Blog

Well, over the next month, I’ll be participating at two conferences:

On July 21-23, I’ll be over in New York City giving a presentation at HOPE6 on underground documentaries. You can check out the official details of the panel here. The talk will be given along with Jason Scott, director of the BBS Documentary. To be honest, Jason was of great inspiration while doing the Piracy Documentary, and it’s an honour to speak along side him.

August 7-8, I’ll be in San Jose, California. I was invited to be one of the participants in a working group about Piracy in the Pacific Rim. There’s some real interesting issues at hand there (biopiracy, illegal DVD duplication), and I look forward to hearing what these other participants have to share.

I really can’t afford doing either trips (and esp. both in conjunction), but I can’t miss out on this. It’s something I would forever regret.

It has come to my attention that nearly all my domains are down. These are DNS issues associated with one particular set of servers, which will be quickly resolved. Among the affected domains:

• piracydocumentary.com (mirror)
• celsius-studios.com
• o2600.com

Update: The domains are now back up. When contacted about the outage, the operators of the servers replied back promptly:

Currently we are experiencing a massive DOS attack that is effecting all customers who are using our URL forwarding and custom parking. A malicious user is attacking the IP address that routs all URL forwarded domains. This attack has caused all parked and URL forwarded domains not to function.

Props to them for having explained exactly what was going on, having done so quickly, and not using technical rubbish to somehow pin the blame on the customer.

I was giving a tour the other day. A group of military officials came on board (“christ” I thought.) After the tour, one of them with a distinct accent from France commendated me on my bilingualism, and offered me a hat from the French Air Force. The other officials clapped. As it turns out, the man was the Major General of the French Air Force. That most certainly made my day.

If you look at the dates at which I’ve posted news here on this blog, you’ll notice that this month has been somewhat sparse for updates. Two updates for all of June, as opposed to the 19 of the preceeding month.

On the Celsius Studios side of things, everything has been put on hold until I can complete the pro-DRM interview. Fortunately, that’s coming along well, and should be resolved over the following weeks. It’s funny how things turn out – I spent a straight 24/7 week of editing to complete the initial beta of the film, only to end up having the final version take a few months to finish off.

Another factor though is my job. Celsius Studios is great, but it doesn’t fund itself. And on the job side of things, I’ve worked 167 hours over the last two weeks. 167 hours. 83 hour weeks. Fun.

In other news, I was interviewed by Binary Revolution Radio. Episode 152.