The Artesea

Someone forgot to check the meter and it seems that LibDemVoice is currently down because we’ve run out of bandwidth.
As soon as the guy in a field in Scotland pays for some more, it’ll be down until further notice.
UPDATED: site now back up.

Sorry for all you Blogger bloggers. I upgraded my webserver to PHP5 and didn’t notice that one of the scripts used in LibDemBlogs no longer worked. What this meant was that the site thought all your posts were made on the 1st Jan 1970 and so didn’t bother to display them.
I’ve now found the offending piece of code and hopefully everything should be back to normal by now.
I did wonder why it was so quite on the site, but I just assumed that everyone was in Crewe or Henley.

For some reason when you select the embed option in Youtube the code they provide includes <embed> tags. However these are big no-no’s in HTML. Youtube also have empty <param> tags, which should really end with />. On top of that I’ve still yet to work out why Youtube insist on having the video at 425×355 pixels, when clearly the resolution is only 320 pixels wide. Thus creating a rather blocky video as it is badly upscaled. So instead here is the “easy” way to embed Youtube videos.

Take your original code from Youtube:
<object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/yVjzd320gew&hl=en"></param>
<param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/yVjzd320gew&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object>

take note of what is in bold (red) and replace with:
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/yVjzd320gew&hl=en" width="320" height="267"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/yVjzd320gew&hl=en" /><param name="FlashVars" value="playerMode=embedded" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent" /></object>

making sure that the bold bits in the original are in the new bit of code.

Hopefully no errors on a HTML validator now

Code tweaked from this post.

(Edit 05/12/09, you might also want to replace any &s with &amp)

Both Cadbury and Sony use the same people to come up with their recent ads. Out of the most recent six, three are great, one is good, one is ok, and one is crap.

Balls

This was the first Sony advert, set in San Francisco with the bouncy balls falling down the hill. It falls into my great catergory, very original, music was perfect (who didn’t get the Jose Gonzalez album) and it brought back images of childhood.

Paint

The second Sony ad falls into the OK category, it felt too fake and if it wasn’t for the behind the scenes video I would have never believed that they actually used real paint. I’m guessing the big problem was using a Scottish tower block, it didn’t have that American polish that the others have.

Play-doh™

Another one of my great ads, very colourful, the soundtrack fits right in and if I had a chance I would have purchased one of the rabbits or fly out to NY.

Foam City

Set in Miami, the latest Sony Ad falls into the good category, it calm, peaceful and very impressive, just lacks the omph from the previous ad.

Gorilla

This advert for Cadbury was clever. The first time you see it with the close-ups you’re not sure what’s going on and then the pan out for the drumming scene works really well. Not 100% certain about Phil Collins, but hey it still features in my great catergory, just leaving one advert…

Trucks

… which is the worst of the lot. I just don’t like it. We have different coloured trucks racing, now if they related them to different variations of Dairy Milk (green for mint, orange for orange) then it might have worked. Also they felt the need to start the ad with the glass and a half logo, giving away what the product was before you’ve even seen the first 10 seconds.

I hope to do more advert blogging, because for some reason I like watching them, just depends whether I get around to doing it.

Some of my regular readers might realise that I have a thing about number plates. Something that caught my eye was the top image. At the time I was looking for a 725, however foreign plates can’t be counted. However it looked very much like a British plate, just styled as a German one. So once I got home I used wikipedia to double check.
Wiki says that plates are in the format of 1-3 letters for the place, then stickers to show the emission test and vehicle safety test, then 1-2 random letters, and then 1-4 random numbers (maximum number of characters is 8). So clearly the plate on the left is actually a GB plate just designed to look like a German one (example at the bottom).
I’ve now seen two in this format, so I’m guessing someone is producing them for homesick Germans. But as with other styled number plates unless they are in the offical typeface with the correct spacing they are illegal to drive with and will fail an MOT.