I inherited a hard-working Weber Grill upon moving to Studio City in 2001, left there by the previous tenant. I had never used a grill before, so the Weber was a great teaching tool, and I have never felt the need for anything else.
Well, over the past seven years of kids running through the yard, gardeners with other things on their minds, and the belief that a man's grill should never be coddled, the Weber - and who knows how long it provided faithful service to its previous owners? - has lost its legs, its replacement legs, and its winning spirit. Seven good years.
My Toshiba HD-DVD player, on the other hand, and for reasons not entirely its fault, lasted less than a month before it got shipped off to a virtual graveyard, namely a table in my office serving a 36", 105-lb. non-HD TV. I should have known what was in the air when, upon buying an HDTV around Christmas, I was given the HD-DVD player for free.
I want to get a Blu-ray player, and I want it to be a Playstation 3. I have neither Blu-ray discs nor Playstation games, but in that the PS3 is backwards-compatible with standard DVDs (as was the departed HD-DVD player), I'm more likely to scale up.
I bought a new Weber for $50 at Home Depot and feel a little ashamed and unworthy of cooking something on a device so clean and stable. But I'm hoping someone will buy me a Playstation.
For now, I am returning to my good old Sony 5-disc DVD changer with one bad tray. I'd relegated it to my office when the new HD-DVD player came home, and I regretted it; why go from four working trays to a single (very slow) one if the only HD-DVD title I had was "The Bourne Identity"?
How does online technology shape community and identity, and do we have a chance to be more vital online than in real life?
Like the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1940s and 1950s, whose celebrities lived and worked in Brooklyn and were beloved of the neighborhood, the woman who voiced The Operator of the groundbreaking Alternative Reality Game/marketing phenomenon I Love Bees is allowed a more personal relationship with her fans.
"When I meet people at ARG events," said Kristen Rutherford, "I ask them what their gamer tag was before I ask them their name."
Rutherford is a hero to a small but intense community of Alternative Reality Gamers who grew to love and depend on her character when Microsoft launched I Love Bees as a marketing campaign for the game Halo 2 in the summer of 2004.
"To promote Halo 2, a narrative was created that would draw people down a rabbit hole," Rutherford said at today's Identity and Virtual Space: Are We Our Avatars? salon at Farmlab in downtown Los Angeles. "The reward is the story, and my character provided a lot of the exposition."
Rutherford spoke about the online gaming community as a dynamic hive, in which individual members, in the service of unfolding the I Love Bees story via telephone booths across the country, worked with unseen partners to complete the puzzle.
"And when people meet The Operator, after this experience they had, they still tell me personal things about themselves," Rutherford said. "The experience was that important to them."
Rutherford says the narrative, even though it was a months-long advertisement for a video game, didn't shortchange its audience.
"It says, 'We won't make you feel stupid for believing in us,'" Rutherford said. "It's the only form of entertainment I know where I don't get the feeling of being talked down to."
The salon was moderated by Stephen Johnson of G4TV, a tech and pop culture network owned by Comcast.
Sean Percival, author of “The Second Life Travel Guide," a handbook of virtual locations in the ARG Second Life, discussed avatars, digital representations of users in online forums and games, saying that a non-sophisticated avatar is every bit as ridiculous in the virtual world as highwater pants is in junior high.
"People can see you coming form a virtual mile away (with a "newbie" or "noob" avatar)," Percival said.
What was striking about the discussion was that it assumed a familiarity with fabricated identities and the need for keeping them. Second Life, in which one's avatar can buy and sell goods with virtual money that is paid for with an actual human being's credit card, and in which "islands" can be purchased by real-world corporations as advertising hubs, seems like a subscription-and-broadband-based do-over for a life less intriguing.
Percival is known as Sean Voss "inworld," as the Second Life community is known. He said that, unlike many gamers, his avatar looks similar to him.
"But I've talked to my share of men whose avatars are women, and vice versa," he said.
Toward the end of discussion, Percival admitted that participation in alternative reality communities might be compensatory.
"There are people here for romantic reasons," he said.
Google's "Meet the You Tube Filmmakers" a pat on the back
...but some people don't deserve an open bar by Marty Barrett
Google's Santa Monica office hired the art deco El Rey Theatre on L.A.'s Wilshire Blvd. for an informative but decidedly self-congratulatory event celebrating its You Tube user-generated video platform. Things were going just fine - and there was no reason for them not to be - when the critics showed up.
"Meet the You Tube Filmmakers," a catered networking affair culminating with a panel discussion with six directors, focused on You Tube's place as a marketing tool for professionals, even as their content sits a few clicks away from, in an oft-cited example, "Babies farting."
Located on the Miracle Mile, the 1936 El Rey was, like many preserved theatres of that era, a first-run movie house with chandeliers, brocade, and sweeping staircases. Now a trendy bar and live-music venue, the El Rey was an excellent location for this feeling-out session, in which guests opined on the constantly-refreshed dramas of old forms in new media, and how or if the old rules still applied.
Is audience-building a film on You Tube comparable to traditional methods?
"God, Inc."/director: Francis Stokes
Francis Stokes: I wanted an audience. At festivals there were 30 or 40 people in the room.
"my name is lisa"/director: Ben Shelton
"We_Are_The_Strange"/ director M Dot Strange
M Dot Strange: Half the people walked out and wanted their money back.
"In Loving Memory (Jesus Christ)"/director: Javier Prato
Is it a good thing that anyone can be a filmmaker?
Javier Prato: Yes.
Stokes: But the audience must be the determinant.
Each panelist's You Tube output has received hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views. Strange's "We_Are_The_Strange" has been translated into 17 languages - by You Tube fans. And Strange looks at You Tube as a direct road to his fans, where his work speaks for itself.
"There is no System trying to make you look great," he said.
The filmmakers ran a gamut of bookish to outlandish to South American. There were no women. Each embraced You Tube, and viral distribution systems in general, with varying degrees of hope.
Strange, dressed like Eminem, was the most Riot Grrl of the crowd.
"I am trying to raise the bar," he said. "They (Hollywood) are are getting richer and fatter. And they're getting lazy."
The filmmakers glanced on whether or not creating content (low res, free, generally shorter length) for distribution on You Tube altered the nature of the content, or affected the choices made in creating it, but "Four Eyed Monsters" director Arin Crumley said his project, no less narcissistic and touching for his time than a heyday Woody Allen's work was for his, worked well on the viral screen.
"Four Eyed Monsters"/director: Arin Crumley
Arin Crumley: From a creative perspective it makes most sense to make your stuff and send it to the web, and make it decentralized.
But do You Tube movies generate money? Crumley, who had to take the complete film down from You Tube when he got a deal with the Independent Film Channel, says Yes. But other directors seemed to say the exposure was enough.
Prato, whose "Jesus Christ" short was the only panelist's movie to arrive in the inboxes of everyone I know, espoused a consciousness-raising philosophy that seemed at odds with Christian dogma (as well as horticulture).
"It is a pyramid backwards," he said. "You plant a seed online and it grows into a worldwide sea of information."
But Stokes, who was the first to bring up monetization about 30 minutes into the panel, said he built a Google map of all the zip codes of "lisa"'s subscribers and prevailed on local movie theatres in those zip codes to screen the movie.
The panel was opened up to questions, and this is when it seemed that a few invited guests, all beneficiaries of an open bar and delicious snacks, inexplicably chose to pounce on Google.
The generation that recognizes You Tube's innovation and potential, but has doubts about its usefulness as a "film" platform, is of a different mindset from the generation that has grown up with You Tube and expects the world from a free service.
"Can you identify the commenters?" one angry young man said. "I get a thousand comments on one of my pieces (he said 'pieces') and real criticism is buried under 800 useless, useless comments. Can we ID them so we can bar them?"
A woman who identified herself as an actress seemed unclear on the purpose of the discussion.
"I'm not a techie," she said, wondering at the use of words like "upload" and "decentralize" by the filmmakers. "I am a human being."
"How do I get an audience?" another asked.
"Just say something interesting," Strange replied. He might have added a silent "Duh."
or, How to Avoid Youtube And Be Your Own Flash Host, Even If You Know Nothing About Flash
by Marty Barrett
Online video hosting services like Youtube provide a convenient solution for people to get their content in front of as many eyes as possible, as well as take the burden of bandwidth usage from the video creator. Youtube and its peers also convert numerous file formats to low-impact Flash movies viewable by most browsers.
So who wouldn't use Youtube?
People who want to keep traffic to themselves. While Youtube provides ways for content providers to link to their own sites, Youtube keeps the web traffic and ad revenue in-house, even if a Youtube video is embedded on the content provider's own site
People who want higher-quality pictures that require more bandwidth. In general, Youtube's video quality is poor, though it will improve
People who want to customize the look and size of their videos and be free of any branding but their own
Since we are those people, it was up to us to forego Youtube's ease of use for our own solution. This required us to learn a little Flash.
What follows is a bare-bones How-to guide. It will tell you how to import video you've already created and convert it to Flash, then prepare it for deployment on your own web server. It won't give you any real insight into why things work the way they do.
Like many people who use Photoshop, we own Adobe's Creative Suite, in which Flash, formerly a Macromedia product, is also bundled, along with web page editor Dreamweaver.
In order to import content created by another program into Flash (in this case, a .m4a designed as an enhanced podcast using Apple's Garageband), we first opened Flash and created a new Flash file (File>New) using Action Script 3.
We then went to the Import command, also under the File menu, and chose Import Movie. Finding our .m4a was easy, though we had to select the drop-down item "All Files" (rather than the default "All Video Formats") before the file was able to be selected.
We wanted the file to be a progressive download from our web server, so that viewers wouldn't be too bothered with the file loading, so we chose the first option in the resulting window.
In the Custom drop-down of the Profiles tab, we chose to encode the Flash movie for Flash 7 at a high quality (700 kpbs), because the current Flash version is 9 and we wanted to provide a high quality video for people who didn't yet have the latest Flash player that could still be played by those people, too.
In the Audio tab, we chose the highest quality audio output, 256 kbps, because my voice needs to be heard at its most mellifluous.
I then chose a player skin that I liked, out of several skin and color choices . This proved to be the first problem.
Because at this point we did not know the difference between two Flash file formats, particularly .swf and .flv, and did not know why the skin was a Flash file unto itself.
It turns out the .flv is the actual movie but the .swfs, for lack of a better way of putting it, contain the metadate for the .flv. Therefore, not only the .flv (the actual movie), but also the .swf that provides the info on the movie AND the .swf that is the player of the movie must also be uploaded to your web server.
Furthermore, the player skin (in our case it was called SkinUnderAll.swf) must be uploaded to either the same directory as the other .swf and .flv file or the root directory where the index.html file is. Since we found contradictory directions on the web, we just uploaded the file to both places. Couldn't hurt - a skin is a small file.
Then we clicked Finish and chose an appropriate place to store the files, which would include a .fla (the editable working file) and the .swf related to the movie.
After the .fla was processed, we were then presented with the Flash "stage" where we could tweak the .swf. This is another area where things were not intuitive, and proved to be the most mistake-addled step of the process.
After much trial and error, we realized we needed to provide the exact URL of where the Flash movie (.flv) would be hosted, even though the .swf's address was already clear.
To do this, we went to Dreamweaver, using it as an FTP program, and uploaded the file to our server.
Then, in Flash's Properties window, we clicked the Parameters tab, which solved a lot of the smaller problems we'd been having before, including AutoPlay (we were able to set that to False for the first time so the movie wouldn't start playing as soon as someone hit our page).
Sure that we'd done everything we could, we then went back to the File menu and chose Publish Preview and saw how the movie would look in Flash. That looked good, so we chose to Publish.
Back in Dreamweaver, we made sure to upload to our server everything we'd just created.
That left the issue of embedding it.
Since we were embedding this in a blog, as opposed to a strict HTML page, we searched the web and found the following code. Rename the .swf, as well as the sizes. If you are using a skin that plays under the movie rather than on top of it, add 40 pixels to the height requirement.
Note that built into the code are provisions for the viewer who does not yet have Flash, as well as a defined MIME type for his/her browser.
This cinched the deal for us. Our movies displayed on all broswers, though sometimes we encountered cache problems where we'd have to refresh pages several times before the movie would show up.
If this was helpful, please let us know. Also feel free to add your own tips.
Arrowhead And Sparkletts Customer Service Doesn't Hold Water
Until recently, our office found the promise of bottled water service too convenient to ignore, even with mounting environmental concerns over the wastefulness of the plastic bottles and research that found spring water neither tastier nor healthier than tap water.
Representatives of the two major water delivery companies, Sparkletts and Arrowhead, regularly stop by our small office building in downtown Los Angeles to sell their service over their competitors, which is annoying enough, but just as often an Arrowhead rep would stop by to ask if we wanted Arrowhead water, despite the fact that, until recently, we already had it. The same was true when we used Sparkletts; their representatives seemed clueless about who their customers were.
We ordered Sparkletts, a division of DS Waters, early last year, and were quoted a monthly price for cooler rental and water delivery that seemed reasonable. Within two months, however, Sparkletts was delivering more water than we asked for or not delivering it at all. Online management of the account proved useless, as water would come (or not) regardless of the adjustments we made to our online account.
After a bill of more than $150 appeared for water we hadn't received and service we never got, we cancelled our account. We even paid the bill. Phone representatives scheduled and then rescheduled pickups of the cooler. No one ever showed up. Finally we managed to collar a delivery person who took the cooler away and gave us a receipt, months after the scheduled pickup date.
An Arrowhead representative came by a few days later. At first we were reluctant to renew water service, but he listened to our concerns and guaranteed better service than his competitor. "It's a friendly competition," he said. "We always steal each other's customers." He even set up delivery to my home.
At no point in the few months we used Arrowhead did they ever get a delivery right. In fact, we did a little research to see if they were, in fact, the same company as Sparkletts, as both companies demonstrated the same lack of customer service. Too much water would come or no water would come. Starbucks coffee would be delivered (and billed) when none had been ordered.
But we were lazy, too; our own complacency profits companies that provide poor service. It is the same principle that has made a cash cow out of gift cards and extended warranties; it has been estimated that as much as 40 percent of gift cards go unredeemed. Easy money.
It was easier, too, to pay a high bill than spend time tracking down a customer service number, complaint line, or supervisor's e-mail.
But when our cooler stopped dispensing cold water, we reluctantly sprang into action.
An Arrowhead phone rep told us our cooler would be replaced the next day. This was surprising, as no one in the building had seen their Arrowhead guy for several weeks (this was all right, too, because everyone was already overstocked with water). But no one came.
Then we called back. The Arrowhead phone rep had no record of our call. We decided to cancel our service. Her supervisor got on the line and then informed us that Yes, there was a record of our call about a "leaky cooler." Nope, we said, there was no leak, it just didn't dispense cold water.
She reduced our bill to $28 (from a dumbfounding $93), cancelled our account, assured us that the call had been recorded, and guaranteed that the coolers would be picked at my home and our office on February 14. No one came.
A week later we e-mailed Arrowhead. Their response was:
Dear Valued Customer,
Thank you for using arrowheadwater.com. We apologize for the inconvenience caused. A service order has been placed to pick up your Hot & Cold Cooler on 02/21/08.
A representative is required to sign the receipt for pick-up. If this date is not convenient, please respond to this email or call on Customer Service Center at 800-950-9393 to select another date.
If we can be of any further assistance, please contact us. We appreciate you for choosing Arrowhead as your water service provider.
Sincerely,
Simi. T.D.
No one came on the 21st, either. Today we logged into our (discontinued?) Arrowhead account and found that our bill had doubled to $56, and that deliveries were still being scheduled.
We sent the following letter:
Dear Arrowhead,
As you know, I cancelled my water service on February 12 due to poor customer service. This has included inaccurate deliveries, missed deliveries, and overbilling. In early February I called to replace a water cooler that was not dispensing cold water. I was given a date when a new cooler would be delivered, and it wasn't.
At that point I called customer service to ask when I would be receiving my replacement cooler and why - again - a representative failed to show up or even call. At first, the operator had no record of my calling. Then her supervisor got on the line and said that Yes, we have a record of your calling about a leaky cooler.
At that point, since it was clear to me that you didn't know what you were doing and that you didn't care about your customers, I cancelled my service. I stayed on the line as the supervisor reduced my bill to $28. She then scheduled a date when my cooler would be picked up, two days later.
I asked her if she guaranteed that, and she said Yes.
Then, when no one showed up, I wrote you a letter. You then responded that you would pick up my cooler on February 21.
As you would not be surprised to know, no one came. No one bothered to call. And today, when I logged into my account, I saw that my bill had increased!
There are many other customers in my office building who have had similar problems with you and your lack of service. A neighbor who moved out of her office months ago still has several Arrowhead empties outside her door. That is a great advertisement for your company. Myself, I placed my broken cooler outside the door for a week before I realized you had forgotten.
And at least once a month someone representing Arrowhead comes to my door and asks if I want water. You don't even know who your customers are.
I demand that you erase my bill, cancel my account, and take my water cooler away. I am also attaching a bill for water cooler storage.
We enclosed a bill for $400, 200 bucks a month for each cooler. Maybe they'll surprise us by paying it? It could happen.
Like love, spam goes through cycles. Sometimes we receive more mortgage spam, sometimes we receive more diplomas from non-accredited universities spam. One thing is certain: we will always receive Viagra spam, and that is comforting.
But whereas last year's big spam trend was a provocative, get you on the defensive subject line like "Where were you last night?" this year's crop is aimed at slackers:
Hello! I am tired today. I am nice girl that would like to chat with you. Email me at (xxxxxxx) only, because I am using my friend's email to write this. Don't miss some of my naughty pictures.
This troubles me. Spam is supposed to appeal to our vanity, to uplift us, to make us think that the world can be better.
What kind of person responds to "I am tired today (so I thought of you)"? What kind of person uses a friend's computer? Do we use a friend's toothbrush? Orthodontic elastics? Mail-order bride?
Let's say your name is Norman and you walk into a room to hear your friends talking.
"And I said, 'Yes, if I were a big fat fatty fat fatass fatty with fat for brains and instead of teeth I had fat,' and oh, speaking of fat: Hello, Norman."
Since I am tired today I have devised some uplifting spam that you are encouraged via Creative Commons License to circulate throughout the world.
Subject: Your Great Worth to the World
Hello! I am seeking a scintillating person such as yourself to view pictures of me covered with oil and jellies in this home I purchased with an adjustable rate mortgage from a Canadian pharmacy. As we are both PhDs from non-accredited universities filled with lovely Russian ladies who want to meet you in Nigeria, perhaps you can sign this petition to keep NPR from losing its funding. Send to 30 friends or you will die (and go to heaven).
That would make me feel better about giving out my Social Security number.
This brilliant ad supporting BellSouth's Yellow Pages sent me wandering through the office looking for the three-year stack of unused Yellow Pages.
Last I saw them, they were on top of the refrigerator underneath the pantry counter, but they weren't there today.
"Where'd they go?" I asked.
"I threw them away before the office Christmas party," somebody said.
Damn it. I really wanted to take a picture of the six or seven phone books we've never opened to accompany this expensive viral video for a product unused for its stated purpose by anyone I know in at least 15 years.
Do you think a picture of something not being used would help justify the "viral" line item in the Bells' budget?
Come to think of it, didn't an old Yellow Pages ad feature the books being employed to prop up a toddler at the dinner table?
This product has a generation's worth of people not using it in favor of the Internet or calling 411. Seems like a waste of paper.
I inherited a hard-working Weber Grill upon moving to Studio City in 2001, left there by the previous tenant. I had never used a grill before, so the Weber was a great teaching tool, and I have never felt the need for anything else.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the Blu-ray and HD-DVD booths faced each other from a distance of just a few yards, much like Father Merrin and the statue of Pezuzu. I remember the HD-DVD guys being very optimistic as they showed me how good "300" and "The Fast And the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift" looked.
