Anyway, they are currently offering a deal whereby you can get a years hosting for $9.95 – the normal price for one month. If you’re looking to change hosts, or are starting a new website, I recommend you give them a try. It also includes a ‘free domain registration’ – although I’m sure that some restrictions apply there. They have given me a referral link, since I am a current customer: http://www.siteground.com/friends.htm?referrer_id=135859

Of course, I’m telling you this because I’ll get a free months hosting for everybody I refer who signs up! Just to be transparent about this….

This should give me a better chance of actually using WordPress and blogging things when I’m out and about. Will finally test a picture and then upload.

This is a picture of our cat sleeping; just to prove the feature works!

We’ll also see if this encourages me to post more or not. At least you’ll see my tweets in the sidebar, to prove I’m alive!

Thomas Gansch and Gansch & Roses playing “Der Rock des Trompeters”, live at Porgy & Bess in Vienna, in September 2009.

The Musicians:

Trumpets: Thomas Gansch, Adam Rapa, Bryan Davis
Trombone: Johannes Herrlich
Saxes/Woodwinds: Florian Truebsbach, Klaus Dickbauer
Piano: Oliver Kent
Bass: Uli Langthaler
Drums: Mario Gonzi

We were having a chat in the Clearleft office today about site stats and their relative uselessness; numbers about bounce rates are like eyetracking data—without knowing the context, they’re not going to tell you anything.

Anyway, I was reminded that I have an account over at Google Webmaster Tools set up for three of my sites: adactio.com, huffduffer.com and thesession.org. I logged in today for the first time in ages and started poking around.

I noticed that I had some unread messages. Who knew that Google Webmaster Tools has a messaging system? I guess all software really does evolve until it can send email.

One of the messages had the subject line Blocked URLs:

For legal reasons, we’ve excluded from our search results content located at or under the following URL/directory:

http://www.thesession.org/discussions/display/21250

This content has been removed from all Google search results.

Cause: Somone has filed a DMCA complaint against your site.

What now?

I visited the URL and found a fairly tame discussion about Perfect Pitch. Here’s the only part of the discussion that references an external resource in a non-flattering light:

I think that is referring to www.PerfectPitch.com. I’m not saying anything about such commercially-oriented courses because I don’t know them, but I think we’d all be wise to bear in mind the general comments voiced in the first two posts on this thread.

That single reference to a third-party site is, apparently, enough to trigger a DMCA complaint.

Google link to the complaint on Chilling Effects but that just says The cease-and-desist or legal threat you requested is not yet available. It does, however, list the party who sent the complaint: Boucherle.

By a staggering coincidence, Gary Boucherle of American Educational Music, Inc. is registered as the owner of perfectpitch.com.

So let’s get this straight. In a discussion about perfect pitch, someone mentions the website perfectpitch.com. They don’t repost any materials from the site. They don’t even link to the site. They don’t really say anything particularly disparaging. But it all takes is for the owner of perfectpitch.com to abuse the Digitial Millenium Copyright Act with a spurious complaint and just like that, Google removes the discussion from its search index.

To be fair, Google also explain how to file a counter-complaint. However, the part about agreeing to potentially show up in a court in California is somewhat off-putting for those of us, like me, who live outside the United States of America.

There is another possible explanation for this insane over-reaction; one that would explain why the offended party sent the complaint to Google rather than going down the more traditional route of threatening the ISP…

The Session has pretty good Google juice. The markup is pretty lean, the content is semantically structured and there’s plenty of inbound links. Could it be that the owner of perfectpitch.com sent a DMCA complaint to Google simply because another site was getting higher rankings for the phrase “perfect pitch�? If so, then that’s a whole new level of SEO snake-oilery.

Hmmm… that gives me an idea.

If you have a blog or other personal publishing platform, perhaps you would like to write a post titled Perfect Pitch? Feel free to republish anything from this post, which is also coincidentally titled Perfect Pitch. And feel free to republish the contents of the original discussion on The Session titled, you guessed it: Perfect Pitch.

It seems that a bug has been introduced in this update. My fix was to locate the image in the Finder – it was in a subfolder of Pictures. I copied it into the root of Pictures and then it appeared in the “Desktop & Screensaver” pane and became available again. I selected it and everything seems to be hunky-dory.

It appears that subfolders of Pictures aren’t been read by the selector widget in “Desktop & Screensaver”. It will remain to be seen if this is a bug or a deliberate change. Anybody having any other interesting issues with the update?

A European trumpeter (that you may recognise!) goes all the way to New York to study with the famous Mark Gould.

Anyway, rant over. This is the last mention of Big Brother you’ll hear from me. What a load of shit!!

Once there, I won’t be allowed to work for some time, as a condition of the process. Expect more blogging at that point both here and on my music site, BryanDavis.info. I’ll have to fill my time somehow!

Having got my iPhone working in the UK with T-Mobile’s data service, I returned today to the USA and put my T-Mobile US sim card back in. I had some problems getting the EDGE data service working again. Since last I used the T-Mobile US service the APN settings seemed to have changed. The following settings are now working for me:-

• APN: epc.tmobile.com
• User: (blank)
• Password: (blank)

A second problem I had was that the “Cellular Data Network” tab had disappeared from my Network Settings page. The fix for that is to check in Cydia and UNINSTALL any APN fixes or T-Mobile/T-Zone bundles you may have installed. Then restart your iPhone and the tab should be back on the Network page. That worked for me just now!

I hope that proves helpful for anyone facing similar problems.