We’re doing a bit of preparation work tonight, watching movies in preparation for the next Smithee Awards.
Actually, I should be clear on this. We’re watching movies for the 2007 Smithees. We’ve allready got pretty much a full slate together for the 2006 show.
The mini-Smithees that we do at U*con has a couple of beneficial side effects. First off, we get to do what the Smithee Statistician called, “Market Research.” We run our clips by an audience to see if they laugh at the same things we do.
The second benefit is that we make sure to watch movies early and often. Instead of realizing in January that we need to have “X” number of clips by March, we watch movies all year long.
One of the tools that helps us track this aill is an installation of PHPWiki on what we call the “House Server.” It used to be a rather antiquated Powerbook G3. Not quite one of the original machines, but old enough. It was one of the “Wallstreet” model, which means that it was built before USB, let alone Firewire. Now the server is running on the battered Powerbook G4 I was talking about refurbishing earlier. It’s a lot more stable.
Moving all of the files over to the newer machine was a bit of an education, but it’s something that’d need to be done eventually anyway. We’re planning on moving everything over to a new server, eventually. Probably a Mac Mini or something small and quiet like that.