My laptop has stopped accessing the Internet, whether by Airport or by a hardline ethernet connection. It was working fine this afternoon when I plugged my friend’s DSL modem into it, then wouldn’t work at the CineVegas press office, and still won’t work back at my friend’s house tonight. I’m not accustomed to having this kind of major problem with my Macs, so I’m not sure what to do about it.

The reason this affects you is that all my Friday materials — reviews, “In the Dark” etc. — are on that laptop, with no convenient way to post them to the Internet. The fastest method would be to burn the files to a disc and transfer them to my friend’s iMac (which I’m using to post this), then post them from there. But it’s very late at night and I’ve already spent an hour trying to fix my connection problems. Maybe I’ll try the disc-burning tomorrow. 

It’s kind of a serious problem, since I’m supposed to be covering CineVegas for Cinematical, and now I don’t have any way to do that. So hopefully I can figure out why my computer has suddenly stopped accessing the Internet. In the meantime, everything is on hold.

We got a lot of good feedback from our reader survey last month, and we’re gradually implementing some minor tweaks here and there to make EricDSnider.com a smoother, more refreshing experience. Today we have some small movie-related items.

First, a few respondents commented that they wished there were a way to sort the movie reviews by grade or release date. Well, there is a way, and there always has been. But maybe it wasn’t obvious enough. At the top of the main movie page is a link that now says “Complete Archives (sortable by title, grade, rating, and release date).” It used to just say “Click here to see an index of all of Eric’s movie reviews,” which doesn’t indicate that the index is sortable. So we’ve made that more clear.

Also, up in the navigation bar, under “Movies Reviews,” there was an option for “View Entire List” that now says “Archives.” That terminology is more in line with general Internet usage.

At the “Archives” page, the movies are automatically sorted alphabetically by title — but all you gotta do to rearrange them according to rating, grade, or date is click the word “Rating,” “Grade,” or “Date” at the top of the column. Click the word again and it will arrange them in reverse order (e.g., oldest to newest instead of newest to oldest).

Multiple sorts — for example, all the PG-rated movies together, and then arranged by letter grade — are not possible. That’s futuristic sci-fi territory there. It’s fun to think about, though, isn’t it?

Finally, we’ve added a new option under the “Movie Reviews” tab on the navigation bar. It says “Best/Worst Lists & Media Inventories,” and it’s an archive of my end-of-the-year top 10’s and stuff. I’ve done a “Best and Worst Movies” list every year since 1999, and a “Media Inventory” (basically a rundown of all the books I read and movies and TV shows I watched) since 2004. They weren’t archived anywhere convenient before, so we’ve rectified that.

So there you go. Hopefully the 5.5% of survey respondents who said they didn’t know I had a blog (???) will stumble upon these new developments on their own, since I guess they won’t read about them here.

On the comments form for movie reviews and “Snide Remarks” and such, there is now a link to the commenting rules.

Even if you’re been around a while, you should still give ‘em a look. Some are obvious (no swearing), while others may not have occurred to you (e.g., you don’t need to point out how dumb a commenter is; idiotic comments usually speak for themselves).

There is one rule that might be somewhat controversial to some of our younger readers, however, and it is this:

If you want your comment to be posted, write like an adult. Even if you’re not one. If you write like a 14-year-old girl (”OMG thiz actor is hott i luv this movie he is soooo fine!”), we’ll delete your comment.

There are many sites on the Internets where teens can gather to discuss how hott an actor is or how awesum a movie is. I am proud to say that EricDSnider.com is not one of them. I’ve been subtly doing this already, but now I’m doing it more ruthlessly: If I see a comment written in idiot pidgin English, I’ll just delete it. Such comments, in addition to being hard to decipher, usually don’t add much to the discussion, either.

Don’t get me wrong, in real life I love teenagers. I really do. I like their enthusiasm. I always thought teaching high school would be fun, and not much less lucrative than being a freelance writer. Many teens have bright, interesting things to say. They are more than welcome to post here, as long as they do it in a way that doesn’t bring shame and indignity to all who read them.

And people who are full-grown adults who still write in teen-speak — well, knock it off.

Many of you responded to our pathetic plea a few weeks ago for donations to help cover the site’s hosting fees, and we appreciate your generosity. My webmaster/brother Jeff tells me we have enough to cover a year of hosting on a new, supposedly reliable server!

We are making the change this weekend. You shouldn’t notice any downtime in the site as we transfer stuff over. However, we will have to disable the comments while we move. If you want to post a comment somewhere and see that it’s not an option, that means the transition isn’t complete yet. If it is an option — i.e., if everything looks normal — that means your computer has successfully found us on the new server, and all is well. The amount of time it takes for that to happen can vary from one ISP to another, but it’s usually 24-48 hours.

Thanks again for your support, and here’s hoping the new server will actually deliver on its promise of near-100-percent uptime!

Here at EricDSnider.com, we’re able to measure site traffic and page views and stuff like that, but we want to know more. MORE! So I’ve devised a few surveys to help me gauge who you people are and what you’re doing here. This will give us a better idea of what we need to change about the site’s features and what we need to emphasize more.

There are three surveys, each with around 10-15 easy questions. It won’t take you more than a couple minutes, and it will give us very, very valuable input on the site. Please take a few moments and fill out whichever surveys apply to you — possibly all three — won’t you?

EricDSnider.com reader survey: This is for all people who visit the site. If you’re reading this, that means you visit the site. So please take the survey!

“In the Dark” newsletter subscriber survey: This is ONLY for people who subscribe to “In the Dark,” the weekly e-mail newsletter containing movie reviews. (If you don’t subscribe to “In the Dark,” well, why not? Actually, never mind, that’s one of the questions in the first survey.)

“In the Dark” podcast listener survey: This is ONLY for people who listen to the “In the Dark” podcast, whether by subscribing via iTunes (or some such) or by listening to it directly here on the site. In fact, one of the reasons we’re doing the survey is to figure out how many listeners there are. You would think iTunes would tell you how many subscribers you have, but you would be wrong. I honestly have no idea how many people listen to the podcast. By filling out the survey, you will be counted!

If you’re like me and you check EricDSnider.com constantly throughout the day, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve had some downtime in recent weeks, periods of a few minutes (or hours) where the site was unavailable. According to my webmaster/brother Jeff, this is because our web host, Dotster, is a terrible company. In his words, “I am not exaggerating when I say they don’t care even a little bit whether we are satisfied with the service we are paying them to provide.”

The point is, we need to change to a new host, and the options we’re looking at — the ones that will actually get the job done — will be more expensive than what we’ve been paying. EricDSnider.com brings in some income through affiliate programs and ads and stuff, but not enough. To the extent that it’s possible, I’d like to avoid paying money out of my own pocket to keep the site up.

And that brings us to the 2008 EricDSnider.com Pledge Drive. Now, we’re not going to take the PBS route and try to guilt you into donating a few dollars for our hosting fees. The content on this site, like the content on almost all non-porn sites, is free, and that’s how it should be. If you don’t feel like donating, don’t do it.

But if you do have $5 or $10 to spare, we’d appreciate it. You can use Paypal to send it to me, and I’ll send it right over to Jeff, and he’ll spend it on candy. No! On web hosting. We promise, only web hosting. My Paypal address is eric(at)EricDSnider.com. If you don’t have a Paypal account, you can use a credit or debit card to send the money.

Thank you for your support! As your reward, here’s a video of a Haitian weatherman. You really have to watch it about 10 times in a row to get the full effect.

We’re having some technical difficulties here at EricDSnider.com with the commenting feature. Apparently you can still post comments here on the blog, but on the rest of the site — movie reviews, “Snide Remarks,” etc. — it’s not working. The Laotian kids in the sweatshop are working on the problem. In the meantime, feel free to use this space to make fun of Chris Buttars.

(P.S. Related to the above problem in the sense that both are the fault of our crappy, crappy hosting service, I haven’t been able to receive any e-mail for the last 12 hours. So if you sent me something, it’s clogged in the system and will spew out once we run the snake through the pipes.)

UPDATE: My fat webmaster Jeff has deployed a Band-Aid to the problem (pending a long-term solution to the crisis), so you can post comments again. Post away!

I’m not gonna lie to you: Mississippi was a blast. I LOVED the Oxford Film Festival and the town of Oxford itself. I had a great time. I will tell you all about it in this week’s “Snide Remarks”…

… which is aaaalmost done but not quite. The sudden Mississippi trip threw my schedule (such as it was) out of whack, so now I have to whack it back in, or however that figure of speech works out. Stay tuned.

If you find yourself in Oxford, Miss., this weekend, stop by and say howdy, or how-do, or whatever they say in Mississippi. Why on earth would I be in Mississippi this weekend? Well, I’m honored to say that I will be part of the fourth annual Oxford Film Festival as a panelist and juror. The fact that I’m doing it as a last-minute replacement for my friend Scott Weinberg, who can’t make it due to a serious dental emergency (ouch), does not reduce the honor.

My panel is called “Film and the New Media: Writing about Film in Print and for the Blogosphere.” It’s at 4 p.m. Friday. I don’t know if anyone who reads this blog lives in or near Oxford, but hey, maybe.

This is a very sudden trip — I only got the call from Weinberg at noon today, and I have to fly out at 6:20 a.m. tomorrow — and so I’m a little scatterbrained at the moment. Mostly it means that all the stuff I was planning to do tomorrow and Friday and over the weekend, I have to do today instead. But I’m glad to fill in for Weinberg, and besides, I’m not one to pass up a free trip to Mississippi! Or at least apparently I’m not. It’s never come up before.

Monday’s “Snide Remarks” will almost surely be late in arriving, as I haven’t written it yet, and I won’t get back to Portland until 11 p.m. Sunday night, and I don’t know how much downtime I’ll have in Oxford. Friday’s movie reviews and “In the Dark” should be on the regular schedule,  assuming they have Internet service in Mississippi. And maybe I should refrain from making Mississippi jokes until after the festival, just as a courtesy.

There is no “Snide Remarks” today, nor will there be one next Monday or the Monday after that, because I’ll be covering the Sundance Film Festival.

However! Please do not despair. I will do my best to entertain you in other ways. I’ll be doing my usual daily reports from Sundance, with the first one appearing Saturday. Also, I’m going to post some other amusing reading material for you here shortly.

In the meantime, why not watch a video of two old French-speaking men fighting on a TV news broadcast?