Big Brother Bother

Statistically most people reading this blog will have come across it from looking at a Big Brother 2008 animation. So, big news for you.

Today, one of my videos came up as "The user has disabled embedding by request". That's wrong, I didn't do that. So I checked the video and found I was unable to revert the change and that my video is no longer available to watch in the UK.

Why?

Because after speaking to me on several occasions telling me how appreciative they were, encouraging me to make more videos, reassuring me that I was fine to use screenshots from Big Brother to make the videos, doing an interview with me for the website, showing two of my videos on Big Brother's Little Brother, asking me to appear on BBLB and phoning me up again at the start of CBB6 to see if I was going to do any for that, Channel 4 have filed a copyright claim on one of my videos. A video I made with music I recorded. Yes, it uses faces of the BB contestants, but I was told this was fine otherwise I would have drawn cartoon versions.

I doubt anyone would agree that the use of static images that would fit on a stamp at 300dpi is worth destroying the hard work put into fan art and the loyalty/obsession of this Big Brother fan.

Needless to say if this isn't sorted out there will be no more Big Brother videos and after 9 years I will be handing in my notice as a fan.


Edit:

I contested the copyright claim through Youtube and they reinstated my video. Nothing more has come of it, but it has left me a little wary of producing more BB videos for future series'.

Dog years, WFT?

Dog years. What's the point of dog years? Who invented dog years? Bloody dog lovers probably - you know the type - the kind of person who sees absolutely nothing wrong with letting their mouth be licked by the tongue of an animal that will happily eat sick and poo then cleans itself with the same tongue "it's kissing me", no actually it's trying to make you vomit so it can eat it (look it up).

So- one dog year = 7 human actual years.

How old's your dog?
He's 6, but that's 42 in dog years.

No, it's six. It's been alive for 6 years. We all know how long six years is. No-one else does this nonsense...

Oh nice tattoo, when did you get that done?
Ooh about 3 years ago, that's 18 in tattoo years. I had it done that time I went to LA for a month, which is 8 months in LA months with the current exchange rate. Anyway must go, I need to get some food for my cat. It's 386 years old today.

Ridiculous.

Enter a memorable password...

Arrgh! I hate websites/systems that force users to format passwords in the way the system wants. "Your password must contain a mixture of upper and lower case". This doesn't increase the security it actually increases the chances of being able to guess it.

I'm changing my address on the DVLA government website and it's come up with this:

Enter a memorable password. The password must:

* be between 8 and 12 characters
* contain a combination of letters and numbers
* contain two or more numbers which are separated by one or more letters
* not contain spaces or the word 'password'
* not contain three adjacent letters or numbers the same (eg 'aaa' or '999')

I'm sorry, didn't you just say MEMORABLE? How the eff am I supposed to choose a memorable password when at least one of the rules prevent me from using every password that I already have stored in my brain - the ones that would therefore be memorable.