30 in 30 for Les Bourgs Hospice

So that’s that. Completed the 30 in 30, raising money for Les Bourgs Hospice. Well done to everyone who took part, including the 4 people who completed 3 100 mile rides in 3 days, and the one crazy foo’ who rode his bike continuously for 30 hours. Nutcase. Personally I managed 613.6 miles – so roughly 20 miles per day. I’m happy with that!

Combined, we’ve raised over £35,000 for Les Bourgs Hospice.

There’s still time to sponsor me if you want, clicken sie hier.

isolation

I wrote this nearly 3 years ago. Nothing has changed. I’ve done nothing about it. I’m in the same shit situation as I was then.

Except maybe now I get paid a little more at work.

What does it take for someone to finally grab life by its arse and start making changes? I watched the film `Wanted` the other night – the theme of which is just that. Some guy, living a meaningless life and things eventually change. OK, so it’s because he’s apparently son of some legendary assassin – right – but ignore that and look at the bigger thing for a second and it helps with some perspective.

The only person you’re kidding, is yourself. YOU KNOW the issues. Yet you mislead yourself. How pathetic is that?

The only way things will change is when you make it happen.

So do it. Now.

sometimes

you need to put yourself out there. you take a risk. maybe it’ll pay off.

most of the time it won’t, but at least you tried. hey, it’s better to try and fail, than to not try at all.

so i end up back at square 1. start again. from the beginning.

but new starts are a good thing.

How to access iTunes Store from restricted location

I recently posted about how it was impossible to access the iTunes Store if you were in one of the Channel Islands such as Guernsey or Jersey. Specifically, when you were updating your account details, it used to be possible to enter your postcode in lower case, or, enter a valid e.g., UK mainland postcode to get around it. This stopped working and all workarounds were essentially dead – the only explanation was that iTunes now uses some geographic IP address matching to check you were physically where you say you were. So it seemed like there was no way around it.

However, I’ve found a way around it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Guernsey iTunes store hack patched?

If you live in the Channel Islands – Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, Sark, Herm – you are not allowed to use the iTunes store. Entering your postcode in the billing section simply gave you a message “the iTunes store is not available in your region”.

UPDATE 1: Friends of mine have said that if you enter a valid postcode in the mainland, then that worked for them in the past. In theory that should ruin any chance of people able to buy something (your CC shouldn’t authorise…).
UPDATE 2: I just tried the above and got an error message, asking to enter a valid postcode (despite entering a bunch of valid postcodes), so it seems likely that they’re doing an IP address check now as well. Bastards. I have a few ideas on how to get round this.
UPDATE 3: Please read my post on how to access the itunes store from a restricted location which has instructions on how to get around this problem.

Your video may have music that is owned or licensed by WMG.

Argh, WMG can suck my balls. I must admit that in *all* the years of the DRM / Copyright / file sharing / Napster debate, I’ve never really been hit by it. Although in principle, DRM or similar is kind of annoying – I mean, I paid for it – I should be able to do what I want with it, right? Well, no, not at all – you just bought a license to listen to the music. The reason I’ve never really got in to downloading music – either illegally or legitimately through iTunes is two-fold – 1) I don’t trust myself to remember that I’ve bought some music in case I start deleting stuff and 2) I have an ever growing CD collection which I’m proud of, and I like having the actual CD.

OK, slight tangent there. Anyway, I’ve just been bitten – albeit algorithmically – by the copyright debate. Shortly after I got my new Macbook Pro, I was farting about with iMovie HD and making some silly videos. These included a bit of my brother’s dog, and a trip when we went to a shooting range, and shot some guns. Hardly ground-breaking or Cannes-winning stuff. In fact, they’re so amateur that they’re pretty laughable now. But nevertheless, they were good fun when I was putting them together, part of which was figuring out the soundtrack. I spent ages working out the best tunes to back my brother’s dog running around in a park (Jungle Brothers) or being driven around in a car (Passenger, by Iggy Pop).

Anyway, some of my videos got WMG’d at YouTube. On some of these videos, I now just see a message that says

Your video, Seven Stages of Dog – Part 2, may have audio content from Growing On Me by The Darkness that is owned or licensed by WMG.

Obviously referring to the part where Iggy (a 2 year 50lb bull terrier / shepherd mix plays with Dante, a 130lb Italian Mastiff, with humourous consequences).

So the point is, WMGs access to YouTube and its algorithms to analyse all videos to find illegal use of their music has caught me out and the music to the video is muted. And that makes the video even more dull than before. What’s unusual however, is that there are other videos I have made that use exactly the same styles, but they didn’t get flagged. And a cursory search of YouTube shows thousands more videos with copyrighted music on arguably much bigger or questionable videos. So obviously whatever software they’re using isn’t perfect.

But I’m still struggling to understand how my use of the music for my crappy “home videos” can really be damaging them and I’d argue that my use is “fair use”. It’s not for profit, it’s clearly not for anything sensible or real, it’s just a bit of fun for me and anyone who might be interested (which, judging by the view count, is not many) and whereever I use music, the artist is credited for it. If anything, I’d go the opposite way and say that for the odd few people who actually watch these videos, might think “oooh Ocean Colour Scene, haven’t heard them in a while” and go and buy a CD. (Or fire up Limewire I suppose.)

Well needless to say, I find it all very crap. This sort of thing can only stifle the creativity that places like YouTube are slowly opening up. Fat little kids who previously had no lives are somehow “cewebrities” because they get creative with a webcam. (Ooer!). But no, WMG can’t monetise it (yet) so their decision is to pull the plug. Of course, you can use the “AudioSwap” – i.e., a list of public domain tracks that are free for use – but how long before they’re used up and everyone’s videos starts to look very very similar. In fact, it gets worse. I saw one poor who had her videos deleted for singing her favourite bands music!

If I really cared enough about this, I’d find a list of all WMG’s artists and never buy their music again. But I don’t, so I won’t. But still, it’s tiresome and officious, and is nowt but a sign of things to come.

So on a lighter note, here’s another video I made that doesn’t have any copyrighted music. It is obviously a blatant rip off of a movie, so quite how long it stays out there, well, who knows.

Countdown to Pain

So megoodmate Al and me have this thing. On our birthdays (which happen every year) we do something really stupid. In the year of our 24th birthdays, we drank 24 cans of beer (and a bunch of other crap too) in 24 hours 12 hours. In the year of our 26th birthdays we rode our motorbikes for 26 hours from England to Spain. (Don’t do that. It’s not clever.)

This year it’s the year of our 29th birthday. Now, since Al is getting married this year – in fact in April – the chances of us doing anything together to celebrate our birthdays is quite unlikely. So I’ve come up with something to do on my own. A triathlon. Now, it’s only a novice triathlon as I am, after all, a novice. So that means a 400m swim, a 12k bike and a 3k run. I’m struggling to come up with something that makes it vaguely to do with the number 29.

I’m training hard. The cycling is no problem as I regularly do 20+ miles. The swimming is OK – and since it’s a novice triathlon, it’s a pool swim, so 16 lengths – but the running is the main problem. I’ve never been a fan of running as it’s so boring.

Anyway, should be fun. Today I did an 8 mile ride, 3 mile run, 8 mile ride, 3 mile run and then a final 8 mile ride. Suffice it to say, I’m pretty shagged right now. What have I got myself in for?

(And what’s worse? There’s a guy at work who has done the Ironman – 4.5 mile swim, 112 mile cycle and a 26 mile run, in one day – 5 times!)