Mom, dad, do you know what I'm looking at?

2008-04-08

Mom, dad, do you know what I'm looking at?

I've been enjoying Digital Arts's "i-Filter" campaign for weeks now, so I decided it was time to share.

Whoever directed this photo shoot was a genius. The girl's expression is pure gold, of course, but the rest of it is jammed full of symbolism too. Mom may have her back turned, but look at her apron and intra-kitchen positioning: she's not a bad or neglectful parent.

(Dad is absent, but that's still the default for the Platonic Ideal of an upper-class Japanese families, so he's not neglectful either. Also, clearly whatever job he's holding down has gotten them into a nice, roomy, modern, well-lit house.)

So, to summarize: Don't get cocky. It could happen to you. Your child is "always exposed to danger" (いつも危険にさらされています). And when disaster strikes, she will pull a face like this... and lean closer to the monitor.

Additional entertainment is provided by their Why Filtering? page, which presents a survey of 217 elementary school kids in which 53.9% said that they take care not to click on "suspicious-looking" (あやしげ) links, but only 30% try their best to avoid sites with "violent, sexual, or anti-social content". It follows that nearly 1 in 4 of the children surveyed do not consider violence, sex, or anti-social activity "suspicious" at all. Those are some jaded kids.

Obligatory language note: the ad contains the line "Shitteiru' kara 'shiteiru' e, which literally means "From 'knowing [about it]' to 'doing [something about it]'", with a weak pun on shitteiru/shiteiru (knowing/doing). This was I think popularized by the Advertising Council's 2007 Shitteiru o, shiteiru e ("[turn] 'knowing' into 'doing'") environmentalist spot.

Popularity factor: 11

Bill:

The RSS feed doesn't seem to be working. The last post I see there is "Commenting problem fixed."

Matt:

Worst administrator ever.

Andreas:

The feed works for me!

Bill:

Okay, it updated, but it doesn't look like any of my browsers are automatically detecting it.

Matt:

Yeah, it works now because I fixed it after receiving the heads-up from Bill. And I just added what I think will allow autodiscovery in most browsers. Twirling towards freedom!

Bill:

Yep, it's showing up in Firefox, Safari, and Camino (for Mac) but not, strangely, in Flock.

I'm a helper!

Matt:

Oh, man, I'll never hear the end of it if I'm not Flock-compatible. Can you give me an example of a website for which autodiscovery does work in Flock?

Bill:

Okay, it's working now on my iMac at work, but wasn't on my Powerbook last night at home. An Intel/PowerPC difference? Sounds like a teen mystery!

Bill:

Okay, I think I have this sorted out now:

If I go to no-sword.jp/blog, the RSS shows up fine:

http://tinyurl.com/4d66el

If I go to the individual post, the RSS shows up fine:

http://tinyurl.com/3lsq8a

But, if I go to the comments link, before looking at the individual post, it doesn't:
http://tinyurl.com/3vjoul

And if I look at the individual post link, then go back and look at it using the comments link, it does show up. Perhaps the browser is remembering it?

This doesn't show up in Firefox or Safari (both Mac), so maybe it's a Flock bug.

I'd also like to point out what a huge frickin' nerd I am.

Matt:

It surely must be a Flock bug; the comments link is the same as the individual post link except with an internal #bookmark. But that's some nice detective work and no mistake.

How do you like Flock, by the way?

Bill:

After about a year of enjoying Camino, I've switch to Flock as my primary browser. The integration features are great: I can keep track of Facebook, email, and Twitter easily. In fact, Twitter was something I didn't use that much until I started using Flock (good thing/bad thing?).

Probably their best feature is the web clipboard where you can drag links, pictures, text clippings and save them until you want to post them in a blog or email, both of which are integrated into the browser. Email can be sent using an app or your service's web interface (if it's a big one like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.). You can also upload pictures to Picasa and Flickr, and it has a blogging feature that's somewhat buggy with my individual Wordpress install (double posts are not uncommon) but it's nice for composing.

You can subscribe to RSS feeds using the browser, or a web feed like Google Reader and such.

Downsides: they apparently have a deal with Yahoo: it's the default search engine. The media (picture) takes a bit of finagling to show me just my feeds, rather than the including the stock ones.

And it's a Mozilla build, so it supports Firefox extensions.

2008-04-08