neuro.me.uk

Update 2009-12-13 17:54: updated Facebook group URL, charity total
Update 2009-12-13 21:49: original Facebook group is back!
Update 2009-12-14 08:00: It’s Monday! BUY IT NOW!
Update 2009-12-15 13:00: Keep buying! A one day push isn’t enough, it needs to be sustained throughout the week! We’re currently up 10% over X Factor Joe!
Update 2009-12-20 00:10: Well, if the iTunes top 10 is anything to go by, we’re home!

So it’s The X Factor finale tonight, not that I could really care much. I’ve only watched it when the regional auditions are on, which means I only watch it for the first four weeks or so, but they changed the format to have the auditions in front of an audience, Britain’s Got Talent-stylee. This didn’t sit well for me, so I ended up not watching at all; no great loss to my media consumption whatsoever.

Concurrent with all this X Factor bollocks, and the usual notion that the winner will go on to produce a single worthy of making enough sales to reach No. 1 of the charts for Christmas, there’s a concerted online effort by over 600,000 Facebook members to kibosh this trend — they’re urging people to buy Rage Against the Machine’s 1993 track “Killing in the Name” so that it’ll go to No. 1. You may have heard about this over the last couple of days. Simon Cowell thinks the campaign is “stupid”, “cynical” and will “spoil the party for these three” [the X Factor finalists]. I think it’s a fantastic idea, which pushes buying power back towards the consumers, and away from the moguls who insist on showering us with manufactured pop fluff. I’m not saying there’s no place for pop fluff, but perhaps The X Factor would be better placed to promote jobbing musicians with real talent, not just at singing other people’s compositions, but at actually writing, creating and performing their own, original and passionate music. Hearing another over-produced piece of pap churned out by a dozen songwriters and emitted by the next bland Z-list wannabe is not my idea of promoting musical talent in this country. Honestly, Leona Lewis aside, can anyone point me to the classic music that past winners are still putting out?

And bear in mind that this campaign wasn’t created by some noo-meeja Nathan Barley-style wankers, or some record company execs looking to make a quick buck at Simon Cowell’s expense (Rage are signed to Epic, who are owned by Sony BMG, who employ Cowell, so Sony only stand to benefit either way here); it was created by two people on Facebook — Tracy and Jon Morter — who had decided that enough was enough. At the moment, nearly three quarters of a million people agree. If you’re on Facebook, you should join in the fun.

Anyway, the campaign: it’s ridiculously simple. Put Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” at Number One in the Christmas chart by buying it between this Monday (14th) and Saturday (19th). Some places are saying do it tomorrow (Sunday the 13th), but it’s unclear whether or not sales tomorrow will count towards the Christmas Top 40 data, so better safe than sorry — do it sometime between Monday and Saturday. And yes, downloads absolutely count. Even if you already own the single or the 1993 self-titled album, buy it again. It won’t cost much.

You can buy it from these music outlets:

• 7 Digital Media in MP3 format for 99p
• Amazon UK in MP3 format for 79p (see note below)
• HMV in MP3 format for 79p
• iTunes in AAC (M4A) format for 99p
• Napster (I’m not a subscriber, so I have no details)
• Play Digital in MP3 format for 70p
• Tesco Entertainment in MP3 format for 67p
• WE7 in MP3 format for £1.07p

… or just rock into a record store and see if they have any copies of the single! Note that some of these links link to the album; just buy the individual track. Also, there’s a 29p MP3 version on Amazon — do not buy this. Only sales over 40p qualify for chart eligibility.

Once you’ve done that, the Facebook group is encouraging those of us participating in this stunt to donate a little something to the charity Shelter, which works to improve the lives of homeless and badly housed people. If you’re a taxpayer, an additional 20% of whatever you donate will be added on. At time of writing, they’re over the £12,000 £16,000 mark. That’s just phenomenal.

So give what you can to Shelter (I donated a tenner), and spend less than a quid pissing off Simon Cowell. It’s a win-win situation for everyone.

I got a letter addressed to “The Occupier” from Virgin Media this morning. It’s the latest in many advertising missives that I’m convinced I’m only sent because someone has surveyed the street and spied my Sky minidish attached to my back wall.

So this one I got this morning has listed ten reasons to switch from Sky to Virgin Media. Each one of them pissed me off at their tactics, so I thought I’d go through them, like the pedantic, easily-pissed-off bastard that I am.

1. We’ve got all your favourite Sky channels including Sky1, Sky News and Sky Sports News. Yes, and Sky Sports and Sky Movies too.*

But I have those channels already (excepting the Sports and Movies packs, because I cancelled those along with Setanta after I lost my job to save me money). Sky also have Sky1, Sky Movies and more in HD. You don’t. You also charge more for Sky Movies (Sky charge a fixed £16/mo for all the channels, regardless of what other tiers you’ve signed up to; Virgin charge between £19.50/mo and £30/mo dependent on which TV tier you’re on).

2. Only V+HD can let you record two channels while watching a third (Sky+HD can’t).

But various Freeview+ and Freesat+ PVRs can.

3. Only Virgin TV gives you access to a huge, ever-changing library of over 500 movies and thousands of great TV shows, documentaries and music videos stored to watch whenever you want (Sky’s equivalent doesn’t even come close).

Yes, Sky don’t have a “pull VOD” system, where you can watch video on demand by having it streamed to your set top box whenever you like. They have a “push VOD” system, where they send select movies and shows to your PVR’s hard drive, but you have no real choice in what you get. However, Sky does have a VOD website (currently called Sky Player), where you can stream or download hundreds of movies on a pay-per-view/own basis, or for free when you subscribe to Sky Movies. It’s not equivalent to Virgin’s Replay, but it’s a stopgap until Sky complete developing their broadband-based VOD next year.

4. Only Virgin TV lets you watch BBC iPlayer, ITV Net Player and 4oD right there on your telly.

No, I’ve been doing this without Virgin for quite some time. Again with the “only” thing. Yes, Sky don’t have VOD yet, but my laptop has it. As does the Mac mini plugged into my TV. However, the actual necessity of watching anything on ITV Player is very much debatable.

5. And only our TV comes down a state-of-the-art fibre optic cable, not through a dish or aerial. So when the weather’s bad, your picture won’t be.

6. The same fibre optic cable brings you fast, future proof Virgin Broadband at up to 50Mb, that’s the UK’s fastest. (Broadband from BT, Sky or one of the others comes down copper telephone wire, which means your speed gets slower the further you live from the phone exchange).

Two ‘reasons’ talking about fibre optic cable. Bloody hell. Are Virgin still droning on about fibre optic cable? Let’s clear something up. Virgin insinuate they deliver all their services to your home via fibre optic cable. They don’t. Well, not really. Virgin deliver services over a hybrid fibre-coaxial network, using a national fibre network to “headends” in each regional area, just as BT use a national fibre network to interconnect telephone exchanges. “Headends” are akin to exchanges: they slurp in content, phone calls and Internet access using satellite feeds, fibre optic links and network connections, then spit all that out along fibre trunks to cabinets in each Virgin-covered street. From there, coaxial cable (aka copper wire) transfers the signals back and forth from each house to the cabinet.

ADSL, on the other hand, which is the primary thing Virgin are attacking with this component of their campaign, is delivered over fibre optic links — just like Virgin — to BT’s telephone exchanges, and from there to your home using pairs of copper wire. This will slowly be replaced by BT with fibre optic cabling to cabinets in the streets, and on occasion, to your home.

So yes, Virgin use fibre optic cable further up the chain than anyone else at this consumer level of Internet service provision does. But it doesn’t really make it all that “better”. It’s as prone to congestion (aka contention) as ADSL is. They really need to find another way to market this, because leaning on the fibre optic angle just ain’t the truth.

However, at least their “UK’s fastest” line is mainly true: only BT’s “Fibre to the Cabinet” trials could be faster; no UK DSL provider offers more than 24Mbps on a single line at the moment. But is 50Mbps really that important?

7. Servicing and repairs are free all the time you’re a customer.† (Sky charges you £65 for a call-out the minute you’re out of warranty.)

Yeah, but Virgin subscribers don’t own their receiving equipment, they merely lease it from Virgin. Once you’re no longer a customer, none of that equipment will work, and they’ll want it back. Meanwhile, Sky customers own their receivers from the get-go, and once out of their subscriptions, they can still receive all Free-to-Air and most Free-to-View channels, including at least one in HD.

8. Delivering TV, broadband and phone down the same fibre optic cable is better value and keeps everything in one simple bill. Our prices for TV, broadband and calls start at just £14 a month when you switch to a Virgin phone line for £11 a month.

Sky’s package of TV, broadband and phone starts at £17/mo (+ phone line for £11/mo). Virgin undercut this by offering an entry level, no-cost TV package (called ‘M’ as in Medium) which mirrors a list of channels freely available on Sky, Freesat and Freeview. If you want channels like Sky1, G.O.L.D., Hallmark, etc, on Virgin, you need to shell out at least £5.50/mo for the M+ package, bumping the comparable package price to £19.50. Oops.

9. We’re so confident you’ll love it, we’ll give you your money back if you don’t. Everything is covered by our 28 day guarantee.

Or I could just not change anything at all and keep my money in my pocket.

10. Your street’s already connected to our fibre optic network so it’s easy to get switched on.

Well, woop de doo … but I’ve had a Sky dish attached to my house for over 8 years. What’s your point?

Job done? Great, just call …

Pass.

I was flicking through the iTunes Store this morning and noticed something odd … some words in reviews and track titles had asterisks in them as though they were swear words (e.g. ‘b*ll*cks’). But they didn’t appear to be swear words. iTunes uses allmusic for the bulk of their album and single reviews, so luckily it’s possible to go back and ‘decode’ some of these words. They include: “porno”, “teen”, “cream”, “sexy”, “hot”. Strangely, variants like “sex”, “creamy”, “teenage” aren’t being censored. This seems to be a blanket effect on iTunes — Katy Perry’s current single “Hot ‘n’ Cold” is listed on the UK iTunes Store main page under ‘Top Songs’ as “H*t ‘n’ Cold’.

This seems to me to be really odd behaviour. They’ve done the same thing to some common swear words, but to censor “cream”? And it’s inconsistent to boot. Look at the review for Tenacious D’s eponymous album. The tracks “Fuck Her Gently” and “Cock Pushups” are censored with asterisks, but the title “Sex Supreme” in the review is not. The Roots’ track “Pussy Galore” has its title censored, but not the name of the band Pussy Galore.

And it’s not even like people at Apple don’t swear.

YouTube is currently off the air. Several people are citing a blog post describing the issue as youtube.com being the victim of DNS poisoning. However, this simply ain’t the case.

YouTube hasn’t had their DNS hijacked; Yelvington describes a wildcard match in the whois tool which let’s you see not only youtube.com but other records where youtube.com forms part of the overall domain name, but doesn’t actually affect the lookup of *.youtube.com at all, e.g. YOUTUBE.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.WWW.GULLI.COM. Check out something similar which happens when you lookup microsoft.com.

The simple fact is that YouTube is inaccessible due to the leak of network route announcements from outside a Pakistani ISP’s network border to implement a government-sanctioned block of certain YouTube ISPs. In other words, someone messed up. YouTube can easily re-appear on the net once either the Pakistani ISP resolves their route announcement snafu, or Google shift the servers onto alternate IPs not part of the /24 block being announced. Simple.

There are things in life that suck. This list is not of things that suck, it’s of things that are awesome.

• My job; pursuant thereof, San Francisco, and regular trips thereto (next one in December); additionally, the stupidly weak US dollar
• Apple Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”
• Beechams Flu Plus caplets
• The Crystal Method
• Ubuntu Linux 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”
• “How I Met Your Mother” (and slapcountdown.com)
• 16Mbps Sky Broadband
• Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (Freebird, Freeeebiiiiiiird!)
• 12.x firmware for the Nokia N95
• Tesco vouchers
• Being able to play music fucking loud (cf watching movies similarly); by extension, Maplin’s 3m 3.5mm to Twin Phono jack lead, my Macbook Pro, iTunes and the + button on my Sony HT-DDW880’s remote control
• British Airways
• Starbucks Vanilla Latte
• Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation (aka エースコンバット6 解放への戦火)
• Cheerios in ice cold milk
• Die Hard
• Four episodes of Star Trek: Voyager every weekday
• Barq’s Famous Old Tyme Root Beer
• A comfy chair

Awesome.

I like to blog, but I’ve been remiss in posting. So what better time than the end of the year to post what I’ve been up to.

Three tomatoes are walking down the street: a poppa tomato, a momma tomato, and a little baby tomato. Baby tomato starts lagging behind. Poppa tomato gets angry, goes over to the baby tomato, and smooshes him … and says “Catch up”.
    — Mia Wallace, Pulp Fiction

Verk

I’m now working at Concept Systems in Edinburgh, very much a Linux-friendly shop. It’s great to be working full-time with operating systems I love, and this is the third company in a row that has given me the opportunity to do so. The commute is probably the longest I’ve ever had to do on a regular basis — 41 miles from door to door — and the last 9 miles are through Edinburgh city centre traffic, but it’s worth it to be in a friendly professional environment, surrounded by people who have a genuine passion for what they do.

Oh, and Google have updated their Earth imagery for Edinburgh, and it turns out that every morning when driving up Maybury Road, I’m passing a big Poo! in a field.

Interweb Technological Gadgetry

Now that I’m no longer working for an ISP, sadly I’ve lost the perk of free broadband, so I signed up with Web Tapestry. They’re a great little outfit, courteous and knowledgeable, and I’d recommend them in a heartbeat. In fact I’ve been recommending them for months, and everyone who I’ve referred has been very pleased. I even get a nice wee kick back if you mention my name to their support team after signing up with them

Something else I’ve enjoyed this year has been Sipgate’s Voice over IP service to give me 1000 landline minutes a month for under six quid. Real phones plugged into a Linksys PAP2 phone adapter make life so much easier than having to piss about with headsets and PCs just to call people.

Schtuff

I’m watching a programme from Artsworld that I taped last week, Morricone Conducts Morricone. It’s fantastic to listen to (and watch) a great composer conduct his own music with a full orchestra — the Münchner Rundfunkorchester in this case, with guest performers — but something that stands out is the number of other composers work I can hear in the performances. This isn’t to say Ennio Morricone is a plagiarist, but rather that his work has had such a profound influence on so many other composers. I could hear twinges of Don Davis, Michael Kamen and even Jerry Goldsmith. Genius.

On a different tack, something dawned on me the other day. I thought how cool it would be if you could simply wish yourself back in time to an earlier period in your life to perhaps unfuck something bad, or to revisit something good, but then an interesting thought entered my head. Perhaps we can all do this already, but we can’t change anything when we get there, so events unfold exactly the same, and we have the same memories as we would have anyway, meaning we don’t really remember actually going back in time in the first place.

Public Service Announcements

The Nokia N70 is poo. Casino Royale is the best James Bond movie in 25 years. McDonald’s mint chocolate milkshakes are vile. Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgt Eft” is the first Linux distribution that makes me feel comfortable on a computer away from Windows XP. My Sky+’s 40GB hard disk is too small. I sold my Xbox and a pile of Xbox / PS2 / Gamecube games I didn’t want/need and got a PSP for virtually nothing. Did I mention the N70 is poo?

That is all.

Lang May Yer Lum Reek

It’s now 2007, so a Happy New Year to you and yours. Chi-ching!

My ADSL connection is currently tres latent due to some Cisco badness on BT’s part. If you’re trying to call me on Skype or my VoIP number, it’ll either sound like I’m the Moon, or it won’t connect. You may also find my site a tad slow too until it’s sorted out.

Still, in other news, I’ve found out a great way to get a cheap flatscreen TV that looks like this …

… the only problem is, that to install it, you have to do this …

Cheers to Derek for that!

I got pinged with a friends list request last night on MSN Messenger (although I use Gaim to connect to the network instead of Microsoft’s crappy ad-laden client) from someone I added years ago. I hadn’t heard from them for a while and I think I’d deleted them since Gaim reported I wasn’t on their friends list. Then this request last night made me think, “cool, Alex is back online again with theaddressheused@hotmail.com“, so I added it back without a worry.

Then this morning, I got this:

(12:02:42) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: whos this
(12:03:39) neuro@msn: i dunno, who’s this?
(12:04:06) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: simon, who are ye

(12:04:14) neuro@msn: ah, so you’re not alex then
(12:04:24) neuro@msn: bit strange
(12:04:30) neuro@msn: feel free to remove me from your list then

(12:04:43) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: who are u
(12:05:11) neuro@msn: someone who knows someone who used to have this hotmail address
(12:05:32) neuro@msn: i got a buddy list request for this address last night

(12:05:51) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: what are u on?, this emal is new
(12:06:10) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: u added me
(12:06:17) neuro@msn: someone else had theaddressheused@hotmail.com before you

(12:06:23) neuro@msn: looks like they let it expire
(12:06:30) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: no
(12:06:38) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: no they didn’t

(12:06:51) neuro@msn: roughly when did you register this address?
(12:07:07) neuro@msn: if you don’t mind me asking
(12:07:22) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: um, 6 months

(12:07:34) neuro@msn: yeah, someone else had it before you
(12:07:42) neuro@msn: i’ve had this address in my friends list for years
(12:08:21) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: wtf, u can’t just let someone use an old email addy, for this reason

(12:08:40) neuro@msn: if you don’t login to hotmail for 90 days or something, they expire the address
(12:08:44) neuro@msn: read the t’n'c’s
(12:09:24) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: yeh, that doesn’t mean someone else can use it

(12:10:12) neuro@msn: dude, accept this fact that someone else had this address before you
(12:10:18) neuro@msn: feel free to delete me from your friends list
(12:10:20) neuro@msn: i’ll do the same

(12:10:31) neuro@msn: it’s just a misunderstanding, these things happen
(12:10:53) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: nah they don’t you got my email from someone
(12:11:10) neuro@msn: paranoid much?

(12:11:14) neuro@msn: i have *no* idea who you are
(12:11:29) neuro@msn: beyond the fact you’re simon, aka calcium and you’re going to somewhere in australia at the weekend
(12:11:36) neuro@msn: and that’s from your nick

(12:12:18) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: don’t talk to randoms
(12:12:18) simon aka calcium . P’s . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april has closed the conversation window.
(12:12:22) simon aka calcium . P’s . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april logged out.

… sigh.

Is there no end to this John Naughton nonsense? Does anyone really care if John doesn’t understand that economists, financiers, brokers and anyone else interested in the US finance markets will love Google Finance?

I got a beauty forwarded to me this morning in my email:

-----Original Message-----
From:		[snip'd]
Sent:		Monday, January 16, 2006 08:56
To:		[snip'd]
Subject:	Message from Strathclyde Police

THIS MESSAGE WAS RECEIVED FROM STRATHCLYDE POLICE
CAR JACKING SCHEME
You walk across the car park, unlock your car and get inside. Then you
lock all your doors, start the engine and shift or put into REVERSE, and
you look into the rear-view mirror to back out of your parking space and
you notice a piece of paper stuck to the middle of the rear window. So,
you shift the gear stick back into park or neutral, unlock your doors and
jump out of your car to remove that paper (or whatever it is) that is
obstructing your view.
When you reach the back of your car that is when the car-jackers appear
out of nowhere, jump into your car and take off!! Your engine was running,
you would have left your purse in the car and they practically mow you
down as they speed off in your car.
BE AWARE OF THIS NEW SCHEME THAT IS NOW BEING USED IN LONDON/MANCHESTER
MAKING ITS WAY UP HERE!!!!!!!!
Just drive away and remove the paper later! It is stuck to your window and
be thankful that you read this email. I hope you will forward this to
friends and family especially to women! A purse contains all
identification, and you certainly do NOT want someone getting your home
address. They already HAVE your keys!!! JUST BE AWARE AND TAKE CARE IT
WILL PROBABLY SOON ARRIVE IN YOUR AREA
Brian Molloy
Detective Constable
Force Intelligence Bureau
Strathclyde Police
0141 532 5867 

If you get something like this, and it smells like a hoax … it’s because it is a hoax — what gives this particular gem away is that it’s supposedly an official missive from Strathclyde Police, yet it’s littered with capitals and exclamation marks, and most noticably incites you to forward it to all and sundry — don’t forward it on. A cursory google for carjacking and spam, hoax, chain letter or snopes (to check the Snopes urban myth site) shows many examples of how this particular spam — and it is spam — has propagated over the years.

Remember: if it looks like it, and smells like it, check it, then bin it. Eventually you’ll recognise them on sight and bin them immediately.