Unfortunately, I’m cursed with the same name as a fairly famous actor so, aside from a domain lost due to a massive fail by a UK based DNS host, I’ve not been able to get a name based domain.  Until now.

My existing and rather poorly updated blog domain (http://blog.maccarocks.com) is going to be retired.  I have quite a few fairly popular posts on there so I’ve done my best to migrate them here and hopefully Dreamhost will mirror correctly to keep the old URLs all working.

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Is it the ‘F you I won’t do what you tell me’ element?  I’m not sticking anything to The Man with this, really.  No-one is – except for RATM swearing on Radio 5.  I see a lot of people putting that line to mean everyone saying “hey, F you Cowell”.  I don’t think that’s true at all.  If that were the case, there some more relevant tracks in RATMs back catalogue – infect I think Take The Power Back would have given a more obvious call to action.

Either that or someone will stumble across it on wikipedia..

This started as a comment on Pauls post at Blog On The Motorway but escalated to a full on post of my own.

Firstly, I don’t watch usually watch X-Factor.  Of course, I’ve been at friends houses when it’s on but I don’t watch it of my own accord.
Secondly, I don’t listen to the radio in the UK (other than the occasional Planet Rock and Kerrang) and thus have little interest in what track is number one and even smaller awareness of what is being played all the time.
Thirdly, Christmas number ones, as far back as I can remember (with the exception of Cliff Richard), have been these so called ‘novelty’ records.  I can’t remember specific examples but I’m sure there was a Mr Blobby one or some form of celebrity rehashed Christmas carol.

I do tire of hearing about X-Factor all the live long day but it’s easy to tune out/block Facebook friends/stop following tweeters/ignore people.

So, why am I so interested in getting stopping some most-likely-to-be-a-one-hit-wonder kid getting to number one?

Is it the ‘F you I won’t do what you tell me’ element?  I’m not sticking anything to The Man with this, really.  No-one is – except for RATM swearing on Radio 5.  I see a lot of people putting that line to mean everyone saying “hey, F you Cowell”.  I don’t think that’s true at all.  If that were the case, there some more relevant tracks in RATMs back catalogue – infect I think Take The Power Back would have given a more obvious call to action.

Is it the ‘F Simon Cowell, he’s a C..’ element?  Nope.  Does anyone really think this is going to stop X-Factor next year or mean that Mr C will have to sell one of his myriad houses?  Of course not.

Is it because I don’t want some kid to get rich off of the back of some crappy TV show?  Ridiculous, he’s already going to have made a fortune and this whole deal is only going to make things more lucrative for him.  I doubt more than 10% (very conservative number) of RATM purchases were originally going to buy the X-factor single.

The whole thing is interesting to me from a social and technological view point - Virul campaigns have been around for years but this is different.

This was started by one ordinary guy, not some big brand with a marketing budget and some scenster in-charge.  Some chap who created a Facebook group most likely for a laugh amongst his friends.  I’ll bet he didn’t think “I’m really gonna go out on a limb to stop this X-Factor guy, whatever it takes”.  Let’s be honest here, he hasn’t done much at all.  Don’t get me wrong, everything starts somewhere but let’s not put this up as some one man crusade to stop the tyranny of a televised talent show.

Of course, it’s not the first time this kind of thing has happened.  Crowd-sourcing is really taking off in a huge way - news sites like Reddit and Digg, software companies using it to aid their development roadmaps, even news agencies use Twitter to track breaking news in real time.

That’s why it’s interesting.  However, ordinarily, I wouldn’t have bothered getting involved with this but the fact that this kind of unimportant ‘battle’ can also be used to motivate people to donate to charity made me change my mind.
Last Friday, they’d raised almost £2k for Shelter.  Today, the current total is over £50k with gift aid.

Am I going to listen to the chart show this weekend?  No way, at least not on purpose.

Am I really going to be annoyed/interested if X-Factor kid is number one?  Not at all.

Of course, it would be very cool for kids to get exposed to (via the radio friendly version ) some decent musicianship for a change.  Maybe they’ll even pay heed to some of the causes that RATM have campaigned for over the years.  Honestly though, I’m really not bothered about the outcome.

However, I spent £0.99 and a did a good deed in donating to charity to be a very small part of something both interesting, useful and certainly something that will be a kind of folklore in geek history - Well, at least there’s a good chance someone will stumble across it on wikipedia in years to come..

I can also hope that RATM will follow this all up with a UK tour next year!

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Quickest way I’ve found is to export your feeds (Settings | Import / Export), edit the XML by hand (fortunately my 100 or so feeds are organised within ~12 folders), delete all of your subs from GReader and reimport your edited XML list.

I wonder if the GReader UX guys are having trouble deciding between Folder and Tag for classification.

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In the interim, DevJaVu have just started to offer free Personal accounts that include integrate Trac and SVN.
All you need to do is sign up using the referal code johnny5. I don’t know how long that code is valid for so get on it.

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1. Versioning a web development project

I’m angry. The problem is that they have the monoploy and you can’t get tickets anywhere else.
I don’t know who is worse, Ticketmaster or the touts that buy up the tickets with no intention of going and sell them on.

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Before I go:

I’ve been using Ebay for a good 5 or 6 years and never had a *real* problem at all, until January this year. I took a BiN auction and paid the (fortunately) reletively low price via PayPal. Ebay has this to say about PayPal:

When a buyer pays with PayPal for a qualifying listing, s/he is protected up to £500 at no additional cost if that item is not as described or is simply not received at all.

A week passed with no correspondance from the seller, which isn’t unusual. That became two weeks and 7 days later three. No response at all to emails so, out of principal more than anything I logged the claim case with paypal. I just got this response from them:

After careful review, we have concluded our investigation of the Buyer
Complaint described below.

We have decided in your favour, however, we were unable to recover any
funds from the seller’s account. As stated in the PayPal User Agreement,
recovery of funds associated with a Buyer Complaint cannot be guaranteed.

Brilliant.

Judging by the number of negavative feedbacks against the sellers paypal account, it wasn’t a one off. Now, I know about people getting their accounts hacked and everything but in most cases i’ve heard of the person on the wrong end of the hacking usually has the decency to reply to the emails sent – even if it is just to say WTF. Besides, in this day and age when EVERYONE should know about phishing and the importance of strong passwords I have zero sympathy for people who cannot protect themselves online, especially when other people lose out because of it.

Thanks Ebay, Thanks PayPal and thanks [email address redacted]

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