The James L. Knight foundation just released their findings after conducting a study about US high school students and the first amendment. If you thought it's bad today from a civil liberties perspective, it's only going to get worse.
January 2005 Archives
Turns out MGM has been releasing DVD's for god knows how long in "widescreen" by taking the fullscreen version and cutting off the top and bottom of the image. So when you buy a widescreen DVD made by MGM you're actually getting less of the original image than even a fullscreen version. Fuckers. Well some greedy lawyers put together a class action lawsuit so now you can send your DVDs back to MGM and trade them for either $7.10 or another DVD from a list of 325 titles. I don't know what is in this list of titles, if they're the same DVD's but not fucked up or if they are other MGM DVDs that aren't screwed up.
You can find out if you have any of these screwed up DVDs by reading the list of eligible DVDs (5 of my 30 DVDs were in the list) and you can request a claim form by calling 1-800-285-2168 and speaking your name and address to an automated system so they can mail you the form and pre-paid mailing labels.
I'll be getting a claim form soon and will try to find out what this "list of 325 titles" is that one would choose from to replace your existing DVDs. You can find more information here. It's worth checking out in that about 15% of my DVDs were this pan and scan cropped situation. What a fucking lame company.
So for those of you who were friends with Craig Brewer at College Park, this may be pretty amazing. Craig's movie "Hustle and Flow" was screened at Sundance on Saturday and went over fabulously. He's sold the film rights to Paramount for 18 million dollars. Paramount is actually starting up a new film subsidiary for this film, in order to make more independent films.
You can read any of the many news stories about this or you can see and read about Craig this week on Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Hardball with Chris Matthews, The New York Times, The LA Times, USA Today, Variety, E!, and People.
I guess that I should have assumed anyone willing to go out on the tennis courts with us at 7AM in the freezing cold was driven enough to accomplish this.
So we've moved to the new server (again). I've got a lot of stuff working. Everything that isn't working isn't a show stopper and I'll work on getting those things up and running this week. I'll write a more detailed account of what's new tomorrow. If you see broken stuff, report it here
I've been reading up on Google AdWords trying to think of an easier way of covering our hosting costs, but because of the way the AdWords system is structured, there's now way to have any idea how much money the ads make until you put them up. It has to do with the fact that the advertisers bid for the ads and other reasons that I don't yet fully understand. So I've tossed up an ad on the main page of CH as well as on the main page of my blog to see what happens. I want everyone to keep in mind this is just for testing to find out how it works, I'm not adding advertising to the site. Anything like that would be discussed with the community first. So nobody fret. It is kinda neat how the ads are related to whatever is in the web page that you're looking at. So for the next week or so enjoy text ads on the site.
Here's an example :
