Recent New York transplant Hams and I kept Formal Friday alive today in the New York office, which was rather empty due to the impending holiday weekend.

Flickr groups are normally nothing to get too excited about (with one possible exception), but this is my first one, and I’m rather proud of the premise (and surprised that it didn’t already exist).

It’s called “Won’t Budge”, and it features immovable objects and the people who attempt to move them. So far there aren’t many contributions, but I know it’s a popular theme in the world of amateur photography, so I’m trying to get the word out about it. Feel free to contribute something if you have it. Below is a random sampling of what we’ve got so far.

Articles like this really piss me off because it gives the IT world a bad name and adds to the paranoia people feel about IT staff members. It really does more harm than good. It does however raise some pretty interesting points about data security in general.

Lets say, for example, that you’re a large business that relies on some mail server to keep your business functioning properly. Now said server uses a master “Administrator” account to grant privileges, and generally administer the server. Then after the administrator account is created it delegates roles to people based on their needs, so you have your database guy, and he gets access to your encrypted email store so that he can back it up, your user create guy that creates and manages users, etc. Then you LOCK the administrator account, you assign it a password that is insanely long and impossible to remember. Then you print that password out, fold the paper, and then laminate that folded piece of paper and stick it in a vault. Then you stick that smaller vault inside another vault that has two keys. You give the combination of the smaller inner vault to the CEO or President of the company. The keys to the outer vault go to two other major share holders or Executives, and thus the vault can not be opened with out the consensus of the board.

Then your administrator account is protected, and no one has full, unhindered access to the mail server. Simple right? and this isn’t even an original idea, I think heard it in a movie. but it makes total sense!

Its like when a few months ago, the network admin for the city of San Francisco held the entire network hostage because he was fired. No one should be allowed unlimited access, not even the executives or the owners, anyone can act maliciously on a network. Like the ol’ IT adage says: sometimes your greatest threat is within. deep right?

Kevin salutes from Raincouver.

Daniel following suit in New York San Francisco.

Okay, a longish one again.

So, I was talking to this friend of mine. Yo is looking for interactive producers. And yo said something really intelligent, and at first I thought “oo this is an interesting insight” and it totally was, but, ultimately, I realized it was a bit misguided. But then I realized it touched on something really interesting, namely education and this wacky industry of interactive advertising, and in a couple different ways.

Lemme explain that.

SO, there is a lack of good interactive producers out there. Especially for agencies. This is totally true. They’re insanely hard to find. Like to the point where I could probably name, from memory, over half the good interactive producers in America. There are fewer Dressage champions in America than there are good interactive producers. I won’t dispute that point. Man, if you’re a kid trying to get into advertising and want to make a killing, become an interactive producer. Oh, right, except you can’t, because nowhere in America do we actually teach anyone HOW to be an interactive producer. VCU’s tryin’ to get it together, and they’ll have it in a few years, but, really, you can’t go to school for it right now. Oh and there are no books about it, either. I’ve been meaning to right one (though lord knows my producerly ways have been gettin’ shabby as they’re tainted with other aspects of the industry these days), but, like all half-decent interactive producers, I’ve been too busy to do it. As an aside, Amanda, or Mike or any of you want to write this book together, we could make a mint.

ANYWAY, my friend made an interesting comment while we were jointly bemoaning the lack of good interactive producers. Yo said “You know, we have all these great creatives, and they come to their producer with their good ideas and the producer just bogs them down with all of these questions. ‘how many pages?’ ‘Flash or HTML?’ etc etc. And it totally stifles their creativity. It’s not like this with Broadcast. Creatives can just think about the idea. The producers do the rest. We need producers who will help get the thing done.”

I think there’s a lot of intelligence in this comment, and I think it’s a solid hallmark of a great interactive producer – help ‘em get the shit done. Be a team partner, and figure out the hard stuff.

BUT, I think there’s another point in there. My friend’s agency has made a logical decision – to hire creatives who focus on the idea, and then get them the support they need to execute on the idea. This makes sense, but I believe it is a bit of a myopic view of the situation.

If we take a look back and survey the environment we’re in, we’ll realize that these traditional creatives aren’t coming to their broadcast jobs blind. Every kid in America knows what a camera is. They know what lights are, and mics, and green screens. Most every kid in America could tell the difference between a CGI effect and a real one, and could probably even tell you when to use which. Every kid in America can spot a big budget film from a low budget film. Everyone knows what a script is. Most people know what a storyboard is.

The tools and trades of making broadcast advertising is ingrained in our national conscience. We all know the basics. A broadcast creative can thank hollywood for giving them a basic grasp of their field for free.

In interactive, however, this is not the case. Yet.

Would the above analogy work if a traditional agency hired creatives who didn’t have a clear idea of what a movie camera was, and when they went to their producer with an idea and the producer said “sounds good hey get me a script or a storyboard.’” they said “what’s that?”

Would a traditional agency creative be able to keep his job if he kept proposing ideas that were manifestly obviously 200 million dollars to create?

I can see it now: “okay, we’ll get every living soul in India as an extra, right? They can’t be that expensive, then we’ll launch a rocket with a giant – what are they called? cameras? yeah. one of those – with a giant camera on it and we’ll film all those extras from space while everyone in India waves at the camera. It’s never been done before. And like people-powered stuff is big right now. What? catering? What? There aren’t any cameras for rent in space?* Oh, well, I mean, I dunno. Why you asking me all this. It’s your job to figure it out. I’m just about the idea.“

This is an absurdist extension, but barely. This is the kind of shit people hear from traditional, or media agnostic creatives all the time.

In 1930-whatever, when JWT decided to make the first broadcast commercial, and it went over well, do you think they said “hey that went over well, let’s make everyone do them now without re-training them?” Well, hell, maybe they did, but I’m sure that in the great migration of American advertising from print to broadcast, a lot of people had to scramble and learn some new stuff, or they stayed relegated to print, which at time, they probably thought was still going to be the big thing, and these wacky kids, whatever.

Before schools started pumping out more film students than you can shake a stick at, before the talkies became ingrained in our nation’s conscience, and before Coppola, Lucas, Tarantino and Sony brought filmmaking to the masses, people were either trained for it, or they scrambled, caught up, and learned the technical skills needed. Or they stayed in print.

So sure, have creatives be creatives across all media, but bear in mind there is a basic level of knowledge that is needed to be an effective creative in any medium. Much of that we already have in print, and in broadcast, but not necessarily in interactive. Yet. The kids are totally different, by the way. The kids have arguments now about Flash vs. AJAX and all sorts of stuff. Send your creatives to some classes. Start classes in-house. Give your creatives the same basic level of understanding of the medium that hollywood gave them about film. Hell, do it for print, too. Teach ‘em about dot gain, while you’re at it, please.**

Or, you know, you could ignore it. But just know that to someone who knows this stuff, being exasperated at questions like “how many pages do you think the site might be” is the equivalent of being exasperated by a producer who asks you how long your spot might run. Both parties gotta come to the table here.

I’m sorry but it’s true. Don’t feel bad. I started in print too. It’s not that hard.

I was away for a week last week so I missed this, BUT IT IS FREAKING INSANE.

Diebold has admitted that it was faulty software that caused evoting machines to drop HUNDREDS of votes on their touch screen voting machines.

Uh. HELLO! is anyone else freaking out that this company has made and sold a metric shit-ton of these machines? and that a good part of the United States will be actually voting on them in November?

a wee bit of backstory: originally they suspected the vote counting servers as the drop point, pointing the blame squarely at McAfee and their virus protection suite. Now Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold, says:

In-freaking-sane. Ok really, how hard is it to make some software that counts how many times someone presses a button. I wrote a javascript to do it in 10th grade, and that didn’t drop any counts. Problem really is that Premier/Diebold rely on proprietary technology, and they offer no transparency in their source code. If they released the source code, then the community as a whole could view and judge it, and find these “logic errors” before they are even an issue. More eyes = less mistakes. No one person ever writes perfect code (ok maybe Toby does, but that dude is a machine).

I realize there are tons of intricacies in these systems, but I can think of at least 5 ways to simplify the whole system and make it safer, more secure, and more transparent. And if you’d like those ideas feel free to hit up newbiz-inquiries@barbariangroup.com, heh.

So, I kind of snubbed nbc.com for the olympics for other available, non-silverlight sources, but I had read a (shockingly) good review of demconvention.com and its HD feed of the Democratic Convention on Gawker. Then I got to my New York apt and tried to find an over-the-air signal for my television and there was none, so I was getting panicky and really wanted to watch the DNC, so I said “okay, I’ll listen to gawker and try demconvention.com.”

Turns out the thing was Silverlight. I hate downloading plug-ins, makes me feel all 1998 n stuff. But i persevered and downloaded two plugins – one for Silverlight and one for Move Networks – and went for it.

OMG, it was amazing. I watched all manner of Democratic congressperson and soldier in amazing HD, streaming, in real time. And not only that, I was in awe of it’s auto-correction and bandwitdh optimization management. The stream would effortlessly switch from HD to standard resolution to low res, depending on bandwidth, and sometimes you could see both streams in the same frame. Really solid stuff. Color me impressed.

Day three, however, made me realize that it had some problems. I’m not sure whether the problems were with the fact that I was watching more pre-canned video than live (and maybe they are on slower servers), or if my neighborhood (my roomie and I share straight up standard Time Warner Cable Internet), or my machine, but the whole thing was unwatchable, and this is where the problems started cropping up:

1) There’s no option to say “okay, silverlight, just play the low res version already I don’t really care if there’s a HD version available I’d just like it to stream k thnx bye.” I am assuming this would go in the prefs panel.

2) speaking of the prefs panel, it shows up with a right click (control-click on a Mac) when you’re at standard size, but in large size, it does not. Weirdly, and additionally, the only way to get out of full-screen is by typing control-click, which is not documented anywhere. They need a little instructional blurb, like flash, letting me know how to get out of full screen mode.

3) Silverlight is an absolutely insane resource hog. I didn’t bother looking the first day, but the thing sucks up like 80% of both of my cores on my MacBook Air. The rest is taken up by kernal_task, which is a finder-level process, but i can’t help but think Silverlight is directing the task, because when you quit Safari, it all goes back down to zero.

4) God help you if you have Growl installed, because it slows Silverlight down to an unusable extent.

5) It’s play/pause controls are woefully unresponsive, and it doesn’t seem to let you hit pause and let the buffer get much bigger than you need, so you can actually watch things without htem stuttering

6) Also, it does weird things like not close when you close the window, and the video kept playing like a full ten seconds after I closed the browser window and quit it. Weird.

Still, though, this thing’s a beta, and the Mac version is obvs. not Microsoft’s top priority, and with those things in mind, I was impressed.

The Democrats really need to hire some user interface designers, though, because whoever designed the player and video clip nav was, well, not hack, but not as UX-conscious as they could have been.

We bought a Drobo to add some additional space on a sever. and its awesome!

We went with 3 1tb drives, for a total of 1.8tb of data. That leaves us a bay to expand and allows us some breathing room should one of the drives in there fail.