As it turned out, I foolishly accepted the offer of an upgrade to Windows Media Player 11 a couple of days ago. It all looked to have gone smoothly to begin with, and in fact I like the look of it – seems easier to find things and is a much nicer interface, all in all.

So I ripped a couple of CD’s I’d been meaning to put on my PC for a while, then connected my MP3 player. And… nada. Well, the helpful error message said words to the effect that my player was using an old USB driver which was no longer supported, and I should go get a new one. Great! It was getting very late, so I decided not to wrestle with it and left it til the next day.

The player in question is a Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen NX (nice and snappy that, ha), so I hopped over to Creative Europe’s website and downloaded the latest USB driver and installed that. Still the same error message.

A bit of Googling later, and I found that WMP11 has “known issues” with Zen portable devices. It would have been nice to have been told this before I did the upgrade, Microsoft! The suggested bodge fix is to roll back to WMP10, upgrade the firmware on the Jukebox and reinstall WMP11.

OK, I’ll give that a go. Except that, having trawled around Creative’s support site (again) and found the supposedly correct firmware upgrade, I get this lovely little error message when trying to run it:
Brilliant! So I send off an email to Creative’s Support asking just which file I should be using, and sit back to wait for a reply.

Meanwhile, there’s a troubleshooting bit on Creative’s site which suggests another possible bodge fix if the device is seen in Device Manager (it is) but not recognised by WMP10 (it isn’t). I follow the instructions which get me to mess about with the registry! And it still does nada.

Last resort is the section of Microsoft’s Readme for WMP11 which says your player might have problems after rolling back to v10; uninstall the USB device in Device Mangler™, disconnect device and reconnect, forcing Windows to reinstall. Still five parts of you know what.

So now I’ve got the (un)shiny Media Player 10 back on my system but I’m not even back to square one as the Jukebox is still not being recognised.

Thank you Creative Labs, and Microsoft, for wasting at least three hours of my time. And I’m still not done. You need your collective heads banging together. I don’t care who’s problem it is, but it shouldn’t be mine.

“User Contributed Content should be more accurately termed ‘Audience Stolen Content’, because media groups rarely pay for Citizen Journalism images and more often than not, either claim the copyright or an all-encompassing license from contributors, when they send their pictures in. That’s a copyright grab in all but name.”

The article runs to three pages and make many other salient points, but this one stuck out too:

“The perception is “if it’s on the web, it’s either free, or I’m gonna nick it anyway because, hey, ‘they’ can afford it”. The reality is that there are now more copyright-free or near-free images on the web than copyright images. Most of them will be on Flickr (owned by Yahoo!), MySpace (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation) or the major corporate image portals. Neither Flickr nor MySpace exist to commercially leverage images, but clients now go there trawling for free content, so they don’t have to pay a photographer for it. It has caused a crash in the unit cost of any images which aren’t given away and which are licensed for profit.”

As a victim of copyright theft in the past, I can entirely sympathise with his point of view. In my case, I was minding my own business reading one of the broadsheets’ weekend colour suppliments a few years ago, when I stumbled across a picture which I knew incontrovertibly to have been stolen from one of my websites and used without my permission. After writing an incensed letter to the paper’s picture editor, they freely admitted that it was their fault (blaming a lazy researcher for not checking the copyright status of the image!) and agreed to pay me their standard repro fee.

It took another 4 letters and six months for them to finally honour their promise. And that was for a picture which wasn’t particularly important or valuable, and would not have earned me anything anywhere else – it was just for the principle of it that I pursued them. What would have happened if I hadn’t spotted it? I wonder how many more times newspapers get away with this sort of thing – not to mention the millions of folks online who can trawl the web for all of your pictures and do with them what they will.

And I’m afraid that’s why you’ll find I put a copyright watermark in all my images which I put online – they’re usually only 600×400 resolution too. And my Flickr images aren’t tagged with a Creative Commons licence. Once bitten, twice shy.

On a related note, recently a client gave me a brief, and I worked up a proposed site layout. But despite me following the brief, the client was not happy and has basically admitted they want me to rip off the design of another site! I flatly refuse to do so. Asking me to do this would basically be asking me to throw away my professional integrity and risk being sued for breach of copyright.

Fortunately, there was PR agency inbetween me and the client in question, who managed to mediate the situation. They were pretty much in agreement with me that it wasn’t not a healthly thing to be suggesting. And from a prospective customer’s point of view, I wouldn’t be too impressed if I found a site which had obviously pinched a design from a competitor – that wouldn’t say much for the company’s buisness ethics!

<rant> HOW MUCH ?!?!?! </rant>

Anyway, that wasn’t the point of this post…

My route home from the PO takes me past the County Police HQ, and just outside it, a vehicle cut me up by pulling in front and proceeded to do 15mph (in a 30 limit) until the next junction, where it turned left without indicating! Sadly, I was going the same way, and the car (still doing 15mph) then pulled up outside the County Court, giving 1 second’s worth of indication and “parking” half in and half out of the layby.

It was a display truely worthy of someone out on their first driving lesson. But the reason I was so shocked? It was a marked patrol car!

I was very interested in Roger’s comment “Blogher was interesting for me.. ..I mean as someone that doesn’t think male or female, I just read what I read”. And I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there, Roger. Why should the blogger’s gender matter? I believe exactly the same. I read what I read and that’s that. Sometimes you can’t event tell the gender of the blogger, (it’s one of the upsides of web anonymity, if you wish to be so). And I was wondering what makes a woman sign up for a blog precisely because it’s hosted by/for women?

I’ve always worked in very male-dominated industries. My first job was a broadcast engineer for the BBC, where around 10% of the workforce was female. I never felt I was treated differently as a women, and certainly didn’t find any prejudices in evidence. If you were good at your job, no one cared if you were a woman, you still got the respect you deserved. And I would never have wanted to be cut any breaks on the basis of my sex – don’t get me started on “positive discrimination”.

Now I’m still in a male-dominated profession – web design and development. At least, the design part is populated by quite a few more women, even if they aren’t so much in evidence on the development side of things (at least, that’s my experience). I reckon it’s about 20% women where I currently work. But again, if you’re any good, you could be a small, furry creature from Alpha Centauri and nobody would bat an eyelid.

Robert Scoble attended the conference, and his write-up suggests that perhaps women are using BlogHer because the tools are easier to pick up. But I have to ask, how hard is it to use Blogger, WordPress etc?

I have a very dear friend, who is a self-confessed technophobe. We’ve known each other since we were 11. At school, I was always the techie one, she the arty one. She majored in English & French Literature and went on to complete her PhD in that area, and now teaaches at one of the UK’s top universities. She hates computers with a passion – only using them when she has to (for writing, that is probably rather more than she would like). Which is why, when I visited her a few months ago, I was absolutely astounded to learn she has a blog of her own, LitLove. And a very fine one it is too. In a few short weeks she has engaged in tremendous debates with other like-minded folk. And she has got to grips with the WordPress publishing system with great success. So obviously, it can’t be that difficult to get a blog going, if you’re passioiniate enough about your subject.

So what am I really trying to say here? Probably, that ultimately, it’s all about the content of your blog that really matters. Not where it’s hosted, or what gender you happen to be. Personally, I’d much rather infiltrate the “male domain” that is the mainstream blogsphere than find myself in what is little better than a female ghetto! I am glad I was educated in a co-ed environment, and never wanted to go to an all-girls school – they can get pretty catty at times

You see, I don’t have any sort of picture messaging contract with my phone, so I can’t email them to myself… BUT! the phone has a handy USB port, so I thought I’d get ‘em off that way. Cue pain and suffering. The phone didn’t come with any software (drivers or otherwise) and WindowsXP doesn’t have any native drivers for the phone, although it recognises the make and model.

I thought I’d go straight to the horses’ mouth and searched the Motorola website for downloadable drivers for the L6. Nothing. Nada. Nowt. Plenty of glossy brochureware (you’re preaching to the converted, I already have one!) but nothing useful. A google or two later turned up quite a few disgruntled users also looking for the driver and posting their frustration on forums far and wide.

So the search continues. If and when I find the driver, I’ll upload the photos (they weren’t that exciting, so don’t hold your breath in anticipation). Until then, you’ll have to do with the text and make up your own cartoons to go with it

People seem far less willing to learn the art and craft of photography in order to get the best results. Of course I’m generalising here, but there has been a gradual decline in membership of photographic clubs throughout the country, even with the huge rise in the number of people buying cameras. I’m a B Panel Judge for the East Anglian Federation, part of the Photographic Alliance of Great Britain. I visit clubs around north London and south east Essex to judge competitions regularly, and their committees are constantly striving to attract new members. Somehow only a trickle seem to be coming through the doors.

A few clubs (and the number is decreasing) have actively shunned the Digital Revolution; it won’t be long before they go under. Some have allowed digital but to be judged in a separate category (and I think, why segregate? It’s the end result that counts and matters to me as a judge, not the technology used to produce it).

Some argue that digital is “easier” than traditional “wet” processes. Usually those who haven’t tried it, I find. And as a judge, I’ve seen just as many badly-done digital prints (if not more) than traditional. In fact, I’d argue that it’s actually easier to make a bad digital print than a bad darkroom one – far less effort is required. Plus, you don’t end up smelling of chemicals or emerging from the darkroom like a confused mole! As ever, the skill is in the execution of what you’re doing, not how.

The vast majority of the clubs I visit have embraced digital photography wholeheartedly (without prejudice to those still using film). So much so that at a few, I don’t see any darkroom prints any more. I can tell, if I look hard enough (and it would require an even lenghtier post for me to explain how). I’ve seen some really stunning inkjet prints, not just from a technical perspective, but from an artistic one. Again, it’s all about who’s behind the camera more than the name badge on the front.

Our equipment can and should be used to facilitate the expression of our artistic talents, and not as a points-scoring exercise to see who’s got the best kit. (Again, I usually find those misguided enough to indulge in this kind of behaviour are invariably those who can’t take a decent picture for toffee).

I’m till having aggro with Technorati, as posted yesterday.

Without me doing very much, recent posts on RugbyMad seem to be indexed (I’ve not tagged any posts on that blog yet) but further back than a couple of weeks and there’s nothing found when searching. Meanwhile, the scoped search for this blog still seems to do five parts of naff all. Hopefully they will sort it soon.

On a more positive note, I’d like to thank Roger Kondrat for giving this blog a plug over at Technological Winter, and his help with aiding this relative blogging-newbie overcome the trials and tribulations of the technology

Tonight I’m off to the London Geeks’ Dinner to hear Chris Anderson speak on the The Long Tail as a sales model, which I hope will be interesting. I’ll post my thoughts soon.

I claimed my blogs (this one, plus my Rugby Mad one), set the blogger settings to ping Technorati (as advised in their support faq) and have added Technorati tags to all posts in this blog (have yet to get around to it for the rugby one, but hey).

Now if I search for something on Technorati, (either directly at their site or with the plugin for this blog at the top right of the page), which I know is definitely here, it claims not to find anything! It also claims that my most up to date post was six days ago, when it fact it was just yesterday.

I’ve logged a call with Technorati’s help people, who have acknowledged receipt, but so far I haven’t heard anything else. I know I’ve only just started blogging, and so my ranking is pretty lowly, but I thought technorati would be an excellent place to generate some passing traffic and help to build up my online profile. I hope they are not operating some sort of elist policy along the lines of “well her ranking is down with the amoeba, so we don’t need to keep her search as up to date as some”…

I’ll keep you posted on developments.

Add half an hour later: Actually, it gets odder. Scoping a search at Technorati on Rugby Mad or Just Mad will turn up results for some things, such as “churchill” but not others, like “handbags” (which appears in this post and here). I’m even more confused now!