I Love Contextual Advertising where Ads Match The Content

And why not advertise Single Arabs next to 'The Ultimate Jew'!?

Responses to Ignorance

Here's some interesting news articles (click the links to follow);

A girl is killed because she's a goth.

An atheist soldier is harassed for being an atheist.

Responses to the atheist soldier article on a website which is predominantly atheist.

What do they have in common?

For me, they're a snapshot of how mixed up and messed up things are right now. It shows how people respond to what they don't understand.

But you know what, nobody looks at goths and says "I hate goths because I don't understand them' or 'I hate atheists because I don't know what they're about' or even 'I hate Christians because I don't get their faith'. Not at all, because I believe that what people actually think (if they think at all in these situations) is "I hate what they stand for" - in other words, the full body of ignorance is shown in that people think they know when in fact they don't.

People think that what they know about 'others' is what informs their actions, but the truth is that it's the gaps in their knowledge that really shows us what they're like.

There are three primary areas of responses to ignorance; positive, neutral and negative.

Let's look at the church's attitude to the belief that the world is round as an example and how those three would be manifest;

Positive

The world is round? Well, I never would have thought that. You learn something new every day eh? Well, thank you for that.

Neutral

So the world is round. What do I care?

Negative

Heretic! Burn him before he manages to spread his satanic lies!

I know, this is an incredibly naive post, but can we see the reflection our our own faces in the reactions of others around us?

The MOTs of Life

I've been thinking today about how I'm conscious at times of how we humans have a desire to look good, successful and respectable without actually wanting to be good, successful and respectable, usually because there's so much hassle, expense and effort.

Take the car's MOT. I've spent hundreds of pounds in the past so that my car can be counted as roadworthy for one day. As long as my car is good for that day, I'm good. I never stopped to think about the fact if my car needed new brakes, it's because I've been driving around in a death trap, a car with bad brakes. All I want is to have that certificate that says I'm good to go for another year.

The same applies to the driving test; how many people drive their cars with the care and attention with which they drove their cars on their driving test? Don't lie now!

As long as we can have the piece of paper or the 'trapping' that suggests we're good people doing good things in good ways for good reasons, we don't care if that's what we're actually doing.

I've worked for a company (not where I work now - in case by boss is reading this) where in order to earn an 'Investors in People' badge, everything had to be 'just so' for a couple of weeks. Once the award was given, everything went back to normal until the time to renew came along and we went through it all again.

Whether we're talking about tidy desk policies, appraisals, church efforts, big houses and posh cars or even politics, we all seem to want the gestures of greatness that show us in the best light possible.

But what about the little things?

If I made the effort to put my car through an MOT every week or month, it would cost time and money but I'd know that my car really was safe to drive. Ok, so that's a crazy illustration, but let's take it out a bit; A company that works for three weeks a year to get Investors In People isn't really an investor in people. A company that does daily everything that's needed for the certificate and therefore doesn't need the three weeks of frantic activity is a true investor in people.

So is it enough to do something every day? Not really, because if a company's idea of investing in people was to regularly put posters up to say that they're investing in people when in reality, they're just investing in the managers' golf fund, then they're not really investors in people. Are they?

What about 'churches' that want to be mega-churches and do it by playing rock music with bland lyrics, play DVDs recorded in churches half way across the world and invite self-help authors who also do shouty preaching (and every good Christian knows that the further a preacher has travelled, the better he is ;-)? After all, if you act like a mega-church, you'll become a mega-church. So if a whale acts like a cat, it will become a cat?

(I never did understand how these 'culturally relevant' churches can think they're addressing the culture needs of South Wales communities by becoming more American). Let's just say that ten people in a church that cares, loves, shares and worships from the heart is what I call a 'Mega-Church'.

Sure, go ahead and look like whatever you want, but the things that actually make you are the things that nobody sees. Pulling books out to make your mates think you're brainy won't make you brainy, reading them will.

Ok, sermon over ;-)

Carphone Warehouse Says: You should have accepted our spam if you want a rebate

Carphone Warehouse has kindly offered to refund £100 to those who bought an 8GB iPhone within a month of the price being dropped. I was among the number of these people, so I checked with the adorable company to check that I was going to get the refund.

Now, don't get me wrong. I see this refund as money-for-nothing since the price I paid is the price it cost and it's just my tough luck if I missed it. What I find interesting however is the criteria specified by Carphone Warehouse  for eligibility. The e-mail I received from Carphone Warehouse Customer Support stated the following;

In regards to this offer being offered relating to the Iphone there are 
the following terms and conditions.

- You must have purchased your Iphone at the higher price on or after 
the 17th March
- You must have provided permission for Direct Marketing and other 
information to be sent to you at the time when you purchased your 
Iphone.

(their spelling, my emphasis)

What this effectively tells me is that if I wanted to receive this rebate (which I didn't know what coming), I should have agreed to receiving Direct Marketing from Carphone Warehouse and Other Information.

I call that spam.

Betterware - Inspiration for Things That Suck

The other day, I got a catalogue from Betterware popped through the letterbox. Like every catalogue I receive, it got thrown away.

I got something else through the letterbox saying that they cam to pick up the Betterware catalogue and they're sorry they missed me.

Hang on a minute: They're expecting to come and pick it up!? But it's in the bin! If he wants it back, he can look in the bin. The bin is outside, he's outside so there shouldn't be a problem.

He left me a note saying 

"Sorry I missed you when I called today to collect your brochure/deliver your goods. I shall call again on Wed Afternoon. If this time is inconvenient and you wish to contact me, please call me on Paul"

If a complete stranger has the right to put something in my letterbox that looks like a physical manifestation of spam and expect me to read it and give it back, then surely someone somewhere on the well respected internet can demand with equal expectation that I will read the Viagra and Penis/Breast Extension e-mails I receive on an hourly basis and demand a reply!

That's not going to happen. It's my letterbox and I will do what I like with any unsolicited SPAM that comes through it.

Boy, Girl or Don't Want To Know?

I know that there are people who may be reading this and thinking that I'm talking about them when I say this stuff but you know that I'm not talking about you because you're different and you're not a bad person.

No, the bad people are the people who make some kind of 'one with nature' pact to not know the gender of their unborn baby. They're the ones who say "Oh, we don't want to know because it'll spoil the surprise" but what they really want to say is that they've got this kind of purity that means they're not going to allow doctors to tell them something that only nature should tell them.

It's like giving birth is something so sacred that they're too afraid to allow science to tell them something so natural. I'm not often on the side of scientists, but this time, I'm thinking it's just hypocritical to take this 'nature never meant for us to know until the birth' attitude when they're doing all sorts of other 'nature never meant...' things to the baby;

I'm sure nature never meant for ultrasonic waves to be bounced off the baby's bonce while yet unborn. I'm sure nature never meant for pickles and ice cream to be so readily available for those crazy cravings and I'm sure that nature never meant for it to have taken this long for you to have conceived anyway, unless that little rubber thing just fell off a tree and landed en penis with nobody noticing.

I get the Christians saying that they want to leave it to God. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Christian and I believe the Bible, but I also read in the Bible that whenever someone important was going to be born, God wasn't shy in saying what brand of human the baby was going to be. You didn't get angels and prophets saying "Behold, thou art with child but fear not, the surprise will be spoilêd not and I shall nay reveal unto the the gender of thy son.... .... D'oh!"

There's a whole bunch of things nature never meant for us to do yet we do it. We travel at 70 miles per hour down the motorway, we get space robots to tell us how to get to the shops and we use the internet to have face-to-face conversations with people on the other side of the world. So why not find out? As long as science isn't making minotaurs, go ahead and use what's there before the West blows itself up in a mixture of liberal oppression of common sense thinking.

May was well.

Evernote

Introduction

I've been using Evernote for a few days now and I thought I'd put a bit of effort into posting up a description of what it is. This isn't so much a review as it is a rave about how neat an application and service it is.

Put simply, Evernote allows you to store notes. Nice. But the power of the tool is in the kinds of notes it allows you to store, the ways in which it allows you to store them and the ways in which it allows you to retrieve them.

But where to start?

Notable Power

I could start by talking about how the notes are Rich Text so you can apply text formatting such as bold, italics and strikethrough. It also allows you to put photos or images into a note.

Now hang on a minute because this is one of the features of Evernote that blows me away. You see, when you store an image in Evernote, Evernote actually READS the image! What do I mean? Let me give you an example;

You're driving along and you see a sign that says 'Welcome to Oxford'. You like the sign so you take a photo of it with your cameraphone and send it straight to Evernote (more on that later).  So far so good yeah?

After a while, you want to find that photo you took in your Evernote list of notes. Now the thing is, there's probably little use in searching for the filename because it'll be something like IMAGE_00234.JPG or something. However, if you were to carry out a search on the word 'Oxford', the note containing the photo would appear because Evernote will have recognised the text and indexed it! Now that is sweet!

The way I've used it so far is by pasting into a note images from error boxes that have appeared in dialogue boxes. These images have been indexed so now I can search within my notes for references to that error message without ever having types out the message!

Another feature I like is the ability to put a check-box wherever I want one. What this means is that if I'm writing notes, I can place check-boxes within the notes as reminders that therein lies an action or a task that I need to complete. That is also extremely useful.

Your notes are stored on your computer but they can also be synchronised with the Evernote server. I find this particularly cool because that means I can use my Windows based PC in the office to take notes. Then, via the server, I have access to those same notes when I use the Mac OS X client at home. The notes don't have to be synchronised though and if I wish, I can set up notebooks which reside only on a local computer's hard drive.

Transmitting

You have a number of options as far as putting notes into Evernote is concerned;

• Desktop Client
  There is currently a full on desktop client for Windows (XP/Vista) and Mac OS X. These offer the full range of capabilities (The Mac client is catching up) so you can edit, arrange and tag with ease.
• Desktop Web Client
  The web gives you a simple and clean interface in which to create notes. The fact that it is web based means that you can access it anywhere, hence, you can get to your notes anywhere you have a desktop class web browser.
• Mobile Web Client / Windows Mobile Client
  There's a special and simplified mobile web based client if you're using a mobile phone or a Smartphone. If you have a Windows Mobile device (I hate that word, when people say 'device' for a phone, I get the feeling they're like grown men who can't admit that they still play with toys), then you have a native client that you can install and use locally. Apparently, they have a Mobile Java client coming soon and I would like to think that they've got a native client coming for Symbian and the iPhone.
• E-Mail
  Evernote gives each user a unique e-mail address so if you are taking notes in a mail client, you can just send that mail to Evernote and it is automatically stored in your notebook.
• Web Clip
  Whether you use Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari, you can use a special Web Clip bookmark to instantly store a web page or a highlighted part of a web page straight into Evernote.

I personally find this useful in the Notes application on my iPhone where once I've finished, I just e-mail the note to my Evernote account and it's there waiting for me to find it when I need it. The same goes for images which I take and e-mail them to Evernote. Also, since Evernote will have a stab at indexing handwriting, I'm can even snap a photo of my Moleskine and send that in!

Retrieval

There's no point storing notes if you can't get at them. As above, you can use a desktop client (Windows & Mac), a desktop web browser, a mobile web browser and a mobile client. There's also a system being developed where you will be able to access your notes via IMAP! Now that is a great idea and once they've got it sussed (my iPhone just doesn't want to know at the moment), that will be a killer facility.

The Desktop Client

Most of your time will probably be spent with the desktop client (mine is) and that's a tool that really offers some neat little functionality.

The Windows version is the more mature and you can see this with little extras like the activity monitor (a little calendar graph that shows you how busy you have been with creating and saving notes) but the OS X is coming up and is already very useful.

In The Name Of Freedom, Shut Up

There are many people crying out for freedom to say whatever they want. People want the right to  to call each other a schmuck or a bigot and if anybody dares shut them up, then they're Nazis or in bed with Robert Mugabe. Everybody wants the right to say whatever they want!

But when someone else comes and says something that enough people don't like, then it becomes a different matter altogether. You can speak your mind as long as you're not influenced by anything; as long as nothing has caused you to come to the belief you have, speak your mind. If something has caused you to come to the belief you have, then make sure it's a good thing like Kylie Minogue or a book that tell you how crap something is.

If you were brought up with religious values, make sure that the only thing you say is that those religious values screwed with your head or they forced your uncle to molest you. Don't, for heaven's sake, say that any religious values you were brought up with had a positive influence on you. If they did have a positive influence on you, make sure that you can show how it wasn't any mainstream part of that religion that influenced you for the better but a watered down secularisation of that religion so that you can still say that you were lucky to come out of that religious environment with an ounce of reason in your head and your pants on.

As long as what you say is what most people are thinking, you're free to say it. And if you're shouting someone down, make sure that your shouting is done for the freedom of others. Remember, you can hide your fear of someone else's ideas by making it clear to everybody that the very fact they have the opinions they have shows that they themselves are the cowards and therefore they should shut up.

Everybody has the right to say 'brave' things like the world is warming up. Damn the media for trying to shut you up in speaking your truths to the many, but woe betide any solitary voice who dares suggest that the world's warming up is not our fault. Such thoughts and ideas are too dangerous and misleading because now we know what the truth is (do we?) there's no reason to believe that anybody who deviates from the accepted truth is anything but an intellectual terrorist. That's why you'll see people failing to disagree and instead saying things like;

Christian groups challenge embryo research

Well of course they do…

Why can’t we just have a policy of rubberstamping the word “DISMISSED” across any suit filed in court by these people.

Nobody sets out to be evil or wrong, but we love to think of the 'other lot' like they're some kind of Dick Dastardly, desperately trying to find ways of making other people's lives difficult. If you want to see human embryos mixed with animals, I'm going to assume it's because you want to see a cure for some nasty diseases. If you think it's wrong, I'm going to assume you have a respect for human life and dignity.

Whether it's a religious nut or a scientific preacher of truth, everybody wants to speak but nobody wants to hear. Everybody wants to be the only one who has freedom of speech and it sucks. Whether it's a blog or a country, you'll find people trying to shut up the ones who challenge their truth while making a virtue of challenging others'

But you know something? This is nothing new. Nothing ever changes and although fashions come and go, you'll find that humans will always find a way to screw up a good thing.

Substance - are we ready to deliver?

I've been reading and hearing recently about a growing backlash gaining momentum that is fed up with having presentation over substance. Whether its TV cooks or politicians, people are beginning to wake up to the fact that the celebrity status carried by so many charismatic people doesn't mean diddly-squat to someone who actually wants the truth from someone who knows.

The church had better watch out. For many years, the church has thrived on charismatic preachers who have wowed the crowds with wit and clever 'acts' that tickle the masses, but in the same way as the general public are getting fed up with a dumbed down media, so many are going to fall away from the church because they're going to realise that their church is all is all hot air.

Churches looking for cultural relevance should maybe start looking for integrity and start allowing their people to be themselves in their church circles. There's nothing more irrelevant than someone trying to be what they're not, and trying to force a person to be a product of a culture that is not theirs in order to be hip and trendy has the moral integrity of Vogue.

I hate it when politicians spin their version of events and I hate even more when I see churches spin the gospel into something that makes false promises and deliver shallow expectations. The church needs to stop condemning people for being in the sinking sand and also stop describing the chemical makeup of the sinking sand, but it also needs to make clear that the sinking sand is there and the world is sinking into it ever deeper (a church that won't talk about the sinking sand is too shallow and a church that talks only of the sinking sand is too dead).

The challenge, as I see it for my life, is to make sure that I don't try and impress with anything other than the truth. Anything else that comes through in my ministry in terms of humour or little asides or even multimedia and culturally aware language need to remain as sideline issues that are part of my personality. Construing a sermon to a point where I can tell a certain joke or grind any axe is just going to suck. It also challenges me to look at my life and how I live it.

Ben Elton said that at least in the old days, a religious belief cost something. The last decade or two has allowed Christians to live Christianity for free but as the world demands substance, we all need to ask ourselves; ARE WE READY?

Exposed to the Core

Podcasts are a fantastic way to listen to the 'radio' programs which cover only the things in which you are interested. Don't want to hear a program about the development of commerce in the North of England but do want to hear a program about your mobile phone and how to use it? No problem. Switch off the radio and pop on over to iTunes and subscribe to a free podcast.

Great. That's what I do.

But, I've found that receiving regular opinions from the core of an interest group exposes me to a lifestyle that is (not deliberately) portrayed as 'the way'. I'm fascinated by how the people I listen to refer to a $50 application as 'must have' and a $500 piece of hardware as 'essential' thus implying that if you want to be considered a 'serious user' or even a 'proper' user, then you have to get these.

Not only can a huge number of people not afford even one 'essential' $20 application, even more can't justify getting a new iPod when they already have one, albeit with 16GB less storage. Do you need to get a new Smartphone every six months in order to be considered an enthusiast?

As I said, I'm convinced that there's no intention to exclude anybody from the 'gang' in any of the plethora of podcasts that I enjoy, but it is interesting to see the social effects of having a 'community leader' (podcaster) defining the standard and establishing the 'best' stuff to buy. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't just buy the latest XBox game (I'd need an XBox first) if I didn't have the money. Would that make me less of a man?

This is the power of advertising and this is the single most thing that advertising needs in order to work; you are less important if you don't have our product. The challenge is for the common people to have enough self confidence and self awareness to be able to say 'that's nice but no, I don't need that'.

Why I Don't Use Homescreens

For some time, Homescreens have been the mainstay of modern portable computers and mobile phones. An accomplished homscreen will tell you what appointments you have coming up, what tasks are needing to be completed and what messages have been received.

But not for me. No more. I've decided I'm not into that any more and I'll tell you why; I don't want to be nagged every time I look at my phone.

Let me give you some background; I tend to not tell my parents when I intend to leave one place to get to another, I tend not to tell them when I intend to be somewhere and I tend not to tell them the details of my transport. The reason? If I did tell them, they'd be phoning me to remind me that I need to get some stuff done because I'm going somewhere important and I need to be ready.

It was worse when I lived with them because I'd then get knocks on the bedroom door, shouts up the stairs or comments at the dinner table, reminding me that I have to do something or other, telling me that I need to be somewhere and that I need to be ready to go to it. Sure, I know that they did it because they cared and for that I am truly thankful, but I could feel my skull being crushed under the pressure of the constant reminders of the things that were coming up.

That's what homescreens do to me. With a homescreen turned on, every time I look at my phone or PDA is like I'm getting nagged all over again about unread messages, constantly being reminded that there are unfinished tasks that may not need to be done until next month, and that tomorrow, I have to go do something somewhere with someone, somehow.

Imagine, if every time you picked up your phone you heard a nagging voice telling you stuff that you already know or you don't need to know. That's why I don't do homescreens any more. That's why I now do a simple, paper-based diary - Because I know where to look if I need to know what is coming up, I know there's a place where this information is stored and I know that it is stored somewhere. When I want to know that information, I'll go there to get it. If I don't need it, I won't go there to get it. I don't have to worry about synchronising it across platforms and devices and services and hard drives and memory keys and websites and flippin' intergalactic satellite to-do lists with their laser-guided calendars and integrated 3D holographic contacts lists! I don't get interrupted!

I hate being nagged at the best of times and so, as long as I can maintain control and discipline, life is much simpler and far more pleasurable without an infernal homescreen telling me stuff all the time. Far better to have a pretty picture to still my restless mind.

If anybody can tell me where that photo is from on the right, up there, I'll be well impressed (there's a clue in the file name and no, Mr. Spoon is not allowed to guess).

Moleskine Templates for Apple Pages

I wanted to be able to easily put content from my Mac into my Moleskine collector so I opened up my Apple Pages application and decided to put this little file together. Each of the three templates are media placeholders which makes it easy to add graphic elements such as maps or simple backdrops.

The first element had, as can be seen, a map in mind. I wanted to be able to paste text into a box (for example, if details had been sent to me in an e-mail or there was something dead useful on a webpage) and I wanted a page dedicated to added some contact details. I can also add these to the pocket at the back of the book should I need.

If you want a copy of the Apple Pages file, just drop a line to rcopeh at google mail dot com and I'll send it to you as soon as I can.

Microsoft's Monopoly vs Apple's 'Monopoly'

There's been some talk in the media that since the EU has sought to tackle Microsoft's abuse of market dominance on the Desktop Operating System market, Apple should be next for its dominance in mobile digital music.

This, in my opinion, is crazy and this is why; Choice. Apple's so-called monopoly has been achieved through the choice of people wanting its products. Microsoft's monopoly has been achieved through people having to use their products where no choice was offered.

Let me put this another way, if you were to walk into a high street electronic store or a computer store with a view to purchasing a digital music player, you would find choice. Lots of choice. There'd be so many different makes and models of digital music player from which to choose that your head would spin. You'll find music players by Fujitsu, Sanio and Sony (to name but a few). There'd be a bunch of cheaper ones with a brand you've never heard of before. You'll find players that can handle video made by Creative and yes, you'll find media players by Apple. What you'll see is that you have choice, you can choose which player you want and guess what, they will all play MP3 files.

But what if you were looking to buy a computer? Granted, you could walk into a store and find computers made by HP, Lenovo and Sony and many more. Is that choice? Kind of. But what about the Operating System? Sure, you can choose between Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Enterprise and so on, but the bottom line is this, you will be buying a Microsoft operating system. Sure, if you ask around and make the effort, you can get yourself a Linux box and maybe even a Mac, but let's look at the shop window; All you can have is Windows.

Whereas you can choose your music player, you can't choose your Desktop Operating System. And this is the difference between Microsoft's monopoly and Apple's 'monopoly'.

But how did we get here?

Microsoft got here by illegal means. They bullied companies into not including other Operating Systems on their computers thus making sure that the only Operating System that could breathe was Windows. Anything else suffocated through lack of exposure. Ever heard of BeOS? There we go then. Windows succeeded by becoming the default installation on almost every computer sold. Not many people actually choose Microsoft Windows because, as far as they can see, Microsoft Windows is all there is.

How did the iPod become so dominant? Apple released it, marketed it and people chose it. It's that simple. Apple didn't have to stop others from making music players and it didn't have to stop shops from selling them. In other words, Apple made a media player that people wanted more than the others, hence their market lead. If Apple were to start making media players that people didn't like, people could move on and buy something else instead. Apple doesn't own the market through bribery and corruption, it owns that market by appealing to the materialistic values promoted in today's modern media - in other words, Apple owns the market because it makes things that people want.

But the EU is worried because Apple is locking people into the iPod. They say that there's no means for people who use iTunes to use their music with other devices. That's not strictly true. I play my iTunes music on my Nokia smartphones by burning the music to a CD ROM and ripping it back in MP3 or unprotected AAC. It's my music, I listen to it on my phone and my iPod. What's the EU talking about?

I really don't see what there is to investigate regarding Apple and it's alleged monopoly. Nobody forced me to buy an iPod, I could have just as easily bought a Windows Media Compatible player (that would be compatible with Windows Media, for a while, before Microsoft changed the format without giving me a path to upgrade for free - a la Plays For Sure), but I wanted an iPod.

Yes, Apple has a massive chunk of the mobile digital media market. Ok, it's a hugely massive chunk and it is the biggest fish in the pond, but it got there by the market (that's us) choosing to put it there, not because people were forced or tricked into buying Apple products.

How much of a stranglehold does Apple have in order to force the market to do what it wants? Ask NBC who have decided on their own volition to not work with Apple and instead work with Amazon. Nobody stopped them and people are as free to buy NBC products from Amazon as they were when NBC were in iTunes.... Well, except that NBC video will no longer play on Apple Macs because Microsoft doesn't support protected Windows Media on the Mac..... Wait a minute!

So, EU dudes, before you complain about Apple's media monopoly, take a look at the BBC's iPlayer, ITV.COM, Amazon's video service, Channel 4's 4oD and tell me where you see Apple's monopoly. Then pop down Currys or Dixons and count how many music players support protected WMV and WMA compared to protected AAC. If there is a lockout monopoly going on, you want to be knocking on doors in Redmond, not Cupertino.

4 Oh Dear

Any companies that want to take on iTunes and the use of DRM for purchase of legal video downloads will need to perform well to be in a with a chance. Unfortunately for Channel 4, there is no chance of it's online TV service coming close to threatening even the most unreliable of services since it is, probably, the most unreliable of services.



For example, the only TV show I can imagine myself watching on the channel is The IT Crowd. When it first started being made available on 4oD, I couldn't get the video to play inside the 4oD player, so I had to find the video file on my Hard Drive and play it from there straight into Windows Media Player.

Unfortunately, Channel 4 have stopped me from doing that and now force me to do it from the web page itself. So, I load up the software and after some coaxing (which involves downloading the video then starting up a streaming video only to have to copy the URL to the stream and paste that into Windows Media Player), it plays and I get to have my weekly TV giggle.

That was last week. This week, I'm playing it in the web based player and it says "Oh no! You naughty little man! You need to be playing this in the web based player!". I am. It's wrong. I'm right. I don't get to watch my video.

I'm still unable to watch it. It's free, so all it's really cost me is the time it takes to connect, download and try to kick it off.

But if I had to compare that with the smooth runnings of the iTunes experience, it should be clear to everyone except a Channel 4 executive that 4oD is utterly useless.

When it comes to iTunes, I just pick my Song/Video/Movie/TV Show and play it. I'm fully legal and yet the whole DRM issue doesn't show its head at all. It's transparent. Sure, I'd rather it wasn't there at all, but it's Ok because it causes me no trouble whatsoever whereas this Microsoft-based DRM means that I can't run it on my preferred platform (Mac OS X) and even under Windows, it won't run because it isn't sure of what software I'm using to run it.

Like, hello?

Eczema - Clearing Up

My eczema flare up seems to be finally subsiding. What made it go could be one or a combination of prayer, hydrocortisone, tonnes of diprobase moisturiser, unique eczema ointment from West Wales or ointment and tablets from a Chinese medicine shop.

But with it now, slowly ebbing away, I don't want to forget what it was like because when it happens, the shock can be frightening and it can make you wonder if it ever will go away.

So here, in public view, are my memories of what I had. I fully acknowledge that what I went through is nothing compared to what other have gone through and go through every day, but I want to encourage anyone who stumbles upon the blog entry to know that if you don't normally suffer from the condition, but you got it bad right now, there's every chance it will go away.

It started with the itch, and I can promise you that there's nothing that compares with scratching an eczmatic itch. It didn't seem so bad on that first day, but when I woke up with blood on my bedsheets and deep red skin all over my torso, I guessed something was up.

I started trying my limited supply of hydrocortisone but it was like the jet fighters against the aliens in Independence Day - it just wasn't enough to handle this kickass invasion.

I got advice to moisturise and moisturise and moisturise and moisturise. This is what I did and while it slowed down the rash's progress, it didn't make it better.

Hot days were bad because the rash was all over and into my back so I couldn't sit comfortably in my car to drive because it would get hot, sweat and then sting like there were needles being pushed out through my skin (yes, out).

In some ways, nights were worse because I'd have to 'grease up' and wear a t-shirt to bed and that meant feeling too hot to sleep. Sometimes, I'd wake up to find myself sitting on my bed with lumps of dead skin under my nails and a horrible feeling in my back and shoulders... A feeling like someone had just gouged out a bunch of skin.

I remembered back when I was around 19, when I had my last flare-up, and some exclusive ointment from a pharmasist in Carmarthen cleared me up in three days. I tried to get hold of it and my parents tried to get hold of it but it took more than a week. One memory that sticks in my mind is that of being at the pharmasist's and being able to see jars of the ointment on the shelf but because my ordered lot hadn't arrived, I couldn't have any! The desperation was so intense, I even considered shoplifting! I did offer to pay double, but that wasn't acceptable either.

I got some in the end and, greasy though it was, I started using it and although I didn't get it fixed in three days, it did start to make it better.

Last Saturday, I fixed on trying my luck at asking some Chinese herbalists for help. They gave me some ointment and tablets to try. It cost... A lot. But over this last week, I have seen improvement; my skin isn't as red, I can sit in my car and handle heat better. I don't itch as much and I'm able to walk on a warm day.

I still try and keep my clothes few and loose, but things are getting better. Yet, I have found that where the redness was, dryness now is. This dead skin falling off has made me shower twice a day (instead of my usual once) and is a little distressing, but I guess it's a sign of healing - but waking up to a neck that looks like it's about to crack like dry mud isn't exactly something that makes me feel sexy.

As I said, it's getting better, slowly, and so I can do little more than hope and drink more Goats' milk.

Thank you for reading.