By way of explanation for the slackening of the pace around here, I’ve spent all my free time this past week immersed in a project using DVD Studio Pro 2, Apple’s brilliant DVD authoring software. This also means you will presently be subjected to my half-baked musings on DVD authoring, and — as the preceding clause aptly illustrates — I am additionally initiating a policy of preëmptively criticizing my own posts, effective immediately, as a means of smothering whatever small pleasures are left to the Eurofs and Charleses of this world when they are compelled to snark on my site. As far as I’m concerned, if they are having this much fun, I want a piece of itClearly, this is a stupid idea, as if I am going to exchaust all the possible ways in which what I write can be ojected to..

Then, you’re going to have to sit through another garrotting of the Swedish language, performed by me. I got back a corrected version of my last effort, and it shows my Swedish skills in a clear retrograde motion. My teacher helpfully asked if I had weaned myself from typing it in MS Word, whose spell- and grammar checkers are like a life vest and a kiddy pool, respectively. I lied. With those things turned on, I know Swahili.

What’s also lame is linking to my own article on another blog, even if it is interesting.

DVD Authoring: DVDs may bring all manner of high-bandwidth goodness, but DVD players themselves are dumb beasts. Those DVD menus have nowhere near the sophistication of Macromedia’s Flash or Shockwave because DVD players don’t have the processing prowessdon’t ask me what the difference is, I don’t think they know either.. They’ll just about manage playing video and audio tracks linked to buttons, with a bit of scripting thrown in reminiscent of peeking and poking at a Commodore 64. Because of this constraint, even the fancy Lord of the Rings menus are just videoloops with clickable hotspots. For example, until now I never noticed it is impossible to have one audio track playing uninterrupted while navigating menus. I tried to make it so, to no avail. Each click of a button requires the DVD player to initiate a new audio track (or none).

This, I believe, is the reason for the ubiquity of my pet DVD menu peeve: Interminably long transitions between menus. My guess is it lets the author play some theme music. My other peeve: overproduced menus: Why do they almost always have to look like CNN breaking news intros? I don’t make my web pages look like that, not because I can’t but because it’s uglyOK, so I can’t, but that’s not the reason why they don’t look like that..

Och nu på svenska: Det är kanske lite svårt att antar vad utvandrare tycker om Sverige. Och det kan vara konstigt att försöka berätta om sig själv som land, men det gör www.sweden.se. Vad ska man berätta om Sverige? En artikel igår på Sydsvenskan påstår att bilden på webbsidan är helt fel, att det verkar svenskare är “duktiga, flitiga, skötsamma, galna, sensuella, sentimentala och stolta. Självmedvetna men aldrig självförhärligande.”

Som artikel skriver, andra länder försöker inte att bygga upp ett stor nationellt varumärke som Sverige (utom Belgien!). Dock betyder det inte att Sverige inte bör göra det. Internationell bild av Sverige är jätte positiv, och det är inte eftersom svenskare är duktiga lögnhalsar.

Till exempel, så bygger man upp ett gott rykteGo ahead, click on the FT link, it leads to a cute English-language story.: FT skriver hur Ikea öppnade en ny affär i Sevilla, och använde typiska svenska anställningsmetoder. Men dem var revolutionär för Spanien, och nu börjar Spanskare att diskutera deras arbetspolitik.

Kanske bör Sweden.se skriver om det…