist in a “question and answer” environment. Two days ago, I asked a question in the Moveable Type Support Forum about a style sheet problem. I checked back a day later, and a kind soul provided me with the solution, which worked nicely! I’ve posted “I need help” types of questions and received help, in other support forums such as Dell Community Forum and Blogomania. Forums need not be restricted to Q&A, mind you; many forums bring together those who share similar interests, such as music. Check out the Steve Hoffman Music Forums, featuring discussions on a wide range of music and hardware topics.

Blogs are more personal and of an individual nature. Posts tend not to be moderated, there isn’t an FAQ to read, and you don’t need to register and login to participate. One theme I see running through some of the discussion I’ve read is that blogs tend to reduce the signal to noise ratio – there is more content of substance and less waste of space in blog posts and related discussions. And consider that if you find information on a blog site that you want or need to know, why would you bother going anywhere else, subsquently, if your need has been filled? It doesn’t matter, necessarily, if the route to that particular blog was serendipitous. There is no way on the planet anyone anywhere, anymore, can get a handle on all that’s happening out there. Who are we kidding? (Well, Triumph likes to kid, “I keeed!!.”)

In any event, here are a few interesting entries that discuss blogs, forums, online discussion, and the like:

• Coates, Tom. Discussion and citation in the blogosphere… Plastic Bag, 25 May 2003.
• McIntyre, Al. Blogs vs. discussion forums. Al McIntyre’s Radio Weblog, 28 Aug 2002.
• Murphy, Gary Lawrence. Blogs ‘n’ boards. TELEDYN :: have blog – will travel ::, 27 May 2003.
• Ozzie, Ray. Architecture matters: the rebirth of public discussion. Ray Ozzie’s Weblog, 12 Aug 2002.
• Plato. Forums vs. blogs. The Ducks of Plato, 22 Nov 2002.

Read more »

:: Mom discovers her son has a blog.

:: Hmm. I was on this for some time between 1998 and 2002, and now Health Canada has decided to pull it from the market. Some people are unhappy with the product, like this guy, for example. The USA won’t follow suit.

:: Jenny, my favorite NYC blogger, reflects on modern music as she turns 23, and then celebrates three days later when she sees her all-time fave band, Duran Duran, perform in Atlantic City. Her musical observations are worth the read.

:: How Much Information? 2003:

How much new information is created each year? Newly created information is stored in four physical media – print, film, magnetic and optical – and seen or heard in four information flows through electronic channels – telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet. This study of information storage and flows analyzes the year 2002 in order to estimate the annual size of the stock of new information recorded in storage media, and heard or seen each year in information flows. Where reliable data was available we have compared the 2002 findings to those of our 2000 study (which used 1999 data) in order to describe a few trends in the growth rate of information.

:: Congrats to Jena and Colin, because they love CKUA, and now CKUA loves them too.

:: I would like to use this space to give thanks for the gift of good friends, i.e., people who care about you.

:: I wanted to see a few films while off work this past week, and see as few is what I did: The Station Agent, Wonderland, In The Cut, The Matrix Revolutions, Love Actually, The Hard Word, and Down With Love.

:: I put up my outside Christmas lights Saturday afternoon. Usually I do this before the end of October, but got lazy this year. It’s cold here already, so I didn’t want to wait for it to get colder.

:: Also this week, I’ve been cleaning and purging. It’s been successful so far – I clurged (cleaned and purged) my spare bedroom, and filled four large green plastic bags wth clothes and shoes, which were taken to Goodwill yesterday. My computer room needs much work, as does the upstairs bathroom. To do this realistically, I need to set goals, so the plan is to get the upstairs completed first, then the main floor, then the basement. The vacuum has yet to be passed, that’s to happen later.

Part of the purge process involves losing stuff in drawers, cabinets and closets. Right now, I’m in a paper shred mode, as I work through my filing cabinet. I can’t believe the crap I’m finding in there, outdated receipts and paper trails and expired memberships and so on. I’ve filled up two blue bags with shredded paper, and I’m set to start a third.