Monthly Archives: September 2008

Commenting at P-F1

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http://planet-f1.com
If you wish to comment you must register. If you want to register the following information is mandatory:

Username
Email
Password
Forename
Surname
Date of Birth
House No.
Street
Town/City
County/State
Postcode/Zip
Country
Home Phone
and when you have done all that they don’t even show you their T&C’s even though it appears you are agreeing to them.
And if you want to discuss this their contact email does not exist.

The upside is that running Noscript and disallowing all their code lets the site load quickly.

Throbbing buds

3

I’ve got some Sennheiser CX300 headphones and I thought they were good. In the evenings when out with the dog I try and get some music in and these whistle in the wind. If the wind crosses them at all I get significant noise. The noise from any cable touching I don’t mind so much but the wind effect is annoying. And the annoyance factor just got worse. I’m sitting in bed doing all non-work stuff – it’s my chance to relax and catch up with things – and I’m listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Except what I should be hearing is Classic Euphoria. The earphones are magnifying my heartbeat so the noise inside my head is Hybrid with a DSotM backing track. It’s like some weird remix with a heartbeat constant. Maybe I need looser buds. Maybe I need to get different headphones. Maybe I should be glad it’s the DSotM intro.

Blogger: a help-free site

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I find yet another blogspot blog stealing my posts. I login and decide to see if Google have yet changed their absolutely stupid rules regarding stolen content displayed on their domain:

See the Help link?

Google has no help

Takes you here:

http://help.blogger.com/bin/static.py?page=start.cs
Google has no help

See the Help Center link? Takes you here:

Google has no help

So not only do Google help spammers and sploggers by making it just about impossible to remove them (flagging stuff is a joke. I’ve flagged many blogs and many youtube accounts and it’s has not made the slightest difference) but it also does not let you find out.

And the DMCA?

To file a notice of infringement with us, you must provide a written communication (by fax or regular mail — not by email, except by prior agreement)

As they don’t provide free fax, and as they probably know fax machines are not easily available they choose to use it because it slows everything down to what must be a complete stop for your average blog creator. That’s being pretty evil to your average person.

Edit:
http://www.google.com/dmca.html

If you are sending a large number of URLs in one removal request, please also send an electronic copy of the notice to removals at google dot com.

Why don’t they have an actual email link there? Don’t they trust their own spam software? Are the people on the end of that email afraid of, well, work?

Provide information reasonably sufficient to permit Google to contact you (email address is preferred).

So they want the easy way but you take the hard way?

Apparently Google are hiring. I looked through several pages of their jobs. I couldn’t find a single one that was focused on user support. Now what does that tell you?

It was on a Saturday

4

in 1986 that Jacq and I got married. And here we are on a Saturday 22 years later still married and happy to be with each other. (And if anyone deserves credit it’s Jacq for putting up with me).

And again iTunes

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After the last post I made I thought I would both sort music out and also show to myself that iTunes is a piece of junk.

Quit iT. Rename and move the music folders. Find and delete all iT files including plists. This should effectively reset iT. I started it up and I got the EULA so objective there was done. It had nothing recorded. Set iT so it did NOT move or organise my music. By now I had many music folders nicely organised with files tagged. I added 10 folders – each containing just one CD – to iT. And bingo – I have 3 Highway to Hell tracks by AC/DC. It’s one CD, one track and in one folder. But iT gives me 3. I kept adding a few folders and these multiple tracks just kept appearing. It was not consistent but it absolutely was happening.
You’d think Apple would get a clue and figure this out. But they won’t because they’ll pretend that it all just works when it plainly does not. But I have proved to myself that it is not me and it is Apple software.

I know you read this.

1

Sometimes something happens which confirms what you thought but had no proof of. On the way back from Sunderland yesterday I told J that a phone call would be received by us, what that phone call would be about and the request that would be made. I had an idea that this blog was being read by or communicated to the person who made the call but I had no proof. The entry I wrote last night followed by the call confirmed in an absolute fashion that this blog is being read. There is now proof.

How I am going to address that is something I have yet to work out.

200 miles.

4

Earlier today we drove away from some flats in Sunderland and we left D there to live in one for a year. She is now 200 miles away, over 3.5 hours by car and sitting here now writing this that is a very very long way away. She chose Sunderland University for the BSc. Psychology (Hons). She could have chosen Leicester, or Derby, probably others. The creeping inevitability of yesterday (the drive up) and today (the farewell) has been evident here for a few weeks. In some ways the fact that we have now crossed the event is a good thing because we can now all get on with what we knew was going to happen. But right now everyone is feeling a loss.
No-one has yet moved into the flats with D so she’s alone. J has lost her eldest daughter and a best friend. P has lost one of the 3 constants in her life, lost her best friend, lost her sister. I’ve lost my little girl. Of course we’ve lost nothing because we have IM, email, phone, texts. But we’ve .. she’s not here and we aren’t there. This is how it is meant to be. She was always going to go to Uni, she was always going to leave home.
But it was always in the future.
Never today, always tomorrow.

Hit or Miss

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In The Telegraph:

In a downbeat assessment of the current state of the campaign in Afghanistan, [Gen Petraeus] said there was “100 per cent chance of success if we do it the right way but if we do it the wrong way there is a zero per cent chance”.

Isn’t that called Stating The Totally Obvious? “If I aim for the target I’ll hit it but if I don’t I’ll miss”. Anyway, the Russians failed and they could hide their losses. If they failed the US doesn’t stand a chance.

Away to your death

1

I firmly support euthanasia but I think this is just a lot too far:

She insisted there was “nothing wrong” with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society…. she hoped people will soon be “licensed to put others down” if they are unable to look after themselves.

Wacky Warnock in The Telegraph

Cocomment has no privacy – and they know.

4

I don’t comment anywhere near as much as I’d like to. On blogs though I can usually remember enough to find a blog to follow up and if there is a ‘Subscribe to comments’ I’ll use that or get the comments feed. But I’m starting to comment more on other sites – The Register, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Times etc and they are horrible to navigate back to. So I again went looking for something that could track comments and landed back at Cocomment. I’ve used it before when it launched and I forgot why I stopped but I signed up for it again.

At work we – unsurprisingly – use blogs to communicate with each other. The blogs are – unsurprisingly – private. So I don’t actually want those urls and my comments appearing anywhere else. It’s private and I would consider some other blogs where I comment to also be ‘off limits’ to tracking what I write on them. So I went to one of the staff blogs and as I’m making a comment I tell the Cocomment extension to blacklist the site. But what I write in the comment I leave appears on the cocomment site. I blacklist another site, make a comment and that comment also appears at their domain.

http://www.cocomment.com/myBlacklist
I want to use coCOmment everywhere except on the following Urls

I have 4 work blogs listed there and every comment I make will appear in the public view of my Cocomment account.

I did test this by logging out of wordpress.com, out of cocomment and using browsers that had logged in to neither – and my comments on a blacklisted site still appeared.

I contacted Cocomment on Twitter: @cocomment – Why have a site blacklist when it does not work? It’s false privacy.
The reply: @69105 I do not fully understand your question. Shoot me an email and lets talk about it.
I sent an email explaining the situation and my expectation that blacklisting should mean no information is revealed. And I just got a reply:

we know the problem with blacklist functionality..
but it’s not the primary issue for us at the moment….
we’re working for new concept and design so may be next year blacklist
processing becomes better..
thanx for your patience..

This makes a nonsense of the twitter reply I got.
It makes a nonsense of the fact they say nothing about their blacklist actually being broken when you try to use it
And that reply means “Hey we are doing fun stuff, screw your privacy needs because we just don’t care”.