A new series of desktops for the Nothing To Hide Tour are available for download for Community members, created by designer Derek Gyssels. They are absolutely gorgeous, and we thank Derek for the time and effort he put into making them.

Registered, logged in members can access the desktops by clicking on the Desktops link in the red block header area.

As you can see, we’ve become bored again and changed the design of the website. The impetus for the change was the confusion I felt existed with regards to the community menu, which is now located at the top of the page in an all inclusive, easy to locate box. That said, I just mock these things up in photoshop. Dale’s the one who actually turns my stick figure drawings into reality, so the entire credit rests with him to be honest. For years I have been strangely obsessed with the design of The Guardian’s Newsblog, so I suppose this is the closest that I’m going to get.

That said - something interesting from Basra. According to eye-witness accounts, the British air force has attacked an oil facility near the city (WMP Movie).

As many of you are aware, the US Embassy being constructed in Iraq is the largest of its kind in the world. What many of you might not know is how it’s been built. From the Asia Times…

“In the past few years there have been numerous stories about unscrupulous contractors hiring people from low-wage Asian countries such as the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan for work in Iraq and then exploiting them with low pay, unsafe conditions, seized passports, cramped housing, and poor food, medical care and safety gear. But generally these were stories about people hired by private contractors working for other private corporations

But new accusations are changing that. Disturbing reports have surfaced about the nearly 900 laborers being used to build the new multimillion-dollar US Embassy in Baghdad and the conditions under which they work.

The accusations are rather ironic for the administration of US President George W Bush, as the they charge that workers are being treated as virtual slave laborers, a human-rights issue the administration has previously claimed it is dedicated to combating.”

You know, that’s about as realistic as me claiming that I’m ‘dedicated’ to safely sending Zebra’s to the moon to live in giant eco-domes. The solution, of course, is that those who have worked on the Embassy should, because of this, have their wages adjusted and be back-paid for their work at a fair rate. They should also be compensated for the conditions that they have been made to endure.

Will that happen? Of course not. Nor will the Kuwaiti company, the First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Co that was contracted to build the Embassy, realistically be held accountable. Further quoting the Asian Times article…

“In fact, many observers wonder how FKTC got the $592-million contract in the first place. It was awarded to it by the US State Department in the summer of 2005. Many of its competitors, such as Framaco, Parsons, Fluor and the Sandi Group, which have established track records for building secure embassies or large-scale construction projects, were viewed as possessing far stronger experience. Many contractors believe that a high-level decision was made to favor a Kuwait-based firm in appreciation for that country’s support of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Investigations by the State Department’s inspector general and his counterpart in the US military in Iraq found no evidence of wrongdoing. However, the State Department inspector general, Howard Krongard, did acknowledge that recruiters in foreign countries may have misled potential workers about the pay and living conditions and said he had told the US Justice Department about the situation. The Justice Department has also launched a preliminary inquiry into these allegations, just to see if they warrant any further investigation.

But during testimony before the House of Representatives Oversight Committee last Thursday, Rory Mayberry, a former subcontract employee of the FKTC, said he believes that at least 52 Philippine nationals had been kidnapped to work on the embassy project…

“Mr Chairman, when the airplane took off and the captain announced that we were heading to Baghdad, all you-know-what broke out on the airplane. The men started shouting; it wasn’t until the security guy working for First Kuwaiti waved an MP5 [submachine-gun] in the air that the men settled down. They realized that they had no other choice but to go to Baghdad …

I’ve read the State Department inspector general’s report on the construction of the embassy. Mr Chairman, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. This is a cover-up and I’m glad that I’ve had the opportunity to set the record straight.

Let me spell it out clearly. I believe these men were kidnapped by First Kuwaiti to work on the US Embassy. They had no passports because they were confiscated at the Kuwait airport. When the airplane touched down at Baghdad airport, they were loaded into buses and taken away. Later, I found that they were being smuggled into the Green Zone. They had no IDs, no passports, nothing. They were being smuggled in past US security forces. I had a trailer all to myself in the Green Zone. But they were packed 25 to 30 in a trailer, and every day they went out to work on the construction of the embassy without the proper safety equipment.”

Personally, given the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, not to mention the lies that helped sell it to the American people, it only seems fitting that the US Embassy in Baghdad should been built on the backs of those kidnapped and forced to work in such conditions. Every American that steps foot it in should be ashamed, and Americans themselves should write Congress to demand answers as to why this was allowed to happen. Because the truth is, you don’t hire someone to construct something of that magnitude on your behalf and not know what is transpiring. Someone, somewhere, knew. They knew and said nothing. Thus is the reality of no-bid, politically motivated contracts.

This is, of course, not the first time that this subject has come to light. One wonders if, this time, it will melt away as quickly as it did the first.

First, you’ll notice the blue is back. Being that I didn’t use a web safe colour for the links in the last design, PC users were seeing them as brown. This led to a decision to change them to a colour safe orange that I wasn’t too fond of. Thus, we’re back to blue, and decided to redo the header as well. I think it brightens the place up a bit.

Obviously this version of the website is a little more ‘standard’ than the last. The reason for changing it was that we wanted users to have more control over the content, to have the content clearly viewable (such as the discography, etc), and to present it in such a way that you could choose to view it as it appears when you arrive or use the Lifestream feature, which is, in many ways, a far better way to peruse not only entries, but del.icio.us bookmarks, Twitter updates, Flickr updates, and so forth. It’s a rather revolutionary aspect of blogging that I’m very fond of, so give it a look if you already haven’t.

For those of you who aren’t aware, you can also rearrange the sidebar to your liking now and the site will remember your changes for your next visit, pretty much like Facebook does. Just hover over any of the menu headers and a drag and drop symbol will appear. Likewise, you can also open and close the different sidebar features and they too will be saved as such.

All of this new functionality due to Dale’s hard work. I can only take credit for the design aspect of the site. To be honest, how he hasn’t been head hunted by a web firm is quite beyond me. He pulled this new design together in a matter of days, functions and all.

It’s Tuesday, Which Means…

…that it’s new movie day. On this particular Tuesday I am excited beyond words because the third season of my favourite show, Deadwood, is being released. Being that I don’t own a television, let alone cable, I don’t watch programs when they air. And, to be honest with you, wouldn’t want to anyway. There is something far more satisfying about being able to watch an entire season of something uninterrupted. That said, after I get back from the dentist tonight, that’s what I’ll be doing until about five in the morning.

I officially proclaim this, the 12th of June, Al Swearengen day. (Damn is Ian McShane brilliant!).

John Bollwitt sent me a link to a recent BBC article entitled Web 2.0 ‘neglecting good design’, and I have to say – I couldn’t agree with Jakob Neilsen more…

“Describing Web 2.0 as the “latest fashion”, Mr Nielsen said many sites paying attention to it were neglecting some of the principles of good design and usability established over the last decade.

Good practices include making a site easy to use, good search tools, the use of text free of jargon, usability testing and a consideration of design even before the first line of code is written.

Sadly, said Mr Nielsen, the rush to embrace Web 2.0 technology meant that many firms were turning their back on the basics.

“They should get the basics right first,” he said. “Sadly most websites do not have those primary things right.”

[…]

“Most people just want to get in, get it and get out,” said Mr Nielsen. “For them the web is not a goal in itself. It is a tool.”

Web firms rushing to serve the small, committed minority might find they make a site far less useful to the vast majority who come to a site for a specific purpose.”

Those last two statements pretty much sum up a lot of the thinking prevalent here in Vancouver, that’s for certain. This is, by all means, a town in which exploiting open source platforms and applications for the benefit of personal gain is rampant, just as I’m sure it is elsewhere.

As most of you who read this blog know, 2006 has been, without question, the worst year of my life. The hacking of the website on Thursday left me laying on my bed staring at my ceiling wondering what I might ask the gods for in return for all of this horrible luck. Thankfully, I’ll be recording in 2007, so I’m hoping that that will escape the 2006 curse altogether even though I wrote all of the material in 2006.

If I had one wish, one desire, one request to make of the universal powers in return for this shitty year it would be that the Democrats take both houses next week and then work towards impeaching that son of a bitch.

Obviously I could ask for world peace and an end to world hunger, but let’s start off slow. The last thing I need is another year chalked full of bullshit to pay off some enormous karmic debt, though obviously I would endure far worse than I have this year to see either of the latter become reality. In fact, who wouldn’t surrender their life full stop to see either happen?

Anyway, I think I have everything back to normal. It’s not as flashy mind you, but everything should be in its proper place. As I’ve said, I just can’t be bothered with undertaking a massive redesign. I think applications like Ruby On Rails and Mephisto are going to spell the end of Wordpress eventually anyway. It’s like waiting to buy a new Apple until a new OS is released, it’s sort of pointless to waste the time getting something now only to have to upgrade in the near future. So Kubrick and simplicity it is.

Twenty four hours later I have learned one thing: it’s financially pointless to even bother trying to figure out who was responsible for yesterday’s hacking of the website. $120 dollars an hour is what it would cost to hire someone to figure it all out, and even though I put a lot of work into that last design, there is no way in hell that I’m going to end up paying thousands of dollars trying to track the culprit(s) down. My friends have their suspicions but I could really care less who did it. I’m just going to get the website functioning again and leave it like this. That way, if someone wants to try it again, then I’ve lost nothing (even though I’ll back this theme up for a change). I have to admit though, I envy artists that have the financial support to have fun, indepth, and artistic sites. It seems that so many Canadian bands lack really great sites, which doesn’t say much for the new media departments of most Canadian record companies. Luckily, there are some out there that actually do seem to put some effort into it, such as Beck, Radiohead, Wilco, and The Beastie Boys.

For those of you looking for my brother’s blog, it too was lost in yesterday’s attack, so if you want to stay up to date with him it’s probably best to just visit his flickr page, which he updates about as regularly as he did his blog (which is to say – never).

Worth Looking Into

1) Vanity Fair’s Neo Culpa.

2) The fact that Britons consider George Bush a greater threat to world peace that Kim Jong-Il.

3) The fact that Congress has ordered that the office of Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the chief US auditor in Iraq, be closed. For those of you interested…

“Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.”

Unfortunately, matthewgood.org has been the victim of a hacker. While we’ve been able to get most of the site’s content from provider back-ups, the design of the site has been permanently lost, as have a few odds and ends.

We are also actively still trying to track down who did this so that we can inform the authorities. Currently the site’s main provider and a third party web firm are looking into the matter.

Please bear with us over the next few weeks as we try and return things to normal, though to be perfectly honest I’m pretty much sick and tired of Wordpress and doing redesigns, so I might wait until Sonny trouble shoots Ruby On Rails and switch over.

I’ve been busy moving into a new place, so that’s where I’ve disappeared to of late. Some of my friends that live in other cities have been interested to see the place, so here’s the mini-tour.

You can see all of them in the Digital set.

Eat: Went to the Salt Tasting Room last night with a friend. If you like meat, cheese, and good wines and Port, ask them if you can move in. It was excellent.

Live: I have a total weakness for quality, modern furniture. I’d like to thank Gary and everyone at Koolhaus for making my life, as usual, headache free. If you’re in Vancouver, they’re on 4th, and their stuff is worth both the wait and the long term investment.

I’m a delete-r. I usually do it first thing in the morning, and for the most absurd of reasons – aesthetics. Sometimes when I look at a page something about it just bothers me and, if I can’t change what bugs me about it, I just get rid of it. Sometimes I like simple text on a page contrasting with background colours and sidebar content. Sometimes I like images. It’s a mixed bag, and probably something I should really just get over.

There are few sites that don’t bother me on a daily basis (design wise that is), and I have no idea why. They are:

 
There are more, but you get the picture.

Nothing, in this case, has actually disappeared. It’s right where it’s always been. You just have to push a few buttons to get there.

Isn’t that always the case?