DREWspective

Just now, at work, I received a "bug" (read: feature request) to add those "are you sure" dialogue boxes to a script.

(If you’re unaware, at the place I’m currently working everything is a "bug". You might work in such a company.)

The prompts would come up when moving and removing items from a category, and it got me thinking;

When are these prompts necessary?

For example, one thing I do straight away on a fresh installation of Windows (after getting the prompt) is to disable the prompt for deleting items to the Recycle Bin. If you delete files one at a time, or in different locations, seeing messages come up frequently can annoy you. When I say delete, I mean delete damnit!

However, there is always a prompt for when I want to delete items permanently; a very critical move, and where I want to be absolutely sure I haven’t made a mistake.

Often, it can feel condescending to be asked if you’re sure you want to close a program or save a file. One good example is in Word, Excel, Photoshop or Illustrator, when you’ve saved a file before printing it - and then get asked if you want to save it again if you close it.

There are some programs that allow you to disable certain prompts, but in my opinion not enough.

I say, when a dialogue box is necessary is mostly up to the user; sometimes they’d just like to get on with things and take responsibility for their actions, while others want to - or have to - be hand held. Either way, there will be those critical occasions where a prompt is necessary.

I’d spent this Easter under the grip of "man flu".

Maybe it was because I’ve been working too hard on too many different things, or that I didn’t pull through with the things I was supposed to give up for Lent, but eventually I was convinced I deserved it. Right now, I’m managing a nasty chesty cough.

Something happened on Good Friday that I’d never expected. The fraud department of my bank called me up about a series of suspicious payments made using my innocent debit card.

I’d noticed there was something awry, when I’d tried to buy some aquarium supplies from my trusty pet store. I knew I had money in the bank, but the payment wouldn’t go through. Luckily I have a backup card with another account, so I’m able to survive.

It turns out that someone had tried to gamble using my card details. I couldn’t think of a single person who could have gotten hold of them outside of home… except for the guy in the US who sold me the polystyrene shapes.

Anyway, because whoever it was had "gained authorisation", my debit card was "blocked" on the spot.

While I really appreciate them notifying me (and luckily nothing left my account), the think that irks me is that the bank called on a Good Friday, knowing that there was another Bank Holiday looming, and that I’d have to wait around five working days for a replacement card.

If I didn’t have a backup card, I’d be in very deep shit right about now.

It finally went out on the 14th March (13th March in the USA - not the release date I was hoping for), but I have to share with you guys what Danielle Kennedy referred to as "the agony and the ecstacy" of my latest YouTube video: Best Chadwarden Parody Moments REMIX.

It took roughly three weeks to produce, which included:

• watching and downloading as many Chadwarden videos as I could;
• grabbing all the funny [enough] parts in Premiere;
• deciding on the order;
• making all the titles in Flash, complete with sounds;
• customising and rendering the model of the "PS Triple", from six different angles;
• so and and so forth.

Everything was ready to go on the 11th, which admittedly left me with an empty feeling inside.  I really felt that the already 25-minute long masterpiece was missing something, maybe a more personal touch.

But at the beginning of the final render, little brother cracked a line from another YouTube video that we’d recently seen:

"There’s more!"

and the saga continued, as I struggled to put together some extra footage. I spent the entire day on the 12th trying to think of some funny clips I could make. Because of sudden commitments, I was unable to make a start that same night; it would have to wait right up until release night.

Have you ever desperately wanted to get something done, but there’s a billion things literally standing in your way? Things like spending/wasting nine hours of your day at work, with two hours of travelling in one direction?

Well, of all days, that’s exactly what happened.

First thing was, I was late to work. (I think it was an hour late.) This place where I work at the moment, they’re very anal about spending nine hours locked up in an office, regardless of whether you actually have anything to do.

Leaving work at around 1830, it was time for the journey home. Funnily enough, the second train I’d intended to catch had been cancelled. That’s never happened before.

After catching the next train, it was reliance on an unreliable bus service to get home. I sure hope the [dumbass] people of London have the sense to vote Red Ken out this May.

So I got home, but little did I know the fun had just started.

I’d spent around two hours solid putting together the clips, disappointed that YouTube was being anal and not allowing access to a video I’d really wanted to use. That was the relatively easy part.

I began the final render, which for some unexplained reason stopped at around 80%. I soon realised that the partition was low on space, so I rendered again to another. After about 30 minutes, the video was rendered. It stood at a massive 5.44 GB.

Obviously I couldn’t upload something that big in a million years, so the next step was to shrink it. I used MediaCoder for the job, which did a faithful conversion in around 20 minutes, but again not without some hiccups.

The time was just before midnight, and I thought I’d made it.

But no! On the uploading page for YouTube, I discovered that my videos were restricted to 10 minutes only. On further discovery, I found out that they’d disabled the privilege for newer YouTube members, regardless of their account type.

How fucking anal; though they claim it’s to deter copyright infringers, for bona fide directors and filmmakers it’s nothing more than an inconvenience. James Rolfe (aka The Angry Video Game Nerd) was able to upload a 20-minute video not so long ago, so at the time I put it down to sheer favouritism.

But it doesn’t stop there!

Frantically searching around for a program that split movie files, the computer caught a very annoying worm. Some of you might have experienced the same one: on execution it immediately disables your firewall and any antivirus programs you may have, as well as Spybot S&D. It also prevents you from installing such programs to get rid of it, though an online scanner would probably work.

I eventually found a working program, which split the video successfully into three parts. It was around 1am, and I was pissed off at YouTube for inadvertently destroying my Windows installation.

The rest of the night was spent uploading two of the parts to YouTube; the third was uploaded later on in the morning.

So far I’ve had nothing but rave reviews on the video, and I am extremely proud of it. It was meant to be my last Chadwarden video - having made a total of nine altogether - but I am extremely tempted to come out of retirement.

http://www.betweenlines.co.uk

One of my real friends from uni had the idea of starting an e-zine. Wanting to be part of something grassroots, authentic and underground, I offered my support and skills; the above link is the result.

Let me tell you guys: the whole process—idea to implementation—took almost a year. Along with my other projects, like The Ignored Board, my own portfolio site and the long-awaited return of BadSoft Inc., it was, quite frankly, a nightmare to design and build.

Note that I’d said in the introduction that my friend had the idea for an e-zine. Initially I was aware that it was a music e-zine, but I had always been confused about the direction of the proposed site.

• What kind of music would it focus on?
• Was it going to be a hobby or commercial site?
• What kind of content would the site have?
• Who would be writing on it?
• What kind of audience?
• What kind of "feel" would the site have?
• What would the site be called?

Nobody knew the answers to these questions, until the bullshit was finally cut after months of talking. I’d decided enough was enough, and started to build a potential site. That’s when the answers came flooding in. (Some of you web developers, and probably even people outside new media, probably have an idea of what happened next.)

After a few months of designing then redesigning the site, with no blueprint or concrete idea of what direction the site would take (and for a while, not even a name for the site), I finally came up with what you see here:

Luckily, this design went down well with other people interested in the site.

If I’m honest, I’m not too keen on the name Between The Lines; a quick search on Google, or your favourite search engine, reveals a number of different sites with the same name, and very similar domain names, which would make it near impossible to gain a good search engine ranking. We were very lucky to find betweenlines.co.uk, which was probably the only combination left for sale.
I have a dislike for cheesy web site names: you know those ones where they pick two words out of the dictionary at random, stick them together and you have a name like moonfruit, facebook, gymgit, lemonsquid etc. Instead, I would have gone for a long, one-word site name for a music e-zine, which would be more memorable and hard-hitting.

There’s yet more work to do on the site: I eventually found out that the site will focus on art as well, as evident by the links for art and a gallery, as well as a music player and reviews section. Fortunately the site runs on WordPress, which is highly customisable and will hopefully be up to the challenge.

This project could have been less painful if it began with a clear direction.  Even when working on my own projects, I fall into the trap of not having a direction to move in.

But how many people, groups and companies embark on directionless projects every day?

How many project "leaders", managers and bosses order people around, when they have no idea what’s going on themselves?

I’ve written about this before, and have made my views known about it on many an occasion. But not on DREWspective. So here we go.

Following my best friend’s success with online dating, where he claims to have had no less than 15 dates as a result, I decided to give being much more proacitve a go. I signed up to the same dating site as he did and began interacting, as well as going speed dating, winking on Match.com and trying to get things going on Facebook.

Unfortunately—since the Internet is the same as going outside these days—the result for me was exactly the same as before: a whole load of "not interested"s and unreturned emails.

There’s been a lot of them recently, but the icing on the cake comes from two or three girls whom I arranged to do something with. At the last minute they fall silent on me, giving their excuses or no reason at all. But when they do surface, they’ve magically ended up with someone else.

Today’s topic is silent treatment, and I’m going to tell you why I think it’s an evil thing.

First, let me point out that I’m wholly against using silent treatment as a first resort. People who use silent treatment as a first resort deserve to burn in hell.

You’ve probably met people who keep things to themselves and won’t tell you what you want (or need) to know, building up like a pressure cooker until they finally scream and shout and level blame and abuse on you.  You’ve probably met those kinds of people who think they can do whatever they want, and hide whatever important information they want. Those people use silent treatment as a first resort.

Second, let me talk about why silent treatment itself is bad.

For me personally, silent treatment—especially from the opposite sex—is a sign of disrespect, and a lack of responsibility; they don’t respect you enough to give you an answer, and they don’t care what it would mean for you.

Imagine you tried to call someone with your last remaining credit, and they hung up on you. Imagine using your last 10p to send them a text message that they never respond to. How about writing a long, detailed email to someone who doesn’t send even a short one back?

There’s advice circulating around the dating community that guys have to send detailed emails to potential girls if they want to increase their chances of getting a response.  How many of you guys have spent valuable time writig individual emails to girls who’ve written those lazy, cut-and-paste profiles, and got nothing for it? Wouldn’t you feel deflated?

Lots of people say that they don’t respond, no matter what the circumstance or medium, because they don’t want to hurt their feelings. Bullshit. Have you ever stopped to think that not responding would hurt their feelings?

Fair enough, you could argue that some people wouldn’t like what they hear. That would depend on both parties: the person wanting to know should be ready to accept what’s said; the person with the answer has the responsibility of telling them in the best way possible.

Personally, I might not like the answer I get (because I prefer pepole to tell the truth rather than candy-coat things), but in the long run I have far more respect for people who tell me how it is to my face, than people who resort to games and silent treatment.

There may be times when silent treatment is necessary, for example whe someone won’t take the clearly-explained, verbal hint. I say it should always be used as a last resort.

Your thoughts, please.