Barkerburgh

30 Grams Per Week

The Toronto Star has been publishing their weekly TV magazine for decades; Star Week. Up until recently the daily TV listings were presented in narrow columns, maybe five or six to a page. New TV series often had a brief synopsis of the episode’s highlights or the plot, usually with an ‘N’ in brackets to indicate a new episode. Movies usually had a one or two person cast list, the production year, and maybe the genre. There was usually useful information along with the bare listings. It was helpful.

Suddenly they changed to a tabular format with no room for descriptions or synopses. I am not a married-to-the-past traditionalist in any way (ask anybody) and I usually take things like this on a case by case basis. This time, the old way was better.

25 Grams Per Week

A week or two after they made the change they had the gall to tell us in a short article on an inside page of the Saturday Star that people had expressed the opinion that they preferred the tabular format. (Well, nobody asked me. Harumph.) As before they have a section for daytime listing that vary only slightly from day to day, but now they only have a single page for weekday primetime, with almost no detail, then at the back, late night weekdays. Often all we know about a movie in a particular timeslot is that it is a movie, because it just says ‘Movie’, especially in the late night listings. After a few weeks - responding to kudos, I’m sure - they added a sort-of highlights box with synopses of that night’s popular shows’ episodes, maybe Gray’s Anatomy, House or Heros, but forget the others. It’s better now though.

No, it’s cheaper. In more ways than one. The new format reminds me of nothing other than those free regional ad-driven TV magazines you used to find all over the place that had no room for details because of all the ads. This isn’t quite that bad, but you can see the resemblance. It isn’t better; it’s a rip-off, a cop-out and a fuck-up. It’s an increase in the chocolate ration.

Why the title of this post? It’s a reference to Orwell’s 1984, and Winston Smith’s task of trying to rewrite history by spinning the fact that the chocolate ration went up from 30 grams per week in 1983 to 25 grams per week in 1984.

‘Nuff said?

Many will not miss him.

Rogers moved CNN Headline News off Channel 37 and replaced it with BBC World. Which is great because now I can’t moan about what asswipes Nancy and Glen are.

I like BBC World but I’m not used to its rhythm yet. I don’t know when anything’s on or who the presenters, hosts, or newsreaders are.

Rogers has also added Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics (TCM and AMC) to Tier 3.

To make room, Rogers moved CNBC and Speed up to digital. Maybe Golf is missing too, I’m not sure. Haven’t noticed it for a while and I always thought it was dumb to have specialty channels like Speed and Golf in the lower channels.

I am quite happy about not being tempted to pop over to Headline News every now and then just to see what stupid crap is coming out of Glen Beck’s mouth or how rude Nancy Grace is being to a guest.

Fresh Ground Peanut Butter From Strictly Bulk At Pape And Danforth

I haven’t been there to get it yet. I’m just saying.

The First Episode Of Torchwood

First, it’s with the first 7 or 8 episodes on a DVD. Second, my machine that will actually play movies can’t read DVDs (it’s SCSI). Next, the network connection between my Pentium One running Windows 98 (with a DVD-ROM) and the Pentium III running Windows 2000 is all impity-jumpity and problematic. Next, the Windows 98 machine and its DVD-ROM don’t really like each other a lot. Finally, the DVD stayed running and the network connection stayed online long enough for me to copy the first episode of Torchwood from the DVD to the Windows 98 machine through the network to the Windows 2000 machine. Lastfully, I watched it at 4:00 this morning because I have a noisy neighbour and there’s shit on my beloved TV-TMSL at 4:00AM.

Okay, the review. Wow. Not your granddad’s Torchwood. Frankly I was expecting Doctor Who and more of the same. It wasn’t. I really liked it; dirtier, meaner, darker, weirder (really: weirder than Doctor Who). But as much as I liked the character of Captain Jack back in his Who days, I kinda thought he was a piece of wood in this, even though the plot, the shots, the hot lady cop, and those - you should pardon the expression - exquisite Welsh accents were really effective. Was the actor who played him like Russell Davies’ boy-toy or something? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But, like Little Mosque and Heroes, I’m willing to give this a big chance, considering that I think it will probably be worth it in the long run. I’m even willing to go through all that shit in the first paragraph again to catch up.

Fun With Food

For a great, amazing sauce, mix ground tomatoes (canned), peanut butter, garam masala and lots of garlic and onions and fresh ground pepper.

It’s awesome.

TLA

Much progress on the PHP/Javascript Jeopardy front. I love it. Wish I was younger so I could have more time. Mark my words, they’ll patent and market the digital-neural mastoid implant the week after I die. I’d bet you but it’s a sure thing and I’m not.

The people of Hazleton, Pennsylvania have organized a campaign to ban Santa from their town because he is an illegal immigrant and an undocumented worker.

Tongue in cheek? Or not? Let me know, but not via the comment process since it is still fubared. Email me.

Google string for ‘hazleton no santa‘

Anybody have a copy of 1976’s ‘Network‘?

Its gestalt looms large in the opening episode of my favourite new show, Aaron Sorkin’s ‘Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip‘.

I haven’t seen the movie in years, but am of the opinion that modern networks and programming executives have tacitly agreed that their secret goal has been, for a generation, to deliberately produce and broadcast television that will eventually make sensible people stick their heads out their windows and shout “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” because it sells more commercials for the plebs, the hoi polloi, and the ravening underclass sub-omegaloids.

One thing I have learned about Ubuntu, besides ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’, is that, like Microsoft, when the documentation gives a specific example, and you follow it exactly, exactly, exactly, double and triple-checking your spelling and spacing and case, it doesn’t work.

Then you change something essentially arbitrarily, and it works.

Plus c’est la meme chose.

The strange fate of Alistair Cooke’s body….

I’ve had two livejournal accounts for a while. I had a recent one, forgot about it, created another one, then rediscovered the first one. I vaguely remember having an account way back when it first got popular, but it wasn’t easy or straightforward then so I let it lapse, and it’s worse now, years later.

Is navigation and design ever fucked up.

Often, the labels are vague, misleading, or dumb. There are too many steps from Point A to Point 2 and there are things on the page that are unexplained, misleading or pointless, and I don’t just mean the ads.

(If you’ve been at it for a while and everything is second nature, well and good, but it ain’t chess, it’s a blog. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to get the brunt of the gist of it. Really. Code geeks shouldn’t design interfaces. Neither should co-ops. Or bosses. Or recent graduates of Devry. Christ.)

Some things just don’t make sense at all, like the fact that when I’m logged into my account, there is no easy or obvious way to view the results of a poll, and you don’t seem to be able to edit the poll itself once it’s posted. Sure, it may be right in front of me, but it sure as hell ain’t right in front of me, if you catch my meaning. (You can edit the actual entry the poll appears in, but you can’t edit the poll itself. And the editing page for the poll entry is just dumb…)

Yeah, if I spend a couple of hours clicking around, I’ll figure it out. But a> I don’t have a couple of hours to do that (I’m not that busy but my online time is very limited), and ii] why the fuck should I have to?

Website designers who think they know best about page design should take Thoreau’s advice: run off into the woods and live by a pond. I mean ’simplify’.

Yeah, LJ’s got more features than Wordpress, but that don’t mean I can forgive the design flaws.

For a nicely designed website for a specific purpose, with lots of information and options, see W3Schools. Yeah, of course I know it’s apples and oranges, but it ain’t apples and octopi.

(But to misquote Matt Damon’s character from ‘Dogma’ in the brief elevator scene at the airport near the beginning of the film; “Oh, I don’t mean you!”)

I can’t decide between “these guys put the first two syllables of ‘mentally unstable’ in Fundamental” or “these guys put the last word of the phrase ‘Jesus H. Christ!’ in Christian”.

From the Pueblo Chieftain, via the Cult News Network

The article about the Rapture Index…

And introducing, with ads by Google, The Rapture Index.

Perhaps it could be offset by this; the Bible Belt Blogger.

But then again, there’s this.

Fuck it. Yer all nuts.