See The Sun

Status update

Monday, August 20th, 2007 | Sites | No Comments

For anyone who cares…. Yesterday was a shit day - honestly. Waking up with a headache and definitely unmotivated, deciding to stay home all day and work on some site stuff, watching Prince Valiant (in French) instead :(, doing some work on the Marion site, helping my little brother to ride his bike, having finally headache that almost cause my head to explode and going back to bed, watching Marie Antoinette (LOVE that film!), dressing for the first time to get my dad from the hospital and then deciding to finish the day with a positive note by watching a Bollywood film - which of course - since it was my fun day - was awful…. Today’s not much better, but at least a little bit.

With the Marion site I’m finally beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Depending on how motivated I’m feeling tonight and the next 2 evenings - and when exactly I get the definitive layout - I could maybe - that’s a BIG maybe - re-open on Wednesday late evening, the day of the French DVD release for La Vie en Rose. Otherwise I’m really aiming for September 1. That’s just such a nice and rounded date.

Oh, and I’m finally on MSN. However, I don’t plan on spending my whole online time chatting - I do intend to keep up my real life, despite the massive amounts of time I’ve recently spent online - but if you’d like to know my ID just drop me an email.

Subtitles

Friday, August 17th, 2007 | Film | No Comments

Just stumbled upon this article about foreign films doing much better commercially in the UK than they used to.

Hugo Grumbar of Icon Films, which distributed La Vie en Rose and the two Gibson films, said that marketing tricks and technology helped. Increasingly, foreign-language films are sold as thrillers, romances or comedies rather than the latest French, German or Spanish hit, he said. “With Caché you change the name to Hidden and try to cut a trailer that is not too French. Tell No One is a commercial thriller, not an art-house movie at all.”

Focus group research among audiences leaving German and French films this year revealed that between a third and a fifth did not know beforehand that they would be watching a subtitled film.

Isn’t that funny? I don’t mind subtitles at all and I am so glad we in Switzerland get pretty much all the movies (except the ones that are aimed at a very young audience) in their original version with subtitles. Contrary to Germany & Austria, who get the German versions of all the movies, I believe. I hate synchronizations, although they are in some cases pretty well made, esp. when it’s an animated film. When we were in France we wer thinking about going to the cinema to watch a US production, but when we were told it’d be a French synchronization with no subtitles we thought our French was not good enough to sit through an entire movie trying to figure out what they’re saying when it wasn’t even a ‘French’ movie.

Can anybody explain why it is that foreign films released on DVD in the US have the English subtitles forced rather than optional?

Back in the days

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 | Personal | No Comments

When I went to school we all went by ourselves, it was not necessary for the parents to bring us. Well, there wasn’t any big road to cross in my case but I know some of my friends had to. And even I was allowed to run some errands for my mom to shops that were a bit further away and required me to cross main roads when I was only 4 years old. Until I got into a car of strangers that is. Of course I was instructed n e v e r to do that, but little me thought it was okay in that specific case - and luckily it was.

Times have changed. My little brother and every other kid from our block is being brought to school by their parents. It is a long way to school from where we live now - there are 2 main roads to cross and it takes around 25 minutes to walk. At least for the time being my parents decided to go along and do as the other parents. There’s been a kidnapping a few weeks ago and also in general I suppose it’s more dangerous. Of course it is difficult to find a balance between reasonable caution and excessive fear - and I do think kids need to learn responsible behaviour when they’re on their own.

Although being brought to school by car certainly seems like a luxury I don’t envy my brother. We are kind of a close-knit family and certainly the first 3 of us children grew up quite protected (my brother too, but the circumstances have changed and I feel in his case it is a completely different kind of protected) so although I never felt ‘entrapped’ I enjoyed the ‘freedom’ the way to school brought. I could walk however fast I wanted, stop to look at what I wanted, talk to who I wanted… Oh, what carefree and unspoiled times these early years of kindergarten and school were!

Custom Fields

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 | Sites | No Comments

I’m discovering WordPress’s Custom Fields. They are absolutely fabulous to build filmography pages! Once the hard work but then one has a template that can be used over and over again!! However, I’m really not good at coding php strings.

Does anybody know what I need to add to the following code to get it to return the words without the link (Official site) if there is no value?

<a href=”<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, “Photo Gallery”, $single = true); ?>”>Photo Gallery</a><br /> 

The following gives me an error. [edit:] I figured it out in case someone is interested:
<?php
$values = get_post_meta($post->ID, “Photo Gallery”, $single = false);
if ( is_array($values) ) { ?>
 <a href=”<?php echo $values[0]; ?>”>Photo Gallery</a>
<?php } else { ?>
 <?php echo ‘Photo Gallery’; ?>
<?php } ?><br />

Hating my PC!!!!

Monday, August 6th, 2007 | Personal | No Comments

I hate my PC!! I wanted to roll back my Windows Media Player to version 10 - that alone requires some restarts - but with the mistakes I made I had to restart about 5 times. And my PC really is slow when it comes to stuff like that. I think I’ve installed too many programmes etc but still. And what was it all for? To be able to make screencaps of a Marion movie I don’t even like that much. But it is a rare one and once I got WMP re-installed and figured out the stuff with my DRM folder it was a matter of about 2 minutes… Uff! 1.5 hours wasted on modern technologies.