etc.

I first saw this film at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and immediately loved it. So much, in fact, that I made a note to self to buy it as soon as it was available on DVD. That alone is a ringing endorsement because there are few films I like enough to want to watch more than once, and therefore, own (the only DVD I have bought for myself is Amelie).

Alice Bradley is a seismologist who lives and works in Tokyo when an unexplained tidal anomaly on the St. Lawrence river in her native Baie-Comeau, Quebec, brings her home to investigate. It’s obvious from early on that there are memories and demons there that drove her away in the first place and the end result is a film with delicately interwoven narratives of Alice’s past, her efforts to apply science to a completely unscientific problem, the tragedy of a small town, and her attraction to a local man whose personal history occupies the centre of that tragedy. This is a beautiful film, go rent it. No wait, go buy it.

What kind of social software are you?

I applied for an ISSN for this blog because I was sort of curious about how the National Library of Canada was handling requests for ISSNs for blogs. And also because the application process is easy and online and being in the ISSN Register, the worldwide directory of serial publications, would have been neat.

I received the following boilerplate response:

This got me curious so I did some digging. It appears that some of the early bloggers received ISSNs, probably before the national centres started receiving bucketloads of requests from bloggers, making them rethink their policies. Since ISSNs are intended to be identifiers, and since blogs meet the definition of a “serial”, I hope the National Centres will be able to come up with a way to handle the volume of requests (it seems to me that that is their only legitimate concern regarding ISSNs for blogs) and stop their equivocal footwork around the issue. I sent the NLC (Canada’s ISSN issuing body) this response:

For more on this, Joe Clark (who is responsible for the document I referred to in email message) has some very intelligible arguments that are worth dipping into. And, as with anything else, the idea has its opponents as well.