Jonathan Ross made a great TV Series a few years back called Japanorama. Its a classic BBC Documentary well paced, enjoyable and informative – one of my favourite subjects too. The series highlights a few popular Japanese exports and customs and offers nothing more than Ross’ irreverent commentary and a brief introduction- no silly camera work, no ground breaking mysteries for a team to tantalisingly uncover within a loud introduction (then dragged out for 25mins, talking to you Horizon!) just fine TV. Hope the BBC come out with a box-set someday, I’ll buy it.

Meanwhile, Japanorama is available on YouTube and on Guba.com where you can watch all of series two.

Here’s a quick fix for a CSS issue that has plagued my K2 installations of the Extended Live Archive (or Better Live Archive as it is now called) plugin. See below, notice all the text is jumbled as if there were no line space between all the items. This appears in Safari / Firefox on the mac, I don’t know why this hasn’t been solved elsewhere.

You need to navigate to the plugin directory in your wordpress install, then under ‘af-extended-live-archive/includes/’ you’ll see a file called ef-ela-style.css open this in a text editor and change the lines:


#af-ela-post-chrono li, #af-ela-post-cats li, #af-ela-post-tags li {
position: relative;
font-size: 1.1em;
line-height: 1.7em;
color: #bbb;
margin: 0 15px;
padding: 1px 20px;
}


to:


#af-ela-post-chrono li, #af-ela-post-cats li, #af-ela-post-tags li {
position: relative;
font-size: 1.1em;
line-height: 1.7em;
height: 1.7em;
display: block;
color: #bbb;
margin: 0 15px;
padding: 1px 20px;
}


Enjoy. Oh, and Meta Comment has an Archive Page again!

Although about as technologically gifted as a gorilla’s bum, The Leither (a local magazine I occasionally contribute to- if only in loud hand gestures and stilted opinions) has signed up to Twitter this month. This is a piece I wrote to celebrate this move. Although technologically akin to turning up late to a student party with three empty bottles of blue nun in a ragged paper bag we’re tweeting…

twitter is the latest online service to be hyped to such a lofty a lofty degree, in a rash of himalayic superlatives, that you could be forgiven for thinking it offers a cure to swine flu, a solution to toxic debt, or the answer to life’s persistent questions. it does not.

twitter (once you’ve signed up at twitter.com) lets you share a few choice words with friends. think: “anyone fancy a film tonight?” don’t think:
“anyone fancy a beer with the editor?” your message is limited to no more than 140 characters known as a ‘tweet’.
tweets can be trivial “i’m at the beach, mmh Seafeild”, or it could be a link to an article you’re reading, a photo of your new puppy. simple stuff you’d like to share. once logged in you can find and add friends near and far (you can choose to ‘follow’ bands, there’s a few celebrities on there… @BarackObama) their tweets will appear on your homepage where you can reply to messages or just keep an eye on what’s happening. friends can choose to follow you by searching your name or through invitation. by connecting with these other twitter users you create a global conversation, accessed easily through your phone, IM, mobile browser, or old- fashioned web. at home at work at play.
Read On »

i wanted to delete a plethora of posts on Meta Comment. mainly irrelevant and mostly useless i was close to just deleting everything pre-2009. fresh start. but i don’t like editing old posts, i hardly moderate comments- its a fun old world and reading some of my earlier stuff is always amusing (to me– and let’s get something straight it’s all about me).

the alternative plan was to separate the new posts from the (very) old… just this week i discovered a great hack for Wordpress that allows me to display a ‘this post is old’ banner on posts of a certain maturity. y’see when i switched over from iBlog there were a lot of formatting issues – not to mention missing images, broken links etc – i tried to weed them out over time, but got busy, so anything from ‘05/’06 is a real mess. yay for $date_check_age

this simple code checks the age of a post (set at 999 days or older here) then displays the ‘.expired’ element (must be defined in your CSS) only to visitors to those elderly posts… it doesn’t print (or echo?) the element in your new material. so:


< ?php
$date_check_age = '';
if (is_single()) {
$days = 999;
if (time() - strtotime($posts[0]->post_date_gmt) > ($days * 86400)) {
$date_check_age = 'this is an archived post' ;

}
}
?>

< ?php echo $date_check_age; ?>

Read On »

you might find this hard to believe, but i’m not a big fan of IBM. so it makes it hard to appreciate what great tv advertisements they, or should i say their ad firm, have come up with. i love them, particularly the early eBusiness examples:

its a sustained effort, thematically and artistically, they say “we’re IBM we’re big, clever and professional”. i love the black and white and the action- it takes place in a static frame without too much jazzy music or sound fuddling up the nice neat corners. here’s another example. there’s always a smidgin’ of blue in there too which is an instantly recognisable hook for ‘old blue’ – right up to last year’s Innovation Man they’re on the same warpath.

IBM, commendably, never talk down to their customers (mainly serious corporate types you’d imagine) even in their sillier efforts, i’m thinking of a series of ads in which poorly formulated ‘blue sky thinking’ techniques replace productivity ‘STOP TALKING – START DOING’ is the simple commanding tag line. See: ‘Ideating’

‘Googlisation’ (i.e. dull business + chill out room and a drinks cabinet = productivity) is something i’m very aware of, probably because after years of being a mac user (cool kid and all round awesome guy!) i logged into a Windows Vista PC last year- and it wanted to be my friend. Rounded corners, a feedback loop, staff bloggers, dropping the ‘e’ in a verb and calling it your logo, having quirky language in your marketing material… this doesn’t make for a creative or profitable company- and i’m looking at you Virgin Media on several counts.

If your big and your blue, make big blue adverts.