Leave it to Apple's web lackeys to spoil our fun. Yesterday we passed on the interesting little tidbit that Jeff Goldblum's iTools home page (whose URL is clearly visible in the new "Internet Gift" commercial) contained a couple of puzzling pages. One was an iMovie page just like the one Jeff demonstrates in the commercial-- except in the ad the movie actually works, whereas in real life, not so much. the other was a photo album page with the cryptic title of "Dog Face," which led to all sorts of fun speculation.

Unfortunately, possibly due to our mention of these bizarre little quirks, Mr. Goldblum's home page abruptly changed in the middle of the day yesterday. Faithful viewer Joe tipped us off that the "Dog Face" page had been altered, either by Jeff himself or (more likely) Apple's web staff. The "Dog Face" title is now gone, replaced with the far less entertaining heading of "The Shoot." Lots of the extraneous photos have been deleted, and now there are just four stills of Jeff himself from the commercial.

In addition to the questionable move to eliminate any and all baffling references to canine visages, somebody also tried to fix the main thrust of the page-- the iMovie. Unfortunately, we say "tried," because while yesterday the page referenced a completely invalid file location, now it references a real file-- but still fails to serve it as QuickTime, so the effect is the same: a broken plug-in icon that really doesn't look very good since one of the major points of the "Internet Gift" commercial is that Apple makes it so easy to post your iMovies for everyone to see. Whoops!

However, if you're all worked up about missing Jeff's iMovie, keep your pants on. First of all, you're not missing much. Second of all, thanks to faithful viewer David Triska, you can still view the footage if you're willing to invest a modicum of effort to fix Apple's mistake. First, use this link to save the 4 MB movie to your hard drive by using the "Save As Source" feature of your browser of choice. (For instance, in Netscape, click and hold on the link, choose "Save this Link as..." and choose "Source" from the pop-up menu in the resulting Save dialog.) Once you've got the source file, use something like File Buddy or SetItsType to change the file's type and creator codes to "Moov" and "TVOD" respectively. Now you've got a QuickTime movie of Jeff Goldblum jumping around in the big white room. Happy? Sure, it's no "Dog Face," but sometimes you have to be thankful for whatever entertainment you can get.