DrWeb's Domain

Away on vacation, NC...

I'm heading back home to North Carolina for a week of vacation, and will resume posts thereafter.
--DrWeb

Everyone's a Film Geek Now

Everyone's a Film Geek Now
By ELVIS MITCHELL

HAS there been a single technological advance --even the advent of sound-- that has changed movies as quickly and thoroughly as the DVD has? Sound changed the scope of movies, but it didn't really change the way they were made, the way they were marketed or the way they were watched. The DVD is changing all those things.

For the movie industry, the DVD has become so important that the tail now appears to be wagging the dog. The studios --and the rest of us-- have realized that nothing they put on screen will ever go away again. As a result, features that were created to appeal to connoisseurs, and that were once available only on large, unwieldy and expensive laser discs, are now routinely enjoyed by mass-market film fans. The esoterica of film culture, formerly consumed by a moneyed geek elite, is now aimed directly at --and snapped up by-- the broader public.
Source: NY Times, Movies, August 17, 2003
Registration required to read, but it's free..

A nice piece on DVDs, letterboxing, special editions, and more.. I do love my DVD player, and just ordered the "Lord of the Rings 2" on DVD.. my only wish is that they (movie-makers) would make better films...

Comings & Goings: San Diego, migration, and housing costs

Comings & Goings

More people left San Diego County in recent years than moved in; as housing costs soar, many find they can't afford to stay

By Lori Weisberg and David Washburn, STAFF WRITERS, August 17, 2003

San Diego County may have a stunning coastline, incomparable weather and a world-famous zoo, but all that has not been enough to stem the flow of residents leaving the region for fast-growing areas in the West where housing is far cheaper.

During the latter half of the 1990s, San Diego County saw 16,000 more people leave than move here from other parts of the country, with many of them electing to settle in Clark or Maricopa counties, home to Las Vegas and Phoenix, respectively, and neighboring Riverside County.

A good read on Census data for San Diego.. and you can see it happening around.. housing prices are astronomical, and the primary reason people leave.. hard to afford even a starter home in San Diego.. affordable housing crisis...

DenverPost.com - Keeping Lonliness at Bay

DenverPost.com - Compass

compass
Keeping lonlieness at bay By Arnold Okerman

"And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls ... "

Ever since John Donne penned those words so many centuries ago, mankind has used them to illustrate how intertwined we all are, how the loss of a friend or a neighbor affects us all, even if we did not really know the person.

Ernest Hemingway added more "bells" in the title of his famous novel, again to symbolize how all of mankind was affected, and diminished, by the tragic losses in a civil war in faraway Spain.

Article Published: Saturday, August 16, 2003 - 12:00:00 AM MST

National Weather Service Corpus Christi - Serving Laredo, Victoria and the Corpus Christi Areas

National Weather Service Corpus Christi - Serving Laredo, Victoria and the Corpus Christi Areas

Select image for larger view..

I was checking out the storm tracking for Tropical Storm Erika, soon to be Hurricane Erika.. checking out where the Kid is in Corpus Christi, TX.. looks like landfall will be Saturday AM, and South, in the Brownsville, TX area.. I've included a NOAA radar image above from 8/16/03.. shows lots of rain but CC will miss the hard landfall for this Category 1 storm.. in comparing the general weather sites, http://www.weather.com/ has good basics, but I dislike the videos are premium only.. my next favorite site is the Weather Underground --with its easy searches, good graphics, and direct navigation.. I also use Yahoo! Weather often for quick hits and looks, and it is a first-rate free weather site...

Can Johnny Blog?

Can Johnny Blog?

ONLINE DIARY
Can Johnny Blog?
By PAMELA LiCALZI O'CONNELL

This may be the year that school blogs come into their own. A school blog is simply a Weblog - an online blend of diary, links and commentary - that is used by teachers and students.

Blogs seem to be a natural way for teachers to maintain a class Web page and for students to handle research projects. One site for classroom blogs, schoolblogs.com, lists more than 1,200 worldwide, up from 800 a year ago. And new blog sites for teachers have sprung up, like the Educational Bloggers Network (http://www.ebn.weblogger.com/).

Source: NY Times Technology Circuits Online Diary, August 14, 2003

Interesting read on educational aspects of blogging, teaching with and via blog sites.. popular story, getting some nice links according to the Blog watchers.. NY Times required registration to read, but it's free..

The Ultimate Cary Grant Pages - A Cary Grant Video Source Page

The Ultimate Cary Grant Pages - A Cary Grant Video Source Page

The Ultimate Cary Grant Pages [Quick Time, RealOne Player] http://www.carygrant.net/ Maintained and developed by Debbie Dunlap, a devoted fan, this site pays homage to Cary Grant (whose real name was the slightly less marquee-friendly, Archibald Leach), one of Hollywood's leading men during the 20th century. The site provides a host of material about Grant, his films, and his life, including a filmography, movie reviews, a photo gallery, a sound gallery, and links to old radio shows in which Cary Grant appeared. The sound gallery is an excellent part of the site, as visitors can listen to audio clips from Grant vehicles like North by Northwest, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Charade. Visitors will learn quite a bit about Cary Grant from the site, including the fact that he never won an Academy Award for his acting, although he was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1970 for his life's work. [KMG]

Source: The Scout Report, Volume 9, Number 32, August 15, 2003

Very well done, kudos.. love the details, the showings of his films on TV, vote for a showing of a Cary Grant film on Turner Classic Movies, and more.. recommended for film folks...

Innovative Internet Applications in Libraries..

Ex Libris--an E-Zine for Librarians and Information Junkies -- issue 186

LIBRARIANS HELPING LIBRARIANS: INNOVATIVE INTERNET APPLICATIONS IN LIBRARIES

by Marylaine Block

I have always maintained that librarians are the ultimate share-your-toys people, and that the worst punishment you could inflict on any of us is to offer to show us an incredibly useful free resource but only if we swear not to tell another living soul about it. This explains why some of the best web sites I know about have been created by librarians to help other librarians, and I plan to profile several of them.

One of my favorite such sites, created by Kathy Leeds of the Wilton (CT) Library, is called Innovative Internet Applications in Libraries, http://www.wiltonlibrary.org/innovate.html. Leeds has obviously spent a lot of time exploring how other libraries have used the net to deliver new services and make traditional services more accessible to distance users.

Read another great essay in Marylaine Block's series.. bookmarked the innovative site from Ms. Leeds, a keeper...

Interactive Narratives

Interactive Narratives

Andrew DeVigal has posted this new site (announced on the online news mailing list), which has a blog for narrative news and comments, and searchable databases of interactive sites, and searchable database of narrative resources.. on first look, a valuable addition to the narrative community.. you can subscribe to the site to get e-mail updates, and suggest sites to add.. published with Movable Type...

ajc.com | Living | Splash of color

ajc.com | Living | Splash of color

Splash of color On Tybee Island, rescued vacation cottages are small in size, huge on hue

By TINAH SAUNDERS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Tybee Island -- Jane Coslick's island cottages are the antithesis of those ostentatious mega-mansion vacation homes.
Tiny (they range in size from 300 to 900 square feet), the houses were built as fishing camps beginning in the 1900s. Coslick began rescuing them in the early '90s as bulldozers moved in to clear the land for larger, more modern houses in this laid-back resort area.

...

One of those is next-door neighbor Diane Kaufman, a Marriott executive who works from her Tybee home, thanks to high-speed Internet connections. Coslick helped Kaufman fix up her own "Hemingway House," named for Ernest, and then encouraged her to buy the minuscule Seabiscuit Cottage (300 square feet) beside it to renovate.

Wonderful tale of smaller cottages, and design to use smaller spaces like these small homes with style.. great design writing, recommended reading..

The Northeast Blackout 2003 (moblog)

The Blackout

MSNBC Map of Outage (from TV screen), as posted on "The Blackout" site.. select image for larger image..

The blackout spread from NY to Cleveland and Detroit and into Canada. Please send images via email to blackout.814@tamw.com

Coverage via a moblog, photos from the Northeast Blackout 2003.. with comments.. note: I thought the cell phones weren't working in the blackout, so I'm not sure how the images were sent or uploaded.. fascinating, fast, and a great use of the new technology.. did the Big News sites do this? they could have..

Poynter Online - Put Audience to Work on Outage Story

Poynter Online - Put Audience to Work on Outage Story

Put Audience to Work on Outage Story

Posted, Aug. 14, 2003
Updated, Aug. 14, 2003

Newsrooms need all the help they can get to tell the story of the power outage that cascaded across large swaths of North America Thursday.

The smart ones are asking for help from their readers and viewers. Newsday invited readers to share their stories of the outage on its web site, along with a request to "tell us how you're running a computer."

Great work from the journalist and journalism hub, Poynter.org, based in Florida.. all about the outage from a reporting point-of-view.. first-rate, timely.. also talks about blogs for feedback and community interaction, and mentions Typepad.com in the article.. take a look at the MSNBC Web Log Central section for a great look at some first-rate news business implementation of blogging and blog resources...

A Race to Master the Art of French Cooking

A Race to Master the Art of French Cooking

A Race to Master the Art of French Cooking
By AMANDA HESSER

JULIE POWELL is in the homestretch. She has 13 days and 22 recipes to go to complete what possibly only Julia Child has done. If she meets her Aug. 26 deadline, Ms. Powell will have cooked all 524 recipes in the 1961 classic, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."

Ms. Powell began climbing this culinary Mount Everest last summer, on Aug. 26, and has kept an amusing, irreverent and increasingly popular daily Web log of her progress on Salon, called the Julie/Julia Project (http://blogs.salon.com/0001399).

Source: New York Times, New York Style newsletter, 8/13/03

Wonderfully funny, NY style story.. and more, about a young woman writing about her challenging herself, and the blog is indeed interesting in its charting of ups and downs.. the smells seem to permeate your browser..

Here's Looking at 'Casablanca' on Its 60th Birthday

FOXNews.com: Here's Looking at 'Casablanca' on Its 60th Birthday

Tuesday, August 12, 2003
By Bill McCuddy, NEW YORK

We'll always have Paris, thanks to "Casablanca," which turns 60 years old this year.

Legions of fans and bold-faced-names showed up to celebrate the legendary film's birthday in grand style Monday night at New York's Lincoln Center.

Ingrid Bergman's daughter Isabella Rossellini was the hostess of the night's festivities. And Humphrey Bogart's real life dame, Lauren Bacall, was on hand to spill a few little-known details about the treasured Oscar-winning film.

"By now everyone knows Ronald Reagan almost snagged the part of Rick," she said of Bogart's character Rick Blaine, who recently came in No. 3 on the American Film Institute's list of the top 50 movie heroes.

"But did you know the script was rewritten 17 times?" she added.

Great piece on the event in New York on Monday.. one of my all-time favorites.. you can find a link to the DVD in my film list on the sidebar.. As Time Goes By, nothing can beat watching 'Casablanca' over and over again.. ah, Bogie and Bacall...

Schwarzenegger's high-concept campaign: Save state from robot..

sacbee.com -- Politics -- Dan Walters: Schwarzenegger's high-concept campaign: Save state from robot

If one were to distill Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest movie -- "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" -- to its high concept, it would be something like this: "Arnold saves humanity from a destructive robot." If one were to apply the same notion to Schwarzenegger's campaign for governor of California, it would produce the same high concept: He's offering himself as the savior of the state from its robotic governor, Gray Davis.

Interesting and very Californian (home of the film industry) take on the recall election.. Dan's column is worth a read.. election isn't a done-deal, but it's a very high concept idea that just might work.. what's that old saying, "we get the leaders we deserve?" maybe we will get Arnold, and maybe he will clean house..