Posted on by mwhybark

Sets

You know, I have only ever visited one live movie set while work was going on, and it makes a huge difference in visualizing what my film people are talking about when I’m doing quote work with them. I can only assume this holds true for journalists without development experience when interviewing computer people.

I think, though, there’s more to be learned regarding what goes on in shooting. I need to arrange for more time on set. For that matter, I need to arrange for fly-on-the-wall time in a dev group working on stuff substantially different than the sorts of projects I’ve burned the midnight candle over. Hm.

Posted on by mwhybark

1919

Yesterday morning on my way to work, I glanced through the cold morning rain to see a cardboard box in the alley near a bus stop. A tattered piece of cardboard caught my eye, turn-of-the-century display type peeking out from the pile of debris.

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I investigated and found a stash of theatrical posters from St. Louis, dated between 1919 and 1928.

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On the backs of the posters, years of penciled figures, possibly bookkeeping.

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There were about twelve posters. All were lightly soaked from the rain and fragile as hell. I stuffed them frantically into a paper bag which had evidently been intended to hold them but which was unfortunately a bit too small to hold the now-slightly swollen posters.

Most survived, and I even caught my bus.

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Hey Mambo

Success! Home – Whybark Mambo Test Deployment is up. What I’ll do with it remains unknown.

The admin UI is pretty appealing. There were some issues with the default deployment methodology and, I’m sorry to say, no clear user-community help with the problem, although suggestions from some non-English native-speakers finally helped me see the solution.

The forum thread is here.

I need to explore available templates and modules for the app next. Given outstanding writing assignments, that may be a bit off in the future. Adam, let’s try to chat this afternoon.

Posted on by mwhybark

Set out running

Neko Case, Neko Case. November 27, 28 at Neumos.

Looks like I finally have a good reason to hit Neumos. The real question, of course, is, “Can Greg and I get Neko to go drinking with us at the Comet after the first show?”

Hint: this is an unlikely outcome.

Posted on by mwhybark

CMStuff

Adam asked me to think about helping a friend of his blogify their extant small business website. He suggested considering TypePad or WordPress; I probably would lean to suggesting TypePad to minimize administrative overhead. However, I hadn’t looked at WordPress closely yet and so this afternoon I went and grabbed it. As advertised, the setup was nice and smooth. I also downloaded Mambo to take a look at; while blog-oriented CMS apps can sure be tweaked and hacked to provide small-scale site publication and maintenance features in a number of ways, sometimes a less bloggy CMS provides greater site-publication flexibility.

This reminds me that I have a partially-deployed Folklore codebase on the server that I have yet to finish setting up (there were some heinous pathing errors that I lacked the will to battle).

I’m also reminded that I should actually write down my many persuasive ideas about why it’s probably important for small business people to blog their business life. Last night I was discussing this with a friend who creates wedding invitation packages. She was telling me that she “couldn’t bear” to pimp out her stuff on other people’s blogs. She’s right, of course; that’s comment spam, or very close to it. I started to explain why it would be a better strategy for her to blog the business activity itself, to write about buying the paper, about helping her customers make their product selections and so forth. But I was unable to coherently lay this out, since I have really only mused on it privately.

She had a basic misunderstanding of the methodology and business reasons that a small-business owner might find blogs a useful customer-communication and retention tool. I think this is because if you’re not a blog reader (which is most people), the idea and purpose of blogging remains unclear.

Additionally, the primary concern of mom-and-pop shops on the web is visibility. Therefore the initial conclusion many mom-and-pops reach is that they must engage in search-engine optimization strategies, whether simply building their sites to conform to spidering’s needs or going so far as to buy a linkfarm. This has a lot of pitfalls, of course.

So, uh, note to self: write about this.

Posted on by mwhybark

WORKPLACE IMPROVEMENT

Corporate fun: Handy posters to make your work environment safer and to improve your mental health. [via MeFi]

A bit heavy handed (the use of the words ‘legal’ and ‘prosecuted’ is pretty clearly overkill and undercuts the effectiveness of the pieces, I think) but I chuckled!