Ianiv blogs about one of my pet peeves: DVDs that force you to sit through ads before you get to see the movie you paid them for.

But with this DVD first you get a copyright notice, then a short clip about how bad it is to download movies (stop saying copyright infringement = stealing!) and then 2 or three trailers for movies I’ve never heard about before. And you CANNOT STOP IT. If you press stop you get the nice “Operation not permitted” message. If I turn the player off and back on and then press menu I get the same crap. No way of skipping it.

The message it sends from the movie industry to the audience is as unambiguous as it is contemptuous: To us, you’re all just a giant wallet waiting to be drained. And we’ll use whatever technological advance we can to do it.

Of course, they’re shocked, shocked that audiences aren’t rushing to support those self-service messages about movie downloading.

Gerard Kennedy and Maurizio Bevilacqua are, I’m happy to report, among the living. Bevilacqua was hanging out at the apparently un-Google-able maurizio.ca, and Kennedy’s site went live, as far as I can tell, today.

Kennedy’s site is still a little rough around the edges. The link to his blog isn’t working yet (and, oddly, it’s under “Multimedia”) and several pages have awkward “This page is currently under development” fig leaves… including the “Doing Politics Differently” link and the site map.
Bevilacqua’s site appears to have been active for more than a week (incidentally, someone needs to have a chat with him about the difference between a blog and a post).

No feeds on either site yet. Each looks slickly designed, but while Bevilacqua’s site uses “alt” tags on his navigation bar so it can be used by the visually impaired, Kennedy’s doesn’t – and doesn’t offer a text alternative. Tsk.

And as you might expect from a lexicographer, he doesn’t mince words.
Barrett recently issued an RFP to redesign his superb Doubled-Tongued Word Wrestler Dictionary (a must-read for anyone who loves language, by the way). Apparently, a disproportionate number of hucksters, poseurs and fraudsters responded to his call. He fires back today, and it’s a scorcher certain to leave a lot of online rip-off artists dabbing aloe vera on their blisters:

Let me tell you: if you can’t be bothered to punctuate and spell correctly, there’s no way in hell you’re coming anywhere near my web site. If you can’t be bothered to read my RFP—and given the questions you’re asking, it’s pretty clear you didn’t read past the first paragraph—then I’m going to add your email address to my killfile so I never have to hear from you again. If you think sending me an invoice with your “proposal” is going to help, especially when your proposal in its complete form says “$60 per page, 100 page minimum,” then if I ever meet you on the subway I’m going step on your heels. If I ask that the site not be image- or Flash-based, and then you propose some Photoshop- or Flash-heavy ideas, then be prepared for me to tell you to go screw. If you think my RFP is a chance for you to push your fraudulent search-engine optimization services—and I do mean fraudulent—then I hope you die alone with your stupid “top links” sites and your stupid Google PageRank of 4 that you’re so proud of.

Maybe not all by my lonesome. But about two weeks ago, I called the TiVo support line, fed up with a months-long problem where every single TiVo show we recorded was being flagged for timed deletion: one week was the longest we could keep anything, and any show we began to watch was deleted within 24 hours.

According to a message on the TiVo machine, the restriction was because the show’s copyright holder had insisted on it. But that was supposed to be the rare exception, not the irritatingly ubiquitous rule.

I found multiple references to the issue on discussion boards and blogs, with people blaming everything from low cable signal quality to a shadowy conspiracy. Mostly, though, the consensus was that it was a bug, and what could you do?

Well, there was one thing I could do: I phoned tech support. And after only a few minutes, a very nice woman picked up, expressed surprise at my problem, asked me to hold for a few minutes, and then came back on the phone.

“We’ve had several other reports of this problem,” she said (I’m paraphrasing from memory, by the way; we don’t go for that James Frey stuff here on this blog). “Let me see… you know what? I’ve just escalated this to our senior support team. They’ll get to work on it, and you should receive a service update sometime in the next week to 10 days. After that, you shouldn’t have a problem. But in case you do, call back with this case number.”

I didn’t have to. A few days ago, our TiVo restarted thanks to a service update. And by god, the problem’s gone.

Hi-ho Silver!

Jane Jacobs is known for her vision of vibrant, liveable cities. But as Alex posts at Civic Minded, her prescription for a viable city is also the recipe for a thriving online community. And Alex has a terrific suggestion for one way to remember her:

These still-early days of online community-building amount to explorations of the potential that Jacobs identified: the potential for supporting real human relationships with virtual ecosystems. And in a wonderful tribute to Jacobs’ continued influence, many of these experiments feed back into twenty-first century cities by providing new tools for supporting urban sustainability. I’ve bookmarked a few of my favorite examples on del.icio.us with the tag JaneJacobsArchive; I hope others will contribute their own examples of how the Internet can support the kinds of cities that Jacobs so eloquently advocated.

Jacobs’ death is a loss for everyone who cares about quality of place. She will be missed.

Orlando, Florida – “She’s a law-breaking illegal immigrant, and she’s getting everything she deserves,” Bill O’Reilly said today as INS agents escorted a heavily-sedated Dora the Explorer from Nickelodeon’s studios into a waiting van. She was flown to her country of birth, an undisclosed but boldly colored Latin American nation.

For O’Reilly, it was the successful culmination of his month-long “Dora the Exploiter” campaign, conducted through his highly-rated TV and radio shows. “Let me draw you a map,” O’Reilly said in a broadcast three nights ago. “Warrant… handcuffs… airplane home.”

O’Reilly was supported by a range of right-wing bloggers and commentators, including Michelle Malkin, who labelled Dora “that dykey, tykey Osama Bin Laden in a pink t-shirt,” and Ann Coulter, who demanded that Dora be “either kicked out of the country or dropped in a real live melting pot.”

The arrest came after a three-day seige of Nickelodeon headquarters by several hundred Young Republican demonstrators. The crowd thinned after Dora was taken into custody and several cheers of “We did it, we did it, we did it, yay!” A core group of diehard protestors remained and pressed for the expulsion of her cousin, chanting “Go, Diego, go!”

Dora’s personal effects were confiscated by a masked orange fox. Her monkey companion Boots was turned over to the ASPCA, where he was humanely euthanized.

Just checking out Joe Volpe’s leadership campaign site and found several new things to update.

But there was one interesting twist: for a while this morning, Volpe’s site offered translations into more than just English and French. You’d also find Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian and Spanish. But unlike every other link on the site, when you moused over the translation links, the destination URL didn’t show up in your status bar. It was masked – and when you did click on a link, the URL was an IP address, not a domain name.

That mystery was solved when I clicked on the French icon (which, incidentally, was a flag of France), and got an error page. It told me little, but it did link to a page of language tools… Google language tools. Apparently, all Volpe’s web team had done was to set the link up to secretly run the page through the Google translator – and then, for reasons unknown, set it up to diguise that fact. A few minutes after I checked the feature out, it had vanished.

Guys, don’t test new features on a live campaign site.

Dr. Carolyn Bennett: There’s a perfectly functional, content-rich web site here; unfortunately, it’s buried several layers inside an interface that makes a serious usability mistake.

Read on…