Month: November 1999

Test audience reactions to “The Messenger”

By LOUIS B. HOBSON — Calgary Sun

HOLLYWOOD — It would seem American movie audiences need a few history lessons.

At early test-screenings of The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, audiences expressed concerns that the heroine dies at the end of the movie.

“People wrote on their comment cards that we should not have burned Joan. They felt that someone should have rescued her,” recalls the film’s director, Luc Besson.

“Many people were also puzzled as to where the story was taking place and they would have like us to have a love story for Joan.”

If making ads look like editorial is annoying and misleading, Go32.com’s practice of making their features look like tile ads is just plain stupid.

Ever pull up eatonweb over a modem? She must be using some funky layers. On my Mac at home, the middle blog section loads first the links only, then pauses several seconds, then the surrounding text and backround color. For those several seconds all I see is a surreal rendering of links…

  tomalak’s realm

          article

     jakob nielsen drinking game

point of view

bloat

michal

…

Four great story flows, one suck-ass website. Winer’s SalonHerringWiredFool takes four story flows that are great individually and intermingles them. While Dave’s a clever programmer, he’s no information designer. Scanning through these headlines is confusing as hell because he’s pulled them out of context. When looking at a particular story you don’t know if it’s general news or technology or finance or what and must spend more cognitive juice figuring that out on a story by story basis.

There’s a reason each of these sites carried over the newspaper convention of categories and sections and of grouping items in a visual way: the shit works. This is not the way to re-invent the portal.

For such a diverse country, it’s pretty tough to hire foreign nationals in the US. The law makes it difficult, even in the resource-deficient technology sector, to hire anyone but US citizens, but at the same time tauting the importance of diversity. When you actually try to create a diverse workforce you realize everyone has their own definition of the term.

I am not xeric today.

My boss was quoted on peterme.com yesterday and referred to as an “Information Architecture Czarina”. She rocks.

A cut and paste from the CHI-WEB list:

go to .webvan.com

under their search box, they have one (count it one) radio option to
“Search all of Webvan.”

hee.hee.

it’s insane as UI, but there’s something absurd and kafkaesque that I like
about it.

I must be high on Sudafed After corresponding with meg about brown eggs and white eggs I walk home, still laughing out loud thinking about the The Jakob Nielsen Drinking Game and everything is crisp and full of potential. I glance at the beautiful people in Greenich Village; the usually-cheesy neon and restaurant lights instead look like It’s A Beautiful Life. I stop in my local pizzaria and the wide receiver on television is the most graceful person I’ve ever seen. At home I’m humming and moving to some crazy rap-inspired Budweiser commercial; a documentary on women’s suffrage quoting Elizabeth Cady Stanton brings me to tears…

We come into the world alone, unlike all who have
gone before us; we leave it alone under circumstances peculiar to
ourselves. No mortal ever has been, no mortal over will be like
the soul just launched on the sea of life. There can never again be
just such environments as make up the infancy, youth and
manhood of this one. Nature never repeats herself, and the
possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another. No
one has ever found two blades of ribbon grass alike, and no one
will never find two human beings alike. Seeing, then, what must
be the infinite diversity in human, character, we can in a
measure appreciate the loss to a nation when any large class of
the people in uneducated and unrepresented in the government. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Note to self: revisit rc3.org, good stuff there.

Through all the talk on the blogs about epinions, I wonder if anyone has thought to write epinions about blogs? A quick check using the epinions search engine didn’t turn up any of the blogs in my current rotation. Maybe blogs are too subjective. Maybe it’s a case of not needing an epinion when you can review it for yourself much easier.

After all the blog-based debate on epinions my head was spinning with analysis. But when I thought of a useful epinion of my own I didn’t hesistate, I just posted my epinion on the foldable, light, innovative Strida bicycle.

Day 34 with my Strida folding bike. The left pedal started unwinding itself for some unknown reason about a week ago. I tightened it and now it’s fine. Now the left crank is loose. Odd, but nothing disasterous.

If you’re interested, I’ll soon be compiling all my Strida comments into an epinion.

Birth by centrifugal force. Maybe the extreme dizziness will distract the mother from the pain she feels.

Meadville-Lombard Journal of Liberal Religion. If you’re unfamiliar with the term “liberal religion” it means what you probably think it means from the individual words: personally and politically progressive, free-minded, liberating. The antithesis of the religious right.

I’m happy to see their first edition published online, but like everything else they are honest about where they stand in society. Their momentum of the 50’s and 60’s waned along with so many great ideals of the period:

The world has not moved as Liberals hoped and expected it would. Fifty years ago, even twenty- five years ago . . . we felt we were the advance wave of a swelling tide that would roll mightier and mightier until it should cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. We confidently claimed the future for our own. But in these latter times the tide has failed to support us . . . the fact stubbornly stands that history has turned in a direction which is not ours.

I think the strength of the movement in the 50’s and 60’s may have set up a dichotomy where the other side strengthened its resolve to conservatism. Liberal religion may actually have more popularity now when people gradually become discouraged and disenfranchised by conservative churches. Liberal religions like Unitarian Universalism may be seen as a welcome, rational alternative rather than a bunch of crazy, new age hippies.