Sunday, December 31, 2006

The Venice Project - First impressions

Quick post. First impressions of the Venice Project:

Looks very cool when it's loading up the first time :o)

I like the channel interface but it took me a while to find out how to
get out of full screen mode (it takes over the whole monitor).

The Cassy video on the Diddy channel looked like it might cause
epileptic fits but I didn't see any warning before it came on (though I
dunno if MTV would show a warning either?).

The advertising seems very regional.. T-Mobile, some brand of chewing
gum which I'm not sure is out in Ireland. Will advertising be country
based in future? (Update: Advertising is apparently localised but not localised to Ireland yet)

Will it allow user submitted content? The FAQ says they're working on it but has no guidelines yet as to whether there'll be content restrictions (i.e. copyrighted material) or anything like that.

The channels are good for a starter but could be a lot broader. Good coup to get the Diddy channel and some MTV stuff!

The FAQ says that in an hour of viewing approximately 320MB of data is downloaded which is impressive considering your average BitTorrented tv show of 43 minutes will require a download of at least 350MB!

Thursday, December 28, 2006

It's that time of year again (Dublin Film Festival)

Unfortunately the film listing isn't out yet but the site placeholder is up and they're looking for volunteers!

In previous years the festival has had an excellent line-up of films and I don't expect 2007 to be any different :o)

The festival runs from the 16th to the 25th February 2007.

Monday, December 25, 2006

A quick rant

Blogging on Christmas Day.. that's not healthy..

Anyway I just felt like I should get back into blogging. To get started I will use an old reliable: the rant. It's not going to be a big rant or a long rant or an expletive-filled rant. Just a small, plain rant.

Try skimming through this blog -> Gautam Ghosh

At the top you've got so many ads and cluttered graphics. There are actually two ads for Firefox linking to the same url. If they're paid ads I can sort of understand, but still why is someone paying him to have two ads for the same thing?

Moving down a bit, his About Me is hidden between a donate graphic and graphics of his email addresses. The colours of the graphics on the page seem to overpower the colour and font of the text so that when I skim the top of the blog it seems like a lot of colour noise and no actual content.

Further down, the "B-List blogger" link reminds me of those links to nerd code where you can specify what your interests are and then publish them on your home page (remember those?)

The guy last blogged on December 25th 2006. Why is he telling people he won "Indiblog of the year 2004"? I can understand being proud of it but it reminds me of restaurants where you see they won some award a couple of years ago and you think to yourself "Why have they slipped enough to not win it since?" Also, do blog readers actually subscribe to blogs based on awards the blog won two years ago? (Heck, does anyone subscribe to a blog based on an award it won this year??)

I also see he has a Hit Counter? Do they still make those?? I thought people stopped using hit counters because no one ever patched them to deal with the Y2K bug?


All the above issues really made me switch off from the blog, but I have spent so long going through it and nitpicking these issues now that I did finally notice the content :o) Some of the content is pretty decent. I like some of his predictions for 2007 and as an Indophile I always am interested in any takes on Indian business and education, of which he has heaps.