And how did I find this out? Because I went to go and log in to my account. I couldn’t. Thinking it was just because I’d forgotten my password, I requested a reminder. No dice. It appears that my registered email address did not belong to an active account. “Strange,” thought I. “I could have sworn this was the right email address. Oh well, let’s go and check.”

I checked. It was right. Confused, I decided to try the other link on there that is supposed to help people with login problems contact CJ’s customer *ahem* service. I received the following email:

From: no-response@custhelp.com
Subject: Assistance Request Denied

Your request for assistance cannot be accepted because your email
address is not registered with an existing account.

===============================================================

Was I mad?! Yes, I was. CustHelp.com? Expletives.

A little internet research leads me to the conclusion that my account was closed due to inactivity. Yes, I hadn’t logged in for a while because I was unlikely to be clocking up large figures of sales… and quite possibly no sales at all. But I DID have funds in there – I HAD made some sales at one point. Those profits are gone now – and though $20 might not mean anything to some people, it means a hell of a lot to me. It’s a starting point. It’s somewhere from which I can grow.

I don’t like this no-right-to-reply deletion of online accounts. I’ve heard horror stories before, particularly from webmasters (boy does that phrase sound corny) who rack up money only for it to disappear before their eyes. I’m leery of going back to Commission Junction now, a company which I have previously recommended to others for the excellence of their affiliate programs. I guess I probably will still recommend them – but with a very significant caveat.

- Don’t dare stop making sales or they’ll delete your account!

(PS. For anyone who’s interested, the few “sales” I made were from GoDaddy’s affiliate scheme that I had set up on my domain name manager website – in case you’re looking to manage your domain name lists.)

Jailbreak my new iPhone 3GS – blackra1n

Anyway, first job, of course, was to jailbreak the new phone. Last time I did it is was… well, it wasn’t a chore, exactly. But it was a bit of pain, using the redsn0w tool from dev-team, on the PC, to modify the firmware update. BUT – brilliant news, an update to an older piece of software called blackra1n which also hacks the iPhone! I hadn’t heard of it before but it appears that it’s been around before for updating older versions of the firmware and I have to admit it was good to have an alternative!

Installation was… well, it was as easy as downloading it and double-clicking the icon! With a connected phone, Click “make it ra1n”, your phone reboots with a funky new wallpaper and then that’s it! You’ve now installed a piece of software called blackrain which is an icon on your phone – open that and you get a number of options to install a software manager, like Cydia.

Problems with blackra1n

HOWEVER, I have a big problem with blackrain because whenever I reboot my phone it keeps asking my to re-activate my phone and plug it into my PC so iTunes can talk to it. Very odd, and clearly not terribly convenient! So if anyone else has this problem with blackra1n please let me know I’m not alone or going nuts.

It’s tricky, I’m very impressed with how easy and quick the jailbreak was with blackrain but clearly this is a big error to have come up every time I reboot my iPhone. Maybe it’ll just sort itself out given a few more reboots, or maybe there’s something in the rebooting that I’m doing wrong and it’s constantly going into recovery mode or something.

Seems obvious to me!

Anyhoo, I installed a few and thought I’d recommend the free one I found that DOES do the job, it’s called DeskPins:

Find the website here

It’s great – has allowed me to do EXACTLY what I want, which is to effectively pin Chrome to the right hand side of my screen. Yay! Thank you!

Hope that’s useful.

Personally I struggled to find the image when I first heard the news and I’m including it here, not to further the problem or to try to snatch a few extra visitors to this rubbish blog (seriously, and honestly, I’m sorry if you think that) because of that reason. Hopefully people will understand that that’s the true reason behind my posting it. As Google themselves have said, the image itself may cause offence but actually the conversation that’s sprung up is interesting (in a social sense) and infuriating in lots of others.

Initially a lot of people will take offence at the fact that I’m republishing the image. Let’s put that argument to one side – I didn’t make the image, I’m not promoting hatred or anything other than discussion. Let’s move on:

So the crux of the argument seems to be that because black people have commonly been referred to over time as “monkeys”, that this image is offensive. It’s interesting, even in originally writing this sentence I came across a way of viewing this that does lead slightly away from the “Oh get over yourselves with this rascism thing”… which was:

“…because black people have commonly been referred to over time as “monkeys”, photoshopping any black person as a monkey is rascist.”

Yunno, actually, I was reading a lot of comments on other sites and wasn’t convinced but now I have to admit, I am rather more so. I read peoples’ suggestions about thinking about it in terms of footballers getting “monkey chants” when on the pitch but that didn’t really wash. I think the truth is: yes, this image IS racially offensive. Google correctly says this but chooses not to censor. Well done Google!

The further arguments that I read about were about George Bush (and Barack Obama!) and other white people getting “monkeyfied” and so, actually, this was just another and “no-one complained when it was a white person getting this photoshopic abuse”. And whilst that’s true, I think it’s actually a bit of a straw-man argument – it sounds right on the face of it but doesn’t actually mean that the image itself isn’t offensive.

Anyway, I’ve been highly intrigued by the argument and think it’s genuinely useful to have this kind of debate in modern times where many of us claim to be relatively sensitive to social antagonisms until actually faced with them. Personally I feel sorry for the Obamas, and Michelle in particular, because this whole nonsense embroils her into an argument which isn’t anything to do with her own actions, and she’s entirely unable to prevent them.

It’s about 5 chaps and chapettes who for some reason are struck by lightning and become endowed with super powers. Uh-huh. So, kinda like Heroes, a bit. We have a time-traveller and a mind-reader amongst others – which is all good. Actually, it’s pretty good yunno – it’s funny in all the right places, doesn’t take cheap swipes at the superhero genre and actually is very entertaining. Just one thing I would mention is that it’s definitely not for young uns – hence the 10pm post-watershed billing.

Yeah – looking forward to seeing more! To view a preview of next week’s show, check out the following movie clip:

Catch the next showing of Misfits:

Misfits, Thursday 19th November at 10pm on E4

Free fireworks displays

Roundhay park

Without doubt the jewel in the crown of Leeds’ fireworks displays is to be found at Roundhay Park – every year thousands gather to watch the huge bonfire and fantastic firework display. The fire is lit at 7.30pm and the fireworks are set to kick off at 8pm. Admission is naturally free – though you’re advised to get there nice and early to take advantage of good viewing positions, live music and various other entertainments there.

Other firework displays in and around Leeds

Springhead Park, Rothwell, Leeds – bonfire @ 7pm, fireworks @ 7.30pm

East End Park, Leeds – bonfire @ 7pm, fireworks @ 7.30pm

Bramley Park, Bramley, Leeds – bonfire @ 7pm, fireworks @ 7.30pm

Middleton Park, Leeds – bonfire @ 7pm, fireworks @ 7.30pm

Woodhouse Moor / Hyde Park Park, Leeds – bonfire @ 7pm, fireworks @ 7.30pm

All Leeds fireworks displays are on 5th November 2010

First thing I did was activate the MMS. What I didn’t know was that it wasn’t actually activated until I received 2 texts from o2 confirming that *they* have now activated it. Would have been nice for the software to have made that obvious. I got 3 messages from mobile number 1010 describing the situation.

My biggest real gripe though is messaging, either text or web. I think it’s a lot less sensitive than it used to be and harder to navigate text you’ve already written. The “select” tooltip thing keeps coming up when all I want to do is fix badly auto corrected words. Even now I’m finding that I can type faster than the screen can update. This didn’t used to be the case. Sad. Texting is much slower now on the iPhone and much more prone to errors!
I wish so much that apple would have just given us navigation arrows instead – yunno, like all keyboards do!

There are good things, I’m not trying to be a complete killjoy, I just hoped for more. I think it would have been cool for apple to have given us the voice recognition that the 3gs has – not really sure the hardware would hold that back for us.

However – big problem, I downloaded the application update (240MB, by the way) and I got the following error:

———-
The iPhone “………” cannot be updated at this time because the iPhone activation server is temporarily unavailable.
———-

Argh! C’mon Apple – I’ve done some reading around and although I didn’t have an iPhone in 2008, apparently this is not the first time.

The solution to the problem appears to be to close down iTunes (you have to install it using iTunes) and unplug your iPhone. Once you’ve done that, reconnect the iPhone and let iTunes load up by itself. Once it loads it’ll ask you whether you want to install the update – fingers crossed you won’t get the iPhone activation server error.

Phew! So it’s still installing while I blog this. Fingers crossed it’ll all be done soon and I’ll be 3.0ing the heck out of it. So long as there aren’t any more server errors!

UPDATE!!

This courtesy of posted lespaul85

1)Click update
2)immediately disable your network connection (several ways, I just went to my internet properties and my connection and right clicked and went to disable)
3) it’ll skip over the offending error and should continue

Thanks lespaul85, and a big yahoo! from everyone who’s finding this working for them.

Anyone?

It's moustache time!

Hey, you may remember a post from a while back asking you to command your moustache – well, today opens the 2009 World and Beard Mustache Championships.

I think everyone should get involved in this battle of the beards and moustacheii, start today, compete next year – you could be the grand winner of the 2010 World and Beard Mustache Championships.

My recommendations are to “shake up” a competition that already looks like it’s been placed inside a bag of baubles and dropped off the side of a cliff. Let’s face it, the people who go into that competition are nutters, most of them look like they’ve been hitting the gin a bit too hard. What kind of brain makes them think “Hmm, I guess if I only shaved one half of my moustache, that could give me just the kind of tactical advantage I need”. And so on.

Let’s fair it, these hirsute behaviours are as disturbing as they are beautiful. I, for one, would like to see a contestant with a moustache of bees. Please, please help make that dream become a reality.