Drive-in Contest

As I mentioned earlier, the Brackley Drive-in opens for the season this weekend.

To celebrate, I’m giving away a carload pass to four lucky and talented readers of this website who answer a special skill-testing question. The pass entitles you to take a car full of your friends and family to the show this weekend.

To enter, please email the answer to the following question to enterme@reinvented.net.

Special Skill-testing Question: the film Changing Lanes opens this weekend at the Drive-in. It stars actor Ben Affleck. What is Ben Affleck’s middle name?

Email your answers by Noon on Friday, May 9; winner announced shortly thereafter. We’ll let you know if you’ve won by email. You can attend the show Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Your carload pass will be waiting at the box office. Winners drawn at random from all correct entries.

Search Engine Watch

Current top 10 web searches that are bringing people to this website:

  1. toby mcguire
  2. reinvented
  3. andy richter controls the universe
  4. netscape vs internet explorer
  5. jay chiat
  6. peter gzowski
  7. what does sic mean
  8. exif editor
  9. administrative professionals day
  10. public shaming
Perhaps I should have a contest in which the task would be to come up with a short story that uses all of the phrases.

Missing Information

The most common thing that businesses leave off their websites (or hide so deep as to be effectively left off) is their address and phone number. Go take a look and you’ll see what I mean. It’s like telling customers “go away, we don’t want to talk to you!”

For airlines, especially smaller ones with a limited market, the most frequently left out important information is “here’s where where why fly.”

JetBlue doesn’t suffer from this problem: click our cities on the front page and, presto!, you get a route map.

America West on the other hand makes it pretty well impossible to find out where they fly. There is a route map available, but to find it you have to look under About AWA / Company Profile / Route Map. Yes, of course, that’s just where you thought it would be.

It’s Drive-in Season!

Brackley Drive-in Projection Room My favourite client, at least in terms of how I get paid, is Brackley Drive-in. While other clients might pay me more (and with real money!), the Drive-in pays me with a season pass for Catherine and I.

And as it’s the middle of May and getting warm, I’m happy to announce the opening of the Brackley Drive-in for another year: the season opens this Friday, May 10 with a double bill of Changing Lanes and We Were Soldiers.

And if that’s not enough, we’ve updated the Drive-in website (handily available at www.drivein.ca for your browsing pleasure) too with a new “contemporary 50s” look.

So go get your coupons, clean out the car, load the blankets and the flashlights and head out the Brackley Point road on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday for the show. All “they are my client” bias aside, you will have a great time.

Tie EQ to Genre

My iTunes audio player on my iBook has a nifty graphic equalizer that lets me adjust the tone of the music it plays. I can do this manually, or I can select from a list of presets like “Latin” and “Pop”.

It’s surprising to me (an audio amateur, if that) how much better I can make music sound if I adjust the EQ to the genre. For example, right now I’m listening to Radio Free Tiny Pineapple playing Bachelor No. 2 by Aimee Mann. If I set the EQ to “Rock” the song sounds rich and full-bodied whereas if I set the EQ to “Acoustic” it sounds more reserved and barren.

What I’m wondering is this: is anyone working on hooking up the meta-data stored in MP3 files to the EQ settings in an audio player, so that I can say, for example “if genre equals bluegrass the set EQ to lots of treble.” Or whatever?

Surfing the Misspelling Madness

Earlier in this space I commented on how there appeared to be a large number of people searching on Google for information about Toby McGuire.

This, in turn, prompted two things: some weird discussion, mostly involved words like “hot” and “cute” and raising this site to the number one search result on Google for keywords “Toby McGuire.”

The thing is, as a helpful correspondent informed me, Toby McGuire is actually spelled Tobey Maguire, which presumably explains a lot of the above.

It looks like MSN corrects for this problem and Google does not.

In any case, if you’re looking for information on Toby, err, Tobey, why not try here or here.

Pages