Even for the experienced presenter, giving a deputation to a City Hall committee gets you flustered. Why?

• You’ve only got five minutes. Most people do not practise to make sure they stay within the time limit.
• Most people aren’t good public speakers. They wing it and go off topic, or they slavishly read from notes.
• You feel like this is your big chance, but in the back of your mind you fear you’re going to be ignored.
• City councillors are not looking at you while you’re talking. They may be half-listening, but you pick up on the fact you aren’t making eye contact.
• You’re seated at an inquisition-style desk. You have a tendency to lean; bad posture leads to bad diction. And what do you do with your hands? Oddly, sitting gives you one less outlet for tension, which you could at least channel into keeping yourself upright were you standing at a microphone or podium.

The foregoing is, at least, my explanation for why I am a natural on a real stage or on TV but a breathy amateur in five-minute deputations. I’m trying to stop being embarrassed about it, since it happens to everybody.

Design sites don’t do Web standards. We know that already. But can’t they even copy-edit?

Adrian Shaughnessy wrote “Wolff Olins: Expectations Confounded,” published at the Creative Review site, a diabolical nightmare of misaligned blocks and flashing doodads. (Excerpted; note dashes, hyphens.)

They have complained about not being listened to in the way other professionals are – accountants, lawyers, management consultants. But most of all, designers have complained that business doesn’t take design seriously.

In the 1980s, smart design groups reali[z]ed that the way to muscle into the boardrooms was to downplay design and creativity, and to elevate strategy and research. The result of this shift in emphasis was that the business world started to take design—and designers—more seriously.

So it seemed like a good moment to see if Wolff Olins (part of the Omnicom media conglomerate) has found the secret of being taken seriously by top-flight clients and yet still managing to produce work that is successful, news – worthy and distinctive.

Today we see it much more about the relation – ship between the corporation and the consumer, and the corporation being positioned in the real world.

They have to sell their ideas to hard-nosed businesses and public bodies drowning in account – ability and evaluation criteria. High-end creativity is not easy in this environment, and it’s rare to find it.

It’s as though this were exported from a Quark document, with soft hyphens converted to hard hyphens. Or it’s as though any word whose morphemes are also full words was separated with space-endash-space. You get different versions of this document onscreen and in print, and different versions again in different browsers. (The print stylesheet, straight out of 1997, uses giant underlined Times Bold.)

Upon checking, they’re using the soft-hyphen character, U+00AD, which they should know not to use. Nonetheless, a decision needs to be made against nospace-emdash-nospace (which doesn’t work online and only barely works sometimes in print) and in favour of space-endash-space.

As with design magazines, design blogs are unnaturally difficult to read. Design sites are to the Web what Republicans are to blacks: They try and try to talk a good game, but at inconvenient moments the truth of their hatred pops out.

Again.

I need:

• Someone who understands the is_page() syntax to remove posting footers from pages (like About).
• Remove archives to a separate page. I would be OK with removing the links to months and replacing them with instructions on how to hack an URL. (I chose the /year/month/day/slug notation for a reason. I have custom pages for all intermediate steps. Try it and see.)
• A real footer like real people have. This will require actual graphic design and proper CSS.

I suppose it would be nice if we could comb through 1,565 postings and remove any Transitional ephemera, but really, does it matter?

As evinced in a podcast interview, Steve Albini seems genial, articulate, and aware that such a thing as computers exist. (He spontaneously uttered the word baud.)

Albini is a record producer. How does he produce records?

If you think about like records that are made over a span of months for superstars, like, those are horrible records, you know? And I’m not trying to be a contrarian here. I think everybody would agree that like the big blockbuster records that are the superproduced records that are like a year in the works, like, those are all pretty awful, you know? Whereas records that you knock out in a weekend – like, a lot of those are pretty good records, and more importantly, if you work on 50 or 100 records a year, you have a much better likelihood of a couple of them being really great experiences than if you work on two records a year. […]

Like, most bands, if you allow them to do what they do naturally, you’ll get a pretty good representation of the band. And, generally speaking, it’ll be a satisfying experience. When you start deconstructing a band into its component parts, and parsing their music out into lyrics and verses and choruses and riffs and bridges and turnarounds and fills and modulations and stuff, then, you know, you work on all of these elements individually and then try to reassemble them into a sort of a simulacrum of what the band was doing organically, right? My experience has been that that makes freakish records that don’t represent the bands very well.

Unless you’re Andrew W.K.

If you take a presentable woman, just a normal, good-looking woman, and she walks into your bedroom and disrobes, that will probably have the desired effect on you. I’m guessing it would. On me it would… If instead you had a team of experts bring in, like, a good arm and another one would bring in a really nice buttock and another one would bring in a good thigh, and then start bolting them together through a laborious process that required a team of experts, you know, I’d have a hard time believing that that assembled mannequin of – a simulacrum of a good-looking naked woman would actually be as effective as the simple presentation. […]

As a listener, I appreciate it the most when I feel they are communicating to me directly as a listener and I get to experience them full-bore – Naked Lady Walks into Room, you know? Like all at once, bang, I get it all. And I feel like an awful lot of the music business, the professional end of music presentation, is spent trying to elaborate on these things…. You end up making these bizarre modifications to something that, on its own, is pretty awesome. […]

I feel like things as they are have about as much awesomeness as they are capable of having. And you can’t imbue awesomeness into something that actually sucks. And in its way, something that sucks full-bore sucking at me is an honourable experience. It’s an honourable exchange, you know? […]

I think pretty much all decent records are made with, if not complete disregard, with significant disregard for everybody that isn’t in the band, you know? When I hear incredible records, I feel the people involved in those records were involved in some kind of a mania that was possessing them and that only they could really grasp, and if they tried to dumb it down for other people, it wouldn’t be as awesome because it wouldn’t be as complete an exposure of their mania.

1. University of the Air
2. The Pig & Whistle
3. Uncle Bobby
4. The Trouble with Tracy
5. Definition
6. The Star Lost
7. Rent-a-Goalie, Charlie Jade, Across the River to Motor City (tie)

Worst industrially-Canadian TV shows

1. Doc, The Littlest Hobo (tie).

Especial extra feature

Amerikanski TV show that has no business being so good: Dirt. And not just because I adore Ian Hart. (I am the only person whose favourite television series of recent memory are, in order, BSG, Intelligence, and Dirt.)

I have previously dissected the claims of the Creators’ Copyright Coalition. The group is more properly known as the Cranky Copyright Coalition for its overweening attitude that you should be paying their members more for your use of their materials, since such use is probably illegal. (Every time I think of them, I combine the concepts of “John Lorinc” and “asshole.” I know that’s unfair.)

They’ve come out with a position paper that really does call for a levy on everything that can save or record a copyrighted file. (That means you’d pay an extra fee for an iPod. Or a computer!) They call, furthermore, for copyright filtering at the level of the ISP. (This has never been thought through adequately. Essentially everything transmitted through the Internet – not just the Web, the Internet – is copyrighted.)

More worrisome is their insistence that certain exemptions be tightened up or just repealed. (We are exhorted to “[r]esist the expropriation of rights through the use of exemptions granted users.”) The last time exemptions came up, the Coalition whined that blind people get to read alternate-format books without a veto by the author. I explained that the Copyright Act gives the copyright holder the initial right to profit commercially from alternate formats (and the exclusive right to create large-print books).

But if the holder doesn’t step up to the plate, it is not an infringement for certain other bodies to create, for example, a Braille or audio recording of a book. Here, “is not an infringement” mean “it’s perfectly legal and we don’t need to ask first.” As such, the alternate-format exemption corrects a failure of the marketplace and makes real the constitutional rights of people with disabilities. Such correction is imperfect, because if the copyright holder does not produce a large-print version, no one else may.

The new Cranky report makes no mention of the alternate-format exemption. I left a (mistyped) comment at – inevitably – Michael Geist’s blog asking for a public declaration that the Creators’ Copyright Coalition had no plans to call for the extinguishing of the rights of people with disabilities. No response.

So I mailed in a question for attribution:

The CCC has completely misunderstood the exemptions for people with perceptual disabilities. Does CCC intend, at any time in the foreseeable future, to publicly oppose that existing exemption, call for its repeal, or somehow ask that it be rewritten, e.g., to give “creators” any kind of veto over it?

Or should I interpret CCC’s silence as meaning CCC has realized its error?

Again: No response.

These people are so peevish and obsessed with getting paid that, frankly, an absence of a no reads to me as a yes. (They also act like corporate copyright bullies, whose general message is “Thanks for figuring out a new method of distributing content! We’ll take over from here.” Then they’ll try to bill you five bucks for having read those sentences, which self-destruct if you don’t pay up.)

I suspect the Creators’ Copyright Coalition is biding its time and waiting for the right moment to call for the repeal of an exemption that they feel “expropriates” their members’ rights. If they do, it will be amusing to watch them get knocked off their high horse.

After declaring the site of Metrolinx, né the Greater Toronto Transit Authority, Failed Redesign of the Year, I decided to act journalistically and file an information request. (They’re a public agency and they are subject to disclosure.)

I am looking for documentation of the following:

• Renaming the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority (GTTA), including any list of candidate names (in order of preference if given).
  • Identity of any outside naming consultants.
  • Projected and actual cost of the GTTA renaming project.
• Redevelopment, relaunching, and/or redesign of the GTTA Web site (eventually under the domain Metrolinx.com). In specific, I request documents (including warnings and in- and out-of-house assessments) pertaining to compliance with Web standards and accessibility requirements; qualifications of developers and/or designers used in the project, whether inside or outside; identities of outside developers and/or designers, if any; and plans for and results of user testing.
  • Choice of Microsoft platforms for Web development instead of other platforms, including justifications.
  • Projected and actual cost of the new Web site.

Now, I know that FOI coordinators love to make things as time-consuming, difficult, and expensive as possible for applicants. They also love to force applicants to appeal to the IPC. One method of accomplishing the former is printing out electronic documents to occupy as many pages as possible. Since all these documents will be available in electronic form (E-mails very much are documents of interest in this request), you can simply save them as plain-text files, PDFs (not scanned images of pages; tagged PDFs preferable; no security features activated), or, if necessary, unpublished file formats like Microsoft Office files.

You can simply E-mail files as attachments…. (The Act does not forbid electronic dissemination of documents.) I’m sure you’ll prefer to burn documents onto CD (not any kind of floppy disc), as that would delay the matter further and incur fees. If absolutely necessary, you can do that. I don’t want and won’t pay for top-postings of respondent E-mails, a concept you may have to look up that you certainly [carry out] yourself.

I’m sure you will uphold the letter and spirit of the Act. I’m also sure you would have done everything I warned against in the previous paragraph had I not asked for other treatment. I enclose the $5 fee.

It got bounced around quite a bit. Then one day I received an envelope with a stamp in the corner. It showed my address and a return address, both printed in Helvetica. The letter – ink-jet-printed (including logotype), set in Arial, and signed by W. Michael Fenn, CEO – claimed that just the research time would run $180, which “does not include preparation time, photocopies or CDs.” That adds up to 12 full hours of research. We all know that Metrolinx has the documents readily at hand (in MS Word or PDF formats), so this is sophistry.

In accordance with legislation, the letter informed me the fee could be waived under certain conditions, the only relevant one of which is handing over one’s bank records. (And then they could still say no.) One might also appeal the fee, which costs $25 right there.

Oh, and the whole thing was passed off as “an ‘interim decision’… not binding on the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority (Metrolinx).”

So: After blowing taxpayer money renaming themselves, and after blowing even more of it buying intrinsically defective and unrepairable Microsoft products, they want me to pay them to explain how it happened.

W. Michael Fenn, go fuck yourself.

Now: What else does Metrolinx have up its sleeve? Well, a new Web site, for one, although I would prefer that someone file a human-rights complaint first to maximize their pain. Next, you may wonder why the Toronto Transit Camp Web site was so recently updated so many months post-Camp. (I cleaned up the paragraphing after it was updated, but I’ve got nothing to do with it otherwise.) Could that be an indication of upcoming events?