johnbowman.net

It seems I’m the space boy around here. I’ve written a Q&A about civilians in space for the site…

(…such as it is. Boy, are we having problems.)

Check the time.

What am I doing up so late?

Playing with these.

*sigh*

I was in the Chapters at Richmond and John earlier today. I’ve noticed a few changes in the way they run their store. These changes are doubtlessly intended to increase customer satisfaction with the Chapters experience. Nothing else makes sense, right?

Among the changes:

• The store now closes at 10 p.m., rather than midnight. I guess that’s OK. There’s not much going on in that neighbourhood after 10 anyway.
• All of the free indy papers have been banished, including Toronto’s two “hip, ear-to-the-ground urban weeklies,” Eye and Now. (Chapters doesn’t see the value of these “non-revenue-generating” papers, even though they generate foot traffic at virtually no cost to them.)
• It is now forbidden to take unpurchased reading material into the Starbucks that takes up the entire second floor of the three-storey Chapters store. It is also forbidden to take food or drink onto the first or third floors. So, instead of one store, we now have three. Brilliant!

These are interesting marketing moves, but it’s nothing compared to what they have planned:

• Over the weekend, one leg will be removed from all the chairs in Chapters. We don’t you to get too comfortable, now, do we?
• After the May long weekend, all books in Chapters will be sealed in transparent plastic. I mean, if you were allowed to open and look through the books you were thinking of buying, you would have an advantage over customers buying books over the Web. That’s just not fair.
• And finally, starting in July, all customers entering Chapters stores will be blindfolded, stripped from the waist down and beaten on the backs of the legs with nettles. This will make the Chapters buying experience sufficiently unpleasant to please the shareholders.

Now, don’t fret if the new Chapters philosophy isn’t to your liking. You can always shop at Indigo.

Oh, damn.

I see that 120 seconds has been nominated for a Webby Award in the Broadband category.

Before they go congratulating themselves too much, they should remember one thing: While being nominated for a Webby does put you in the same category as BBC News Online, it also puts you in the same category as Dancing Paul.

There are lots of on-line comics. Some are absolutely brilliant. Others are annoyingly esoteric, and still others are completely surreal.

But not a lot of them really make good use of the medium. They are all comic strips, like you would see in a newspaper.

One of the exceptions is Filler, featured Wednesdays on Suck.com. It’s a combination of text and comic panels (arranged vertically for scrolling happiness) that is designed for the Web exclusively.

But to see the real potential of comics on the Web, you have to look to Scott McCloud. I’ve only read the first couple of episodes of Zot! Online, but I’m hooked. And McCloud’s autobiographical scroll-fest, My Obsession with Chess, certainly couldn’t be printed on paper (unless you want to fold it up like a road map).

I must go pick up McCloud’s two meta-comic books, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, at the local hipster comic store.

Why? Because Jakob says so, that’s why!

There’s another Canadian Web zine on the scene. Rabble.ca is a lefty news source along the same lines as Straight Goods, with whom they are, as they say, “in cahoots.”

The publisher of rabble.ca is writer, broadcaster and political commentator Judy Rebick. You can find lots of her columns on the CBC site.

Rabble.ca looks a bit like a Canadian Salon.com, without the obsession with show biz, or all the ads. (And without, I suppose, the ad revenue.)

It looks like the Toronto Star had a really bad time with their printers this weekend. Their plates were all out of whack.

Either that, or some marketroid at the Star convinced the editors that publishing an edition in 3-D was a good idea.

Oh, damn.

The pffft.net longbox linked to this big kitty pic and accommpanying story. It’s cute, but obviously fake. The photo looks doctored and the story has all the marks of an urban legend. I mean, stray cats found near the Chalk River nuclear labs? C’mon…

So, I checked it out, and Guinness says the world’s biggest cat is 40 inches long, not 69.

But look! On the Guinness page. Isn’t that Pfish in that ad for KiwiBox.com? That’s spooky.

I just did a blog entry about 120seconds.com, but it got really long. So, I decided to revive my Articles section and put it there. It goes a little like this…

Radio 3 redux

Well, whaddayaknow. It is possible to link directly to a specific item on 120seconds.com.

Here’s the CBC Vancouver Flashmonkeys’ take on the FTAA summit — Behind the Fence: Stories from the Protest in Quebec City.

Full article

Well, whaddayaknow. It is possible to link directly to a specific item on 120seconds.com.

Here’s the CBC Vancouver Flashmonkeys’ take on the FTAA summit — Behind the Fence: Stories from the Protest in Quebec City.

I previously wrote that it wasn’t possible to link to a story on 120seconds. I’ll now say that you can, but they don’t make it easy for you.

I found that link to Behind the Fence in the photo gallery of cbc.ca’s indepth look at the summit. The folks at 120seconds had to tell the people building the summit pages where to find their work. It certainly wasn’t obvious from surfing around the site.

And the Tell a Friend function at 120seconds is now working, so you can get the URL for a particular story using that. Import Night in Canada, for example, is a look at the DJ culture in the T-dot, specifically the scene Thursday nights at Play de Record. I just heard an audio version of it on DNTO.

But sending yourself email is certainly a round-about way of getting an URL you can use on your Web site. And that’s the real problem with 120seconds.com: it’s hard to use.

If you want a link, you can’t just copy and paste. You gotta fill out a form and check your email. If you want to quote something from an item on 120seconds, you have to type it out, because Flash text isn’t text and you can’t copy and paste that either.

And I already wrote about how hard it is to get around 120seconds.com. The site’s designers have rejected the Web’s established navigation tools — text hyperlinks, the back button, bookmarks, URLs — in favour of their own widgets.

It’s design arrogance, and it shows little respect for the site’s readers.