Brian Kerr

Some recent searches that brought people here, with links and commentary as appropriate.

annual film farm ann arbor

Film Farm is an annual student film competition hosted by M-Flicks. This year’s Film Farm X was held last night (Friday, April 6) at the Michigan Theater. Attendees vote for their favorite films in several categories, which are then showered with micro glory.

kabob palace ann arbor

Kabob Palace was a restaurant near U-M campus in downtown Ann Arbor. It closed in February 2007, but the kitchen and service started to fall apart long before that. From about 2001 to 2004, Kabob Palace was my go-to spot for big groups, since there was plenty of seating and friendly service. They made excellent mjaddra, simple and tasty.

oddmuse analytics

OddMuse is a very cool wiki engine with a modular design — a svelte core backed by a bunch of extensions which add particular kinds of features or black magic. If you want to collect analytics for your OddMuse wiki, just use Google Analytics. A bigger problem is making sense of the data you’ve just collected. By setting up clever conversion goals that track progress through your wiki and, in particular, your wiki login / edit / preview / save cycle, you can differentiate between visitors who show up and read versus those who actually make changes.

osx keyboard navigation menubar

Hit ⌃F2 to select the menu bar using a keyboard. You can then press arrow keys to navigate around, and type the names of menus or commands to jump to them. You can remap this keyboard shortcut in the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab of the Keyboard & Mouse settings in your System Preferences.

If you are a Quicksilver person, another (arguably easier) way to do this is to set up a trigger that looks like this:

and map it to a key combination of your choice.

slicehost jabber

Just do it! One fun use case: if you don’t feel like running mail on a slice, just send status or update messages via jabber.

(tags: annarbor feedback-loop lunch mac movies slicehost wiki)

• IMDB: Towers Open Fire (1963)

From Those crazy “cut-ups” Burroughs, Gysin, and Balch restored to their rightful place in avant-garde film history in Bright Lights:

Towers Open Fire is a collage of the main themes and situations or “routines” that appear in Burroughs cut-up novels of the period. The soundtrack accompaniment is a mixture of recordings made by Burroughs on a cheap Grundig tape recorder and resembles many of the cut-up tape experiments achieved in collaboration with Ian Somerville. The rest was done in a studio, with some Arab music used. The film depicts society as crumbling in the form of a stock exchange crash, shots of which were purchased from Pathé news. Members of “a board” are dematerialized, and Burroughs plays an omnipresent role in the film (not least as the victim of an “orgasm attack” in which he leaps through a window and shoots family photos with a ping-pong gun).

(tags: collective movies narratives politics process writing)

Some of our favorite places to find free movies on U-M campus:

The Center for Japanese Studies runs summer and fall film series each year. The series for this fall: “Nippon Connection Festival On Tour.” Selections from the Nippon Connection film festival will be shown Friday nights at 7:00 in the Askwith Auditorium in Lorch Hall. This series is free, and has already been posted to the Ann Arbor upcoming metro.

M-Flicks already held its first event of the term this weekend. Look to M-Flicks for free showings of some classics and favorites, along with the occasional sneak preview of an upcoming film. The sneaks are free, but require that you pick up tickets in advance. M-Flicks screenings are held somewhat irregularly and usually in the Natural Science Auditorium. There’s a tentative list of movies for this fall with dates and times still TBD. Finally, M-Flicks hosts the annual Film Farm student filmmaking showcase.

The Department of Screen Arts and Cultures, formerly Film and Video Studies, is always hosting screenings of some sort. The fall term projectorhead series (the link is to last year’s schedule) has been fun, but this fall’s schedule — if one is forthcoming — hasn’t been announced yet.

(tags: annarbor movies umich)

Terminator 2 — 70mm print — at the Michigan Theater this afternoon. “The future is not set.”

(tags: movies)

Tonight, MovieLens greeted me with:

Welcome to Movielens!

We have added a new feature to MovieLens called tagging.

What is a tag?

A tag is a word or phrase you add to a movie.

Why are tags useful?

• You can apply tags to create customized lists of movies.
• You can search by tags.
• You can use tags to express yourself.
• Tagging is fun!

This excellent introduction is followed by a two-sentence description of the tagging interface. MovieLens loads three movies into the instructions page — two you’ve already rated, and one you haven’t — so you can try out the new interface right next to the instructions. (See a screenshot of this part of the page.)

I was really impressed by how well the tagging feature was introduced. Compare the instructions above with the del.icio.us/help/tags document, or with Flickr’s tag FAQ. Nobody is going to read the stuff from del.icio.us or Flickr: it’s too verbose and abstract, and not situated in a place where people are likely to see and react to it.

Since the general proposition of tagging is still pretty new, it was encouraging to see another service rolling out tags while giving some attention to making it a comfortable fit.

(tags: movies web)

In every dopey little college town, the fall term brings with it fall film series. Here’s what I’ve found at U-M — am I missing anything?

Interior Visions: The Subjective Camera in Narrative Film is a series that Film and Video Studies is running at the Michigan Theater. The theme appears to be more or less “Brian-bait” due to the prominence of the Whodunit? Idunit genre. The downside? It’s no freebie.

Three Films is the Center for Japanese Studies fall film series. There is no detectable theme to this series, the name of which suffers from an off-by-seven bug.

M-Flicks and Projectorhead are in apparent hibernation.

(tags: annarbor movies umich)

See Pleix Films. “Simone,” “Sometimes,” and “Netlag” are my favorites.

(tags: movies music)