Year: 2010

Categories
Uncategorized

Desperation

I think McAfee must be getting a bit desperate. Seems they *really* want me to renew my anti-virus:

Subject: Subscription Renewal Price Enclosed
From: subscriptions@mcafee.com
Date: Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 1:06 AM

Subscription length: 1 Year(s) Renew Subscription(Auto Renew)

Base price (pre-tax): £ 64.99(GBP)

Subject: Alert: 1 Month Remains
From: subscriptions@mcafee.com
Date: Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 4:39 AM

Renew Now
Save 15%

1 Year Total Protection
£55.19 SAVE 15%

Subject: Alert: 2 Weeks Remain
From: subscriptions@mcafee.com
Date: Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 4:55 AM

25% Off Plus 25 Music
Downloads* When You Renew Today

RENEW YOUR SUBSCRIPTION NOW
1yr Total Protection – plus 25 downloads*
Was £64.99 Now £48.69

Subject: Save 50% On Internet Security Renewal
From: subscriptions@mcafee.com
Date: Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 11:16 AM

Save 50% On Internet Security Renewal
£24.99 – 1 Year

If I wait long enough they’ll probably give it to me for free eventually…

Categories
Australia Media

Channel Nine Sucks The Big One

So there was I thinking, as I walked home from work last night with Test Match Special in my ears courtesy of Radios 4 and 5 and my iPhone’s 3G connection to teh interwebs, that with 8 or so overs still to play at the end of the first day of the first test in this year’s Ashes series, that I’d make it home in time to catch some play on the TV.

WRONG! Of course I was forgetting that this is Australia, where the TV networks have a cavalier disregard for their viewers. “That’s an awfully long ad break”, I thought to myself as I switched on Channel 9 when I got in. I remembered where I was when the ads continued even as Test Match Special started to talk me through the next over, and then Channel 9 returned from their ad break to the end of their half hour nightly news bulletin and the start of their shabby, tabloid telly evening magazine show, A Current Affair. Over on their second and third free to air channels, “Gem”, and “Go”, they were showing some even more important and unmoveable telly: The Flintstones and The Nanny.

And here was me thinking that Australia was a sports obsessed sort of place. Apparently not: cartoons, reruns of ancient sitcoms, and Tracey Grimshaw are more important than the only broadcaster with the rights to show The Ashes live actually, you know, broadcasting it live all the way to the end of play.

Australia’s free to air networks have form in this department: I’ve seen Channel 9 do it before for other cricket matches, Channel 7 just love to cut away from the Aussie Open (which, of course they also have exclusive rights to broadcast live) to show Home And Away, and heaven help the AFL fans in this country, who almost never get to see a game live on free to air telly, with most of them showing with half an hour or more delay (heaven forbid that Channel 7 might have to move Better Homes And Gardens…)

Frankly I’m amazed that the sports-mad Aussies put up with it. Of course I’m well aware that not everyone likes sport, and there would surely be plenty of people annoyed at missing their nightly news bulletin to see some blokes in white throwing a small ball at each other, but the issue is that no one else has the rights to show this stuff, because the right of the free to air networks to dick around with their coverage is enshrined in Australia’s “Anti-Siphoning Laws“, a piece of legislation designed to ensure that key events like the Melbourne Cup, the Aussie Open and the big Cricket matches remain on free to air. Unfortunately although the legislation ensures that at least one of the free to air networks will always get the rights to show these events, it doesn’t apparently require them to actually show the event, live and in full.

Not that I’m the world’s biggest fan of the Murdoch empire, but at least his channels show things live and stick with them all the way to the end…

So it looks like I’ll have to fill in the gaps with Test Match Special and whatever streams I can find on the interwebs.

[And the less said about England’s performance so far, the better…]

Categories
Uncategorized

Radical New Direction

I think they normally play these things on a cricket oval. Can’t help thinking that this radical new direction by Cricket Australia is going to result in a lot of balls lost in Sydney harbour.

Guardian:

Australia announced their Ashes squad for the first Test on Circular Quay in Sydney this morning…

Categories
Uncategorized

Misdirection

Hey. So you know when you receive an email that isn’t spam as such but is from a real person who meant to send it to another real person that isn’t you but is probably someone with the same name as you and a very similar email address, and you read the message and think “this is sufficiently weird that it would make a great easy blog post to just stick the whole message up verbatim and invite people to wonder what it all means”?

Well, that.

From: Angus Mcleod
To: Me
Subject: Excercises

Hey mate,

Great to see you at the weekend. Was cool to hang out and lovely for me that
my little babies thought you rock.Thanks also for the chat about that
weirdness on Monday night. Its a headfuck but nice to talk to someone else
about it as sharing lessens its power. Hey also can you get me some more
english lesson resources from the school like discussed. That would be
wicked. Hope youre well. Will try and get into field to check the score.
Big love Angx

Just what was that weirdness on Monday night? We can never know.

Categories
Uncategorized

Genius Product Ideas #247

This genius business idea is free to anyone who wants it: someone really needs to make a little tool for cleaning out the headphone socket on the iPhone.

As I carry mine around in my pocket typically without the headphones plugged in, I find I’m constantly having to use the end of a paperclip to remove all the fluff and lint and crap that somehow finds its way into the headphone jack.

Given that Apple already provide a custom tool for opening the SIM compartment, I can’t believe they didn’t think of this one too.

It can’t be just me, can it?

File this one under #firstworldproblems…

Categories
Australia

Aussiefication

So last night we headed for the Sun Theatre in Yarraville to see Mark Watson reading some passages from his new book, parts of which happen to be set in Melbourne. One of the many things he spoke about was his affection for this city and his plans one day to move over here. In answer to some further probing on the specifics of his migration plans during the audience Q&A (I think he was expecting questions about his book, but he seemed happy to answer it anyway…) he revealed that apparently there is a branch of the highly skilled migrant visa program through which comedians can get in to the country (and also that he knows all the words to Waltzing Matilda and has already picked an AFL team, which will probably do). I wonder if he’ll ever make it here permanently and whether it will live up to his high expectations when he does.

I took another big step in my own conversion this morning when I went to my appointment at VicRoads to swap that funny pink UK driving licence I have for the Aussie equivalent. The slightly inconsistent rules here state that you can drive for as long as you like on your overseas licence if you’re a temporary resident, but as soon as you become a permanent resident you have six months to swap your licence for the local equivalent. With that deadline about to expire at the end of this month it was time to take the plunge.

Luckily the UK sits on a short list of countries exempt from licence tests so the swap was nothing more than a bit of paperwork and identity verification. It took me long enough to pass my test in the UK in the first place, I couldn’t even begin to imagine the horror of having to do it all again (especially after two years of living here driving around in an automatic / forgetting how to drive a proper car / picking up all sorts of bad habits…)

Perhaps the only negative part of the whole process would be the fact that there is now a photo of me somewhere in the VicRoads computer system, which I have not yet seen but I will be carrying around with me for the next ten years. I don’t even want to think about how old I will be when this licence expires, so let’s hope it’s a good ‘un.

Still, add that to permanent residency and cross it off the list. Next stop citizenship. 2012.

Categories
Blogging

Oh Yeah, Comment Spam. I Forgot All About That…

One of the downsides to kicking off the blog again has been the return of the dreaded comment spam. Before I moved the blog over here, I was using my own custom blog system, which meant I could implement a very simple little trick to stop comment spam. Not quite a CAPTCHA in the true sense of the word, but good enough for my little insignificant blog: I simply added a field asking people to type in my name before submitting the comment. Easy for humans to do; unlikely that anybody would ever bother updating a comment spam bot to parse the question and respond accordingly.

But when I moved the blog over I opted for the easy solution of just installing WordPress, and while that meant that setup and configuration were the proverbial breeze, unfortunately “security through obscurity” no longer applies round these parts. Anything that I choose to implement here is also available to millions of other WordPress users around the world, and so it is very much worth the time of any comment spam bot author to workaround whatever anti-spam techniques I might be using.

Up until a couple of weeks ago I hadn’t seen a single piece of comment spam for about 4 years, but now there’s a steady trickle of them pouring onto the blog and into my inbox (far outweighing the number of genuine comments–perhaps that’s the universe’s way of letting me know that I’m just pissing into the wind once again).

Interestingly, things seem to have moved on in the world of comment spam over the last couple of years–when I last dealt with the problem the comments were usually gibberish and stuffed with links, whereas now they masquerade as apparently genuine comments, and it’s only when you read them closely that you notice the faltering English and lack of relevance to the article they’ve been posted on. I guess they’re designed to trick a busy moderator on a high traffic site who isn’t paying close attention.

That said, if I was writing a comment spam bot that posted the comment:

I also think the same as the commenter above.

They I’d maybe add some logic to check it wasn’t the first comment on that post, as that was a bit of a giveaway on that one.

Some of them are almost worth keeping for the comedy value of the dubious English (and the compliments–but a compliment by spam bot is no better than a machine on a train platform playing that recording that apologises for the delay to your service, is it…):

Thank you for give very good knowledges. Your web is very goodI am impressed by the information that you have on this blog. It shows how well you understand this subject. Bookmarked this page, will come back for more. You, my friend, ROCK! I found just the information I already searched everywhere and just couldn’t find. What a perfect site. Like this website your website is one of my new favs.I like this info shown and it has given me some sort of desire to have success for some reason, so thank you

Nice to know that my web is very good. I wove it myself, don’t you know. And yes, thanks. I do understand the subject of this blog–me–pretty well. Glad to know that I ROCK too. Do come back for more Mr Comment Spam Bot, and good luck with that desire to have success. I’m still working on that myself.

Categories
Uncategorized

46 People Like This…

I’m all for social network integration and everything, but I can’t help thinking that there might be some occasions when that Facebook “like” button isn’t actually an appropriate thing to have on a news story:

Really, NME?

46 people “like” the fact that a former member of ELO was killed in a freak road accident? That’s just great.

In other news, 295 people just love the fact that Charles Haddon jumped to his death at a music festival in Belgium.

Nice.

Categories
Australia UK

Neither Here Nor There…

I was struck by a wave of nostalgia the other day, when my mid-afternoon-lull/boredom-alleviation strategy at work saw me tuning my iPhone to BBC 6 music, only to find Damon Albarn mid-way through a performance of his The Good, The Bad, And The Queen “concept album about modern life in London”, recorded at The Roundhouse in Camden in 2006.

Ah. 2006. When I used to live just down the road. Suddenly I wasn’t sitting at my desk on a dreary winter afternoon in rainy Melbourne wrestling with a cross-browser CSS issue, I was walking along the canal with Sal to Camden on a sunny summer day. Perhaps we were off for a pint of Fruli in the beer garden at the Edinboro Castle. Who Knows.

Of course I inevitably have a rose-tinted view of our past life–it’s easy to forget the freezing winter mornings and those commutes spent wedged into someone’s smelly armpits on a packed tube train that has just decided to hang around in a tunnel for a bit for no apparent reason–but regardless I miss the people and the places that we left behind.

Unbelievably it’s almost two years since we arrived in Australia (and now well over two years since we gave up our Marylebone flat and packed our London lives into 26 shipping boxes and a couple of rucksacks), and I began wondering how Australia has changed me (apart from the extra grey hairs, but I’m pretty sure they’d have sprouted regardless).

Clearly I’m still clinging to my old life in many ways–Private Eye turns up every two weeks to keep me informed about whatever hilarious japes those Coalition boys have been getting up to, and that VPN connection I signed up for gives me access to a certain online telly streaming service–but recently I’ve found that when I need a news fix I instinctively reach for www.theage.com.au before news.bbc.co.uk.

On the other hand, even after two years of living in this sports-mad, aussie rules obsessed city I’d still rather lose sleep to watch another depressing late night Everton result play out than sit through a whole AFL game. (And I won’t be losing sleep when the current season of that particular sport is over in a couple of weeks time, if only because it means that everyone will stop talking about it…)

Then again, with limited opportunities to expose myself to new British music, my Recently Added playlist is local bands all the way (a couple of notable exceptions aside).

So I find myself somewhat conflicted–no longer the person I was when we lived in London, but not quite a proper Australian yet. Still, there’s two years to go before I get to apply for this, so there’s plenty of time for that to change, whether I like it or not.

Categories
Media Shoddy Journalism

Logic

Curious article here from the normally sane Charles Arthur in The Guardian, which opens with:

The invitation to Apple’s event on Wednesday at the Yerba Buena centre in San Francisco shows an acoustic guitar, with a soundhole in the shape of the Apple logo. Seasoned watchers of the company know that this is the time of year when the iPod gets a refresh, yet there’s a shadow over the digital music player that turned Apple from an also-ran computer company into a force in the technology world.

The latest sales figures for the quarter to June showed 9m sold – the lowest quarterly number since 2006. In short, the iPod, launched in October 2001, looks to be in terminal decline. While Apple is unworried – sales of its iPhone and iPad are booming – the drooping figures for the digital music player market are a concern for another sector: the music companies.

Some slightly disingenuous logic there, I think. I don’t see how you can consider iPod sales in isolation and use those as a basis for doom and gloom pronouncements on the state of the music industry as a whole.

For starters, you can’t just take iPhone sales out of the equation and pretend like that doesn’t matter, given that it is essentially an iPod with phone functionality. Why would any of those people contributing to the booming sales of the iPhone bother buying an iPod too? Surely no one loves Apple that much…

But more importantly, what does a decline in sales of the iPod have to do with downloads anyway? Isn’t this an issue of market saturation? There are only so many people in the world after all. How often does Charles Arthur think you need to replace your iPod?

But as iPod sales slow, digital music sales, which have been yoked to the device, are likely to slow too.

Why? My chunky 2005 vintage iPod still does a perfectly good job of playing music downloads.

Just because there are fewer and fewer people left who don’t own some form of iPod, it doesn’t mean that digital downloads are doomed.

Of course the small matter of whether people choose to download music legally, and whether they choose to pay for it is another issue entirely…