I hope to return to more regular posts here shortly – I’ve been distracted with some computer work recently for friends that have taken up what free time I have after hours.

In the meantime, I’ve been gradually redesigning this site. (Note the new information / link panel at the bottom of the page.) It’s a work in progress and will no doubt go through many revisions, so don’t expect it to stay as it is. I’m also aware of some presentational problems – especially in IE which I haven’t managed to get to yet. On the other hand, if you view it in Mozilla / Firefox it doesn’t look half bad.

Update: Things are looking a lot better – and it even looks okay in IE now (although it’s still more attractive in Mozilla).

Michelle was away in Florida this weekend visiting her brother. Since I had the house to myself, I gravitated towards my usual “stay up very late” schedule, something I do naturally but which only really happens when I have the house to myself because I can make as much noise as I want without worrying about waking anybody up.

I was flicking idly through the TV channels around 1am, when I saw that City TV was showing an “adults only” movie (I know this because, upon looking it up in the TV guide, that’s the category under which they’d listed it) – this one brilliantly titled “Deviant Obsession”.

I was intrigued to see how what kind of fare this would provide, and to determine how much leeway public stations might have, so I watched about 15 minutes of it. Let’s just say that, aside from satisfying my intellectual curiosity, it was a total waste of my time. Frankly, I really don’t know at exactly what audience it might have been targeted.

The acting was terrible, and any kind of explicit sexuality was either never filmed or edited out. (Most likely it was never filmed, because a cursory search on this movie doesn’t mention anything about there being a more hardcore version available, with the one broadcast being just the “sanitized” version. Unlike some adult movies that have a legitimate hardcore version as well as a tamed down version that’s shown in hotels.) So, essentially the only thing that you’re exposed to is a lot of naked breasts, gymnastics that at least appear to be indicative of something actually happening, and a good amount of fake moaning. Apparently even female genitalia is out, at least in the bits I saw, which is quite ridiculous if you think about it. Even some mainstream movies, in non-sexual scenes, will show this very thing. Surely, I would think, if it’s fair game for regular movies that it should be no problem at all for movies billed as being “adult only”.

Is there really any point? I’m not sure what would keep somebody’s attention on this sort of thing. In mainstream movies you get to enjoy plots that draw you in and acting performances that make you want to watch just because of the dialog and emotions that are displayed; erotica offers this, along with some glimpses of nudity and sexuality; while hardcore pornography, despite it almost always lacking in any kind of redeeming intellectual exercise (there are a few exceptions but they are very rare), at least does an excellent job of satisfying the carnal desire of anybody who would be watching it for that reason.

So – who’s going to watch something like this that fails utterly on every count? I can’t think of any category of interest / desire that could be even close to satisfactorily resolved by this kind of movie fare. Why are these movies even made? What’s even more “disturbing” is, in my brief surfing around for reviews of this particular movie, the fact that I found any reviews at all – let alone the (to my mind) number of them out there for this one. I only hope that these reviewers were paid to watch and review, rather than that they’d done so out of any actual interest…

I’ve just now found a cool Grand Canyon WebCam site that I’d like to have available to people who get to my home page. (It has sentimental value because of where Michelle and I were married.)

Obviously, I finally need to work on getting that “Cool Sites” section on this page that I’ve been thinking about for a while now. So far, that thinking has been mostly of an idle nature – but any casual thought as to where I might put it (worked into this page’s current layout) have all stumped me. Time to turn up my brain power a little bit here and figure it out…

Just the other day I came across an article on the BT420 i-PHONO Bluetooth Hi-Fi Sports Headphone – a Bluetooth enabled sports headphone. In other words, it’s wireless. No need to worry about dangling cords as you listen to your music, particularly as you’re jogging or doing whatever other sport you might be interested in.

I immediately thought of Michelle, since she listens to music while walking and biking, who told me that she’d been a “good girl” and that Christmas was coming up. I have no idea how much these things cost, as I can’t find anybody who seems to be selling them (including the manufacturer), but they’re definitely very cool.

A little late to the game, I’ve come across an excellent photo (and videoclip) gallery called Coppermine. I say “late” because it’s already fully featured at version 1.3 and, when I mentioned it to Glen, he said that he’s been using it for a while now.

In any case, I’ve set up a new “Bassford family”gallery for Michelle and me. The only drawback is that we currently have a lack of scanned in pictures, so there isn’t much there at all. This will have to be addressed properly some weekend.

Yesterday, somebody (again) posted a comment to one of my journal entries about how I could enlarge my penis by going to their Web site…

The latest version of Movable Type is incompatible with Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist plugin, so my Movable Type Web log entries are open to getting comment spam again – despite my very basic fix of making sure that you had to click on two different buttons in order to do submit a comment. (This does not prevent automated scripts from generating comment spam.)

In an effort to increase my counter measures a little bit more, I’m going to implement a quick fix as provided by Shelley from Burningbird.

Hopefully this will stop such minor annoyances. (Minor, in my case, because my site gets almost no traffic so I’m not as inundated with this garbage as are people who run much more popular blogs.)

My networking support team at Microsoft is now using a new support model. The bottom line is that we’re all now working in various “shifts” that are supposed to be rotated every 3 months. I drew the shift that has the least impact on my previous M-F 9-6 schedule. Now I’m working M-F 10-7. (Some other shifts involve only working 4 days a week but for longer periods, such as S-W 2pm-1am.) While I now come into work an hour later, it actually translates into an extra hour and a half of sleep for me each morning because of public transit schedules. This part is great. What’s not so great is that I get home at night an hour later so I have less time to see Michelle. (However, I do now get to see her in the morning so it sort of evens out.)

So far, I’m enjoying the difference. I’ve already told my manager I can’t physically work here past 10:00 or so (otherwise I’d never be able to get home), so I won’t be getting anything really outrageous. But I might actually not mind something like S-W 9am-8pm, giving me 3-day weekends…

I recently said that the chess program Rival Chess “suits all of my needs” – I spoke too soon. I hadn’t really taken a look at the program. Not only could I not configure the board/piece colours appropriately, but it wouldn’t remember the settings I’d put in place between games. Perhaps the registered version does, I don’t know.

After even more searching, I finally discovered Soft Chess, which really does meet most of my needs. The graphics are okay by default, it does remember settings from session to session, and it can have its difficulty lowered sufficiently that it’s not impossible for a beginner to win against it.

I have a really big pet peeve. That’s renting DVDs that are in full screen only. In fact I hate it so much that there are some movies I’ve wanted to see but have simply never watched because Blockbuster (Canada) only makes the full screen version available. I’ve complained about this to them too – not to any avail of course.

But lots of people still don’t get it. To them, they just don’t like the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. They find this annoying, or even think that there’s something wrong with the DVD and return it.

Well, let’s start off with a graphic example. Compare the following two still pictures from the movie A Few Good Men:

• Widescreen (2.35:1)
• Full Screen

(Why it’s “full screen”, two words, and “widescreen”, one word, has always seemed inconsistent and a little odd to me, but never mind…)

I got these images above from a Digital Bits article – which also shows other widescreen vs. full screen examples, and has more discussion on the subject.

It all comes down to what “aspect ratio” the movie was filmed in. This is a measure of the horizontal to the vertical. So 1.33:1 (a standard TV screen) means that the picture is a 3rd again as wide as it is tall.

Widescreen movies have a higher ratio – the two most common being 1.85:1 and 2.35:1 (although there are some others.) But the bottom line is that there ends up being a lot more horizontal to the picture than there is vertical.

Even if you don’t have a home theatre, you should be concerned about the aspect ratio. If you’re watching something that was filmed in widescreen, but the DVD you have is “full screen”, “standard”, or “pan & scan”, then you will have lost a lot of information. (The higher the aspect ratio of the film – how “widescreen” it originally was – the more you’ll lose.) This is clearly demonstrated by the pictures above.

Depending on the actual aspect ratio, you lose from a 3rd up to half of the picture, only being able to view a portion of what you’d actually have seen if you were in the theatre. With Pan & Scan, this “viewable window” is adjusted back and forth so as to give the viewer as much meaningful information as possible.

The first image, above, is how A Few Good Men was filmed, and how you would have seen it in the theatre. (Also how you’d see it if you bought the widescreen version and played it on a home DVD player or your computer.) But if you see it on TV (unless they’re showing the widescreen or “letterboxed” version) or buy the full screen / standard / pan & scan version of the DVD, you’d end up seeing the second image.

With so much of the picture chopped off, the only way that it can make any sense when there’s a conversation going on is for things to be edited so that the viewpoint “pans & scans” left and right in order to see missing pieces of the picture as it’s needed. (When, in reality, you should just be seeing everything at once without any left and right movement.)

With some movies it’s not really a “big” deal (although it always will be for me) but with others, especially those laden with special effects and panoramic scenes, it can serve to completely destroy any sense of what the movies about and what it’s trying to portray if you end up losing all of the filmed scenery.

I should also mention that what I really want isn’t widescreen per se, but simply to see it as it was filmed. For instance, if you take something that was filmed in a 1.33:1 ratio (such as all of our early 20th century movies, or most shows filmed for television) and force it into a widescreen format by stretching everything horizontally, it can end up being even more destructive to the viewing experience than watching a widescreen formatted film cut down to full screen. At least when you’re looking at something in full screen, even though parts it are missing it you still see it in the proper proportion. Having to look at something that’s been stretched width-wise, only in order to become widescreen, can be a disorienting and very unpleasant experience. This is also true of taking a widescreen picture and, rather than chopping off the ends to make it fit, squeezing it horizontally. I’ve seen at least one spaghetti western presented in that way – with everybody tall and thin – that was just awful.

This last consideration has led me to be in a slight quandry from time to time – trying to actually determine in what format it really was originally filmed. When one of my favourite movies, Truly Madly Deeply, came out on DVD I noted that it was only available in full screen – so I didn’t buy it. Over a month later, after some research, I discovered that it had been filmed to be presented on UK television and that 1.33:1 was the correct aspect ratio to the movie. In short, that’s just fine because I wasn’t missing anything by a full screen presentation after all. It’s always nice when the back of the DVD cover issues a disclaimer to this effect. For instance, Truly Madly Deeply’s back cover says “The Director’s intent is to show this film as it was originally photographed for BBC TV. The original aspect ratio is 1.33:1”. (I’d been ordering this movie online so didn’t get a chance to view this information as I would have if I’d looked at the actual DVD in a store.) But others aren’t quite so obvious. To this day, I still don’t know in what aspect ratio the movie Door To Door was filmed. (Despite the link saying “Widescreen” – another “faux pas” of the Amazon.ca site along the lines of the one mentioned in my previous journal entry, it’s wrong. The DVD itself is actually full screen and there is no disclaimer on the back to say that 1.33:1 was its original aspect ratio. I even went so far as to write to the distributor, Warner Home Video, because I liked the movie enough I would have bought it if I could have only figured out if I was buying the right version – but they couldn’t tell me.)

So – for all of those people who keep complaining about the annoying black bars at the top and the bottom of their screens – I have two comments. First, Blockbuster, and every other rental store, should print out the two pictures from above along with a brief description of what’s going on so as to educate everybody. Secondly, I just can’t wait for all of these people to finally buy widescreen TVs and pop in their full screen movies – then complain about the black bars at the left and right of their screens…

It is, at least, when it comes to Amazon.ca. I recently bought three DVDs – Searching For Bobby Fischer (in honour of Michelle’s new interest in the game), Noises Off! (a very funny comedy that I’ve been waiting to have released on DVD for some time now), and My Life, with Nicole Kidman and Michael Keaton, in one of his really good roles.

Now, the Web site clearly shows that My Life is presented on the DVD in both Full Screen and Widescreen. When I got the order, there was no mention of Widescreen at all, it only showed text describing Full Screen. I immediately suspected that something wasn’t kosher.

Try as I might I could not find any reference to a customer service number for Amazon Canada. The only option I had was to fill out a form to have my complaint / question emailed to somebody. I did that, then went for lunch. (Which also turned out to be a disappointment because several of the menu items I was used to being available at The Rude Native had been removed since the last time we’d visited.)

When I got home again, I did a quick Google search and came up with some information. Apparently, neither Amazon US nor Amazon Canada publish an actual customer service number on their sites. It was suggested that the US site does – but only on the screen you get right after you’ve purchased something. I can’t confirm if the Canadian site functions the same way or not – I’ve never bothered to look at its post-order screen for the phone number. However, I did find references, on Google, to the customer service numbers. Apparently, customer service deals with equally with both amazon.ca and amazon.com.

Here they are:

• Amazon (Canada): 1-877-586-3230
• Amazon (US): 1-800-201-7575
• Amazon (UK): +44-208-636-9200
• Amazon (International): 1-206-346-2992

Hopefully the above will help some other desperate sole track down how to get in personal contact with somebody.

I must say that, having actually found a number to call, my support experience was quite nice. Amber was friendly and understanding of my situation. I’m getting a replacement sent (hopefully in widescreen format this time) and have already printed out a postage-paid stamp I can attach to the new package – in which I’ll simply return my old copy of the movie. Hopefully it will work out better this time.

Lastly, I find it rather ironic that of the three DVD titles I’d ordered the one that happened to be wrong was “My Life”. How appropriate…