Wow. Just when you think you're on top of things, someone goes and bees clever.
Thank you to the very dedicated Daniel, who has made my life approximately nine thousand times more liveable by creating this, which I hereby propose the Melbourne Film Festival PAY HIM to turn into a website.
Excellent work.
So far I have only booked two films, which is hoplessly slack of me, but I will make up for it in the watching, oh yes I will.
I have noticed lately that I am FINALLY experiencing the "post show slump", which until now I thought I had escaped.
I think every autobiography or biography of a writer has the word "antisocial" somewhere in the index. For someone who is usually very social, the post-show slump and period of reinvention after having written something and before writing the next thing must be a very surprising period for the writer's friends (if the writer still has friends, having inflicted this period on many of them over a period of years).
My mobile phone is broken. Normally, this would have been fixed immediately. Thus far, I have had a broken phone for three weeks. This is both a metaphor for my inability to fix things, and the side effect of my belief that the grumpy introspection of this post-show slump period should not be inflicted on anyone.
Having said that, the only way to fix the post show slump is to swim against the tide. Bring on the friends, I say, and possibly a new haircut.
Daniel sent that link to me as well. I must say it's a very good idea. MIFF of course has its own film diary which is better in some ways but could not as user-friendly as Daniel's. I'd consider using it myself but have opted for creating a private Google calendar specifically for MIFF and sharing it with friends. We can see who is seeing what and plan to catch up based on our respective sessions. If we could just merge all these features....
Well, my organiser does the job of sharing your calendar with friends - http://soxbox.no-ip.org/films/festival_sessions/user_guide/1 is my current plan. There's also a user count in the bottom-right corner of each session listing which expands to a full list if you hover over the session (the count doesn't display in internet explorer, but the full list does - the site was designed mainly for my own and my friends' use and we use firefox, so i'm not in any hurry to fix explorer bugs).
I don't have any sort of privacy control on it though, because I don't really care who knows what I'm seeing. If that's an issue for anyone, it wouldn't be hard to implement a friends list.
Now I just need to fix up the automatic booking stuff as they took away the 'book everything at once' page that I was previously using.
You can contact: daniels at thegroggysquirrel.com if you've got any questions/issues.
Well, I have to say, I find using google calendar and the miff calendars very VERY boring, and Daniel's is quite good to use INSTEAD of the guide, once you get the hang of things.
Who uses internet explorer anyway? Huzzah! I am officially nerdy enough to partake in a server conversation. Bam! In your FACE internet explorer!