I am now a YouTube partner. Before you think that I have joined the hallowed ranks of the great, the glorious and the good, let me re-state that: YouTube have made me a partner. That's right, they are letting just about anyone in on this - it isn't really a privilege at all.

Of course the reason it isn't a privilege is that although partners made advertisement revenue when the ads on their videos are clicked, who else makes money? Why, YouTube of course, owned by Google. The more partners they have, the more ads they serve, and the more money they will make. Anyone can be a partner. Really. Try it. They'll let you in. If they let the mighty Cap'n Awesome in, he with a video of himself beheading a dummy of Muhammad and pissing on it, I assumed that I had a fighting chance! All you need is an Adsense account, which I already had - where do you think the stoopid Google ads (all of which seem to promote religion - grrr!) on this site come from? - and the whole process took around 48 hours. So I'm a partner.

YouTube partners can attach ads to their videos, but only if the content is non-controversial and the content is all your own. So that rules me out 100%, since I use Creative Commons audio, which is perfectly okay but only for non-commercial purposes. And I also don't make the audio myself. And hey, don't forget the 'non-controversial' part. I am not about to tone my videos to earn extra pennies from YouTube ads. I cannot imagine the next 'Holy Fucking Bible' video ever getting through the vetting process which each new video has to go through if to wants to be part of the revenue sharing scheme.

So why did I apply to be a partner? Because I wanted to put a whacking great banner on my channel, that's why! And that's ALL! So, er, that's done now. Nothing else to see here.

BUT one bad thing has turned up: as you may notice, the featured video on my channel now automatically plays when you go there. I had assumed you'd get the option to stop it auto-playing but no, you have no choice, it has to play. Unfortunately nearly all my videos start with a huge whooooosh-BANG! sound effect which is very VERY annoying if you hear it every time you visit my page, so I'm going to have to re-think that one and change the intro. The new video I just made has no intro at all, for this very reason.

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Fitness Footnote:
While I'm here, I'll mention a couple of other things. First, a landmark has been reached in my exercising - I've now lost 28 pounds. For non-Brits wondering why 28 is such a remarkable number, we do weight in a seemingly archaic unit called stones - there are 14 pounds to the stone, so I've lost 2 stones. Or to put it another way, I've worked off 10% of my bodyweight since I started working out 10 weeks ago! Still some way to go, but that is over half my target, so I'm really pleased at my progress.

I actually had to take a complete week off from exercise at the start of March because I think I was pushing too hard on the exercise bike - I was getting pains in my chest, so presumably I pulled a muscle somewhere, and as the heart is a muscle I wasn't about to risk dying, or worse(!) The week off was good, I came back at a steady pace, and I'm now pushing hard again on the exercise bike, but making 100% sure I back off when I need to. For comparison, the first time I ever used the exercise bike it told me I'd burn 290 calories in 20 minutes. Today I burned over 900 calories in 30 minutes. I can't recommend highly enough a good quality exercise bike, for shedding the pounds (and stones). 20 or 30 minutes out of my day is nothing really, and is what keeps me motivated on days when I'd rather not bother - I just tell myself that it's 30 minutes out of my day. What else would I be doing? Probably just watching YouTube videos! But I watch DVDs anyway when I'm cycling, so it's win, win. Currently going through series 3 of Andromeda, if anyone's interested!

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Website Footnote:
I've been doing some work on the guts of the web site, so that it will in future be easier to add new sections, accomodate new ideas, etc. You may have noticed that the links to all the pages look different. For example what used to look like this...

http://www.gisburne.com/ngblog.php?id=2008-03-27a

...now looks like this...

http://www.gisburne.com/blog/2008-03-27a

While both old and new versions will work, the new format is easier to remember, easier to type and looks a lot better. You don't actually need to concern yourself with any of this - just keep clicking, and let me worry about the technicalities!