A Review Less Ordinary

Browsing on Amazon today to find something to buy along with The Matrix Revolutions to qualify for free shipping, I noticed this DVD recommendation. I guess Amazon’s script for pulling movie reviews didn’t figure out that a blurb calling a film a “surprising disappointment” wasn’t the best way to sell it.

I actually happen to like A Life Less Ordinary a lot. In fact, in addition to the amusing coincidence that he has the same name as my next door neighbor, I’ve liked every Danny Boyle flick I’ve seen (those being Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary, and 28 Days Later.)

MT Wishlist

With MovableType 3.0 on the horizon, and with prompting from Kottke’s new integrated design, I’ve been doing some thinking about what weblog software doesn’t do. Here’s a short list of some features I’d like to see in the next generation of personal publishing software. Most of these can be done with clever hacks, but the fact that the hacks exist shows that there’s a need that isn’t being met.

Customized Fields

Separating posts in different categories is often not enough for many people. Suppose I write lots of movie reviews on my page. Putting them all in a “Film” category would useful, but I might also want to group them as “Drama,” “Comedy,” “Action,” etc. While MovableType currently allows posts to be assigned to multiple categories, what I really want in the above scenario is the ability to assign subcategories. The most logical way to do this is to create a weblog just for movie reviews. There are two major roadblocks that prevent this from being an easy solution. The first is a lack of customizable fields, and the second is that there’s no way to stitch multiple weblogs together on the same page.

A basic weblog uses just a few fields, such as entry title, entry body, and category. More complicated setups might have extended entries and keywords. Every different weblog has its own unique configuration, and weblog software should adapt accordingly. A book review post might need fields for author, publisher, ISBN, summary, review, and rating. A movie review post might include actors, IMDB links, etc. A linklog might contain fields for link destination, commentary, and attributed site. A blogrol could contain a person’s name, site name, site URL, one-line bio, XFN data, and FOAF link. The config screen for each of my weblogs should let me define and name fields specific to that weblog, and create a template tag for that field, like <$MTCustomFieldISBN$> or <$MTCustomFieldvialink$>.

Pages Containing Multiple Weblogs

While it makes sense to put different types of posts into different weblogs, there’s no easy way to have all of those posts appear interspersed together in chronological order on my main page. Currently, MovableType assumes that the weblog is the basic building block of a page. TypePad allows extra stuff like TypeLists and photo albums to hang out on a page’s sidebar (and really, TypeLists are just stripped-down weblogs without archives, comment systems, or XML feeds), but doesn’t let you integrate this information in with full-fledged posts. Suppose I wanted to keep a moblog but wanted its photos to show up inline with my text posts. What I see is a move away from weblog-centered pages to pages whose content can include posts from any local source. Archives could be similarly organized and both integrated and segregated, so that users could view everything posted in a April 2003, or just photos from that month, or just posts in the “Romance” category whether they’re books or movies.

RSS and Atom fields should be available for all posts within a single weblog and for all posts on the entire page.

Built-In Text Education and Validation

Daring Fireball’s SmartyPants is great. It and Amputator should be built into MovableType and be turned on by default. Encoding ampersands would solve validation problems for most pages. Furthermore, though templates can be easily coded to output valid HTML, a page is only valid if the content of its posts are valid as well. There should be an option to “validate and publish” that will return markup errors before posting an entry if any are found. [Note: a per a strand from Daring Fireball, a post cannot actually be valid on invalid, just well-formed or not. Still MT could check so make sure start tags have end tags and such.]

Cruft-Free URLs

MovableType should automatically generate cruft-free URLs.

Spam Protection

All email address should be automatically hidden from spambots using an approach similar to (or licensed from) The Hiveware Enkoder.

Link Stripping

Comment spam is a problem. Instead of blacklisting IP addresses, we should blacklist link destinations. Links to known porn sites in comments should either be banned or stripped down to plain text.

The Charter Tele-Robots and I

For weeks now I’ve been getting occasional automated messages from Charter Communications telling me that I am scheduled for new service installation the next day. I’ve been ignoring these calls and assuming that whoever is actually supposed to be getting the new service will eventually get sick of their installation man not showing up, call Charter, and provide them with the correct phone number. This week I’ve gotten seven such calls, including four today. Charter doesn’t service my area, so I’m positive that it’s their error and not mine. The message gives a phone number that I can call if I have questions, but I can’t call it from my phone because they don’t service my area and somehow have their phone system set up to reject incoming out-of-area calls.

Charter’s website does not provide an easy-to-find customer service number. I eventually found one, and talked to a very confused woman who normally assists custmers in Wisconsin. Being that I don’t even know what they think I’m supposed to be signing up for, she had no idea how to fix the problem.

My phone number is registered with the National Do Not Call Registry, but since these calls aren’t marketing calls, I can’t threaten file a complaint with the FCC on those grounds.

I’ve used their email contact form (providing my law firm email address for extra oomph) so we’ll see what happens next.

MMS: It's Hard to Get the Picture

Having a high tech camera-phone is fun, but I haven’t had much success actually sending my bad low quality photos to other people. MMS does not seem to be implemented in any standard way from one carrier to another. This is bad. It means that you can’t really be sure your recipient is going to see your message correctly, and to even get it to them at all you have to know both what company they use and how that company’s phones handle incoming pictures messages. All phones that can handle picture messages also do email, but all mobile carriers charge different rates for email than they do MMS. So you can’t reliably send a picture message to an off-network phone, and if you want to email it to them instead the price of that email won’t be included in your picture rate. Plus there’s the problem that you have no way to know if the recipient has configured email on his phone anyway.

I did a quick sweep across the various mobile providers’ websites to drag up some information on why my picture messages always bounce back, and here’s what I found:

T-Mobile

I have T-Mobile, but I’ve been unable to send photos to Gabe even though he does, too. My guess is that you have to send pictures to their T-Mobile email address and not just to their phone number. T-Mobile’s email format is: 5551234567@tmomail.net. Their website has very little information about picture messaging, and doesn’t mention compatibility with other service providers.

Verizon Wireless

Verizon’s website says that its phones cannot send pictures to non-Verizon phones. I’m not sure that this is true in practice, but it would surely work using standard email if their MMS format fails. I wasn’t able to send a picture to Chris White using his phone number, so again I suspect that if it works at all messages have to go to their Verizon email address: 5551234567@vzpix.com or possibly 5551234567@vzwpix.com.

AT&T Wireless

AT&T’s website makes no mention of compatibility with other networks. It says that messages can just be sent to an AT&T Wireless 10-digit phone number, but doesn’t say if off-network pictures should go to the phone number or to an email address, nor does it provide a format for such an address.

Cingular

Cingular’s site does say that picture messages can go to other networks’ phones, but disclaims compatibility. It also doesn’t mention if it prefers 10-digit numbers or email addresses.

Sprint PCS

Sprint PCS Vision sends pictures as images embedded in HTML, so I’m guessing that most non-Sprint PCS phones have very little chance of getting the picture.

The problem with all of this is the compatibility snags harm the technology, but no provider has a great need for standardization. They’d all prefer you just get all of your friends on their network where interoperability can be assured and bandwidth costs are low. And since corporations tend to pick one service provider and stick with it, the cash cow professional market has very little sway in pushing for standards adoption.

The good news is that posting to webpages from cell phones is very easy. TypePad is doing great things in this field (though the term “moblogging” has to go), as is Text America. Of course, for the moment all that means is that it’s really easy to post crappy, grainy pictures to your website (here’s mine!), but it’s good to set up the infrastructure before camera-phone technology matures.

A Content-Provided World

I live in a content-provided world. TiVo faithfully records all my shows. The comic book store reserves all the titles I read. My newsreader checks the websites I like. LiveJournal collects my friends. I never have to go out and find anything. Information arrives in prescribed doses, pretending that the world is built to deliver media tailored to my tastes.

But the danger of having the whole world at your fingertips is that you never have to find out what’s beyond arm’s reach. There’s probably a lot out there.

Marie Ely

I never knew my paternal grandmother. She died at age 32 when my dad was five. A few years ago he started going through and collecting her poetry. She had always wanted to become a published author, but only got one small work out before the leukemia set in. For my dad, reading her poetry has been a way to get to meet the mother he never had a chance to get to know.

Over the past few months I’ve helped him set up a website so that people can read about her. Though I’m sure internet publishing isn’t what she had in mind when she wrote the poems, it has at least let me get to know her. Much of the work is dark, referring to a failed romance, fear of getting involved with my grandfather, and sadness over knowing she was going to die and leave two small children.

The site is up at www.marieely.com. There’s also a collection of black and white photographs and low-res scans of the Sacred Paintings she wrote about, her only published work.

How far above or below the Mason Dixon Line is your accent?

How far above or below the Mason Dixon Line is your accent?

The Meaning of Jesus’ Suffering: What Mel Missed

My dad sent me an interesting article today that discusses the most important difference between The Passion of the Christ and the Gospel: the Gospel glosses over all the suffering. While Passion will probably do a great job at depicting how terrible a thing to die on a cross would be, the Gospels themselves don’t focus on it. It wasn’t until many years later that Christian rhetoric centered on the suffering instead of the sacrifice.

[To focus on the details of the crucifixion] would be as odd as welcoming home a wounded soldier, and instead of focusing on the victory he won, dwelling on the exact moment the bayonet pierced his stomach, how it felt and what it looked like. A human soldier might well feel annoyed with such attention to his weakness rather than his strength. He would feel that it better preserved his dignity for visitors to avert their eyes from such details, and recount that part of the story as scantly as possible to focus instead on the final achievement.

This is the sense we pick up in the Gospels. Jesus’ suffering is rendered in the briefest terms, as if drawing about it a veil of modesty. What’s important is not that Jesus suffered for us, but that Jesus suffered for us.

Of course, the film’s purpose is to tell the story to modern audiences for whom suffering is an integral part of the tale, but the fact that it wasn’t at the time is interesting. Since the suffering is now such a big part of the Passion, I wonder if one could say that it doesn’t mean the same thing it did 2000 years ago. And if it doesn’t, wouldn’t that bring huge theological consequences if our culture has rewritten the single focal point for our faith? Are we getting it wrong?

Go read: beliefnet: The Meaning of Jesus’ Suffering — Mel Gibson’s Passion Contrasted with Early Christian Thought

The Passion Controversy

It says a lot about a certain segment of Americans that people are worried a movie about Jesus, the figure of forgiveness, might provoke hate towards Jews, a group that had already been persecuted for thousands of years before His crucifixion. Apparently dying on a cross just wasn’t enough.

The Kerry Slate

Tuesday’s Slate article, Kerried Away – The myth and math of Kerry’s electability, discusses the problem of electing a candidate based on his perceived electability. It says:

How did Kerry win? By racking up a 4-to-1 advantage over Dean among voters who chose their candidate because “he can defeat George W. Bush in November.” Among voters who chose their candidate because “he agrees with you on the major issues,” Dean and Kerry were tied.

Let me say that again: Among voters who picked the candidate they wanted based on the issues, not the candidate they thought somebody else wanted, Kerry did not win the New Hampshire primary.

The problem is that voting for a candidate based on whether he can beat President Bush involves dangerously circular reasoning. People perceive John Kerry to be the most likely to beat the president, so they vote for him, making him the nominee not because they agree with him on the issue but because of a bandwagon impression that other people have confidence in him. If each voter selected the candidate who best matched up against his own stance on the issues, we’d end up with a candidate who best represented the beliefs of the voters. Instead, people seem to have forgone the spirit of representative democracy out of a drive to remove the sitting president from office at all costs.

Saletan goes on to point out that what’s going to matter is not who democrats believe can beat Bush but who gets the votes of moderate republicans and independents. The thinking is that since democrats are by large willing to vote “not Bush” no matter what, the most electable candidate is the one who can win over the undecided. While I disagree with this push toward to middle for the sole sake of ousting George W. Bush, I do strongly feel that there are a lot more people out there who disagree with the current administration than popular opinion holds.

The problem is figuring out what the non-vocal majority thinks. Saletan quotes exit polls from the past few weeks’ primaries, but I’m not sure this is a valid way to answer the question. There’s no way to know that independents and republicans showing up to vote in democratic primaries are voting their hearts. I’d actually assume that republicans voting in these elections are doing so to screw up the system. I myself, a democrat, voted for Howard Dean not because I want to see him elected (though I do like a lot of his issues), but because I think it’s important to keep him in the arena to encourage discourse.

2000’s race was a tie. I’m interested to see how far to the left or the right this country has swayed in four years. Has President Bush’s strongly conservative footing alienated everyone who had been on the fence?