Lucire

The dodgy neighbour needs to go

Full disclosure: this window came up in the normal time (two seconds), so whatever I experienced here earlier this hour is not to do with the neighbours. Still, I just wasted a quarter-hour weeding out more potential culprits at my original account, only to find that that had no effect on the blank compose screen. I have added them all back.
   I think Vox needs to migrate whomever is causing this problem to a fresh account that does not have whatever bug has caused the lock-out against me, Patricia, and, platform-specifically, Ninja. Or, perhaps Vox should remove the one errant account from our neighbourhoods so we can use this site for what it was designed for: blogging. If there’s some confidentiality reason for not telling us about the dodgy account, then don’t—but I hereby give Vox permission to remove that neighbour from my neighbourhood.
   The sad thing is that the ten compose windows I got yesterday were flukes. I have been able to get one window today since 9 a.m., despite having far fewer neighbours at jackyan.vox.com now.

Don’t expect me to open a third account, Vox

Folks, bad news. I can no longer compose properly from this account, either. This window also takes minutes to load now, beginning tonight. This one took about 20 minutes to load.
   Kimmie hinted that it might be a neighbour that is causing this trouble. The mere act of following a dodgy account means that I am blocked from composing on Vox. It makes little sense to the layman, but I suspect there is some errant, unpredictable code that has caused this issue.
   I’d love to know who it is, and I cannot see the harm in telling me. Or, better yet, telling that Voxer to move on, so that we don’t keep following him or her and locking up our accounts.
   I am none the wiser. Yesterday, I spent a morning weeding dormant and dead accounts, only to have the compose window still taking hours to load at my original account.
   Now, this window has taken nearly 20 minutes, and you can’t help but feel that Six Apart has it in for me. What are the odds that ‘the same shit happens to the same guy twice’, in the words of John McClane in Die Hard 2?
   Not only that, I get logged out of here as I type, which never happened at the other place.
   I might do a bit of weeding here, too, and remove some accounts, and see if it improves the performance of this site.
   I think we can pronounce Vox very, very dead. I am unlikely to open a third account just to keep blogging when I am now likely to leave this service altogether. It still upsets me that sploggers and pornographers have more rights than I do on this service.

Who is this new guy?

If you got my neighbour or friend request today, it’s me—Jack Yan—at a new location because Vox has locked me out of the old one. Here’s a bit more on the scenario.

Lalo Schifrin conducts his hits

Lalo Schifrin, composer of Mission: Impossible and Mannix, is still going strong at age 77. These were from a few years ago, and it shows that Mr Schifrin is as lively today as a pianist and conductor as he was in his prime.
   One YouTuber described him as a ‘living legend’. The term seems very applicable here.

Lalo Schifrin & BBC Bigband - Mission: Impossible

Lalo Schifrin live Grand Rex Paris 23.04.07 Bis. Mannix

Vox takes the piss with the sidebar widget

Say, what gives? On my old Vox blog—you know, the one they don’t let me use any more for no apparent reason—I could embed a small widget (as can all of us) on the sidebar. I used mine to promote Lucire:

Widget works all right here

   So, logically, since this Vox blog is named for the magazine, I should use the same code and do the same thing.
   I got the code, and copied and pasted it in to the embed field. This is the code, which is no real secret:

<a href="http://lucire.com/2007/subscribe.shtml"><img src="http://lucire.com/2009/0906-lucire27-63.jpg" width="63" height="90" border="0" alt="Subscribe to Lucire"></a>

Here’s what results:

Vox is taking the piss

   That is certainly not what the code has in it, as anyone with a day’s knowledge of HTML will tell you. Is Vox taking the piss?
   I tell you, this service is getting weirder by the day.

Come on, some of you wished you were Billy Bob

I don’t know why I bother checking Vox every day under the old Jack Yan account. It blocked me for a full 24-hour period over Thursday and Friday, and it is still down now, though I managed to get in a couple of posts this morning.
   Part of me wants it to continue because I have it linked from a lot of places, and it is “my” space, rather than Lucire’s.
   And since we said nice things about the second-generation Toyota Prius in Lucire in 2004, it almost seems inappropriate to post the following on the first-generation model (as I did to Tumblr today):

Top Gear - Toyota Prius review

   I’m still finding my feet when it comes to blogging here, since as we all know, it’s not really the Lucire blog.

Stockholm and Fortum team up on emissions-free traffic by 2030

Forced into it

In case you’re wondering who this new neighbour or group member on your Vox blog is, it’s Jack Yan.
   Since October 28, Vox has blocked my access to this site, so I can no longer compose. It’s not wonderful when you know that some splogger has more rights than you do on Vox. In fact, here was how bad it got:

The yellow days are when Vox worked. The pink days are when I had to wait minutes to hours to get the compose screen. And the red days were when Vox blocked me from blogging totally.
   This is akin to Vox blocking Australians back in August. The difference is they have not bothered fixing things. It’s also plagued Patricia Volonakis Davis, who used to be very active here on Vox (it got to her in September, a month before my troubles began).
   Since I object to setting up aliases for myself, I could only justify a new Vox space if I did it for something—in this case, my Lucire property. At least having lucire.vox.com would mean stopping some splogger from stealing the name.
   I experimented with a few other sites, such as Tumblr, where you can read more of my saga with Vox. And it is a genuine error: even Daisy (the Six Apart staffer who all of us like) could not compose a post when logged on as me. So we know that even inside Six Apart, it is impossible to blog as me.
   I doubt that my team members will use this Vox blog, since we have a blog of our own. Some of my friends-only posts might still appear here. Hope to catch up with the rest of you soon. “Neighbour” or “friend” me if you recognize the name.