As we wrote back in October Jad qualified for the Winter Dressage to Music Regionals.

Most of winter was then spent travelling up and down the M6 on my behalf as I took my own horse hunting.

Jad loved a winter of Rest & Relaxation, and Kirsty was bringing him back into work nicely. We even hired an arena, which I duly marked out at 70 x 20 metres by mistake, for a practice session. Then that evening Jad tried to pull away from me on the lead rope, I pulled back, and pulled him over.

As he got back up I was mortified. Scuffed knees and a fat leg! Make up borrowed from someone who shows would cover the one, but you couldn’t hide the other. Kirsty was straight onto the vets and we followed their advice to the letter to get him ready for the big day. The letter involved nothing in the way of practising for the Regionals though.

With such preparation there was no place in the prizes for Kirsty or Jad, but I was proud of them, and I think the music suited Jad admirably.

We were rather less flattered that the use had been without our permission and was in clear breach of the Commercial Commons licence attached to the photo which prevented Commercial use. Such use breached the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA), a portion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act known as DMCA 512 or the DMCA takedown provisions, a 1998 United States federal law.

The unauthorised borrower - Doug Emerson - claims he “specializes in helping professional horsemen find new and better methods to add to the profitability of their businesses” we figured that a polite request for an address where he could be invoiced would be met with an honest response.

Our flattery turned to dismay when Doug Emerson tried to wriggle out of paying for copyright infringement. Doug Emerson instead claimed it was a misunderstanding. Taking others folks work and not paying for it is a practice that some call theft. Instead of admitting his dishonesty and facing up to his responsibilities like an adult he refused to anser our emails and took down the offending page. All very good you might think, but he still didn’t remove the picture, which is still hosted on his server.

None of this releases him from his liability to pay for use of the photo, plus penalties for unapproved use for the last 6 months. He has refused to answer any request for an address where we could invoice him. If you’re remotely interested the offending article is still visible in the Google cache here.

Turns out Doug Emerson is either a serial offender or has a very bad habit of ‘forgetting’ to ask permission. Just try a Google search for the word flickr on his site and see how many pages he’s had to remove lately. For those who can’t be bothered to look he’s stolen images from 17 different people. I’ll wager he’s not paid for any of these other folks work either. In fact 8 of them have had him take down the relevant pages. What does he tell his 1000 newsletter customers about the missing pages? What will he tell them if enough people file a Notice of Infringement to his web-host that he has to pull it altogether?

His mission statement began to look to us like a statement of irony.

Then we discovered more Doug Wisdom:

“Do you want to be perceived as cheap or unprofessional?”

I don’t know Doug. Do you?

Which is all very funny but businessmen, and especially horsemen, trade on their reputation.

What price this guys reputation compared to settling our invoice?

Update: Google is quick to catch up. We’re on the first page of results already. Look out Doug, your reputation is on the line…

Since the Regional Finals Jad has been on holiday, out at grass all summer getting flabby and lazy.

Kirsty decided after the Regional Finals that she should do some dressage to music. Cue hours spent analysing Jads’ various gaits with a computer metronome and choosing music. Jad suits piano music a la Coldplay - his trot exactly fits ‘The Scientist’ by Coldplay. Too bad that we support the Make Coldplay History campaign.

Out of the 3000 songs in iTunes (and much more still on vinyl) we struggled to find much that suited Jad. It turns out that the iTunes store 30 second samples were a great way of choosing music though. For some reason I still haven’t fathomed Kirsty settled on a Glenn Miller theme and found a tune to match each gait. Cue memories of my days as a barman in the late 80’s when all we were allowed to play at lunchtime was Glenn Miller tapes on heavy rotation. So we ended up with Pennsylvania 6-5000, Rhapsody In Blue and In The Mood.

The next step was to put together a test that lasted 4 minutes 45 seconds and video it. This allowed us to edit the music to the test, get the appropriate British Dressage licences for the music, overcome the stupid digital rights management on the iTunes files - even though we have the aforementioned licence from PPL to use the tunes, burn a CD, and hire somewhere to practice.

Before we splashed out on hire we parked the car next to the riding paddock at the yard just to get Jad used to the music which does rather come in with a fanfare. We ended up with an audience as folk nearby (for instance the golf course across the stream) wondered what on earth was going on. The impromptu audience theme continued when, with two weeks to go, we hired somewhere to practice, backed the car into the arena, and spent an hour trying it for real. We found a couple of flaws, but were loathe to go all through the trouble of re-editing the music, so changed the test instead.

Without a 60×20 arena at home to practice properly all we could do then was wait until the day itself.

Today we drove to Myerscough for the Area Festival, and a first step into the gay¹ world of dressage to music. Kirsty’s only concern was not coming last, wishing that she’d entered the Elementary, with only four competitors.

The good news was that the PA system was broken, and so the music would be played from a car backed into the arena. I don’t know how some folk practice, but this would suit Jad down to the ground.

Despite the technical hitches and delays at the venue Jad did a storming test. There was some rather partisan applause at the end of the test as family and yard hangers-on voiced there support. Turns out Kirsty need not have worried about coming last, as she managed second place overall. This has already qualified her for the Winter Regionals. I hope she’s not going to change the music.

It Don’t Mean a Thing If it Ain’t Got that Swing!

1 Take that as you will. Ahem.

We have found from experience on other websites that you can’t beat a combination of akismet and Spam Karma for reducing the burden of filtering through the garbage to find genuine comments.

This has allowed us to turn off comment moderation. So now if you have anything to say it should appear directly. And that’s a good thing, right?

in his old bridle

In horse related news Jad has a new Elevator Bridle. He’s an odd sized head, long but not wide, so the bridle is made of a combination of pieces from the full and the extra full sizes. It has been a bit of a faff getting all the right pieces and setting it up correctly. By the time we were done even Jad was getting bored of it all, and had a resigned look on his face as we changed browband yet again. Sadly it arrived too late for his first lesson after the summer break. I have high hopes that it will help him feel more comfortable.

It was all aboard the new wagon at the weekend as Kirsty and Jad had qualified for the North-West Regional Dressage Finals at Somerford Park. Eager to bask in the reflected glory we had a full complement of hangers-on and ne-er do wells who managed to make the 7 a.m. leaving time.

Trakhener

Jad’s rivals in the competition were seriously well-bred. And I mean horses and riders! One girl going into the Prelim was executing perfect canter-pirouettes in the warm-up arena! Another was being coached by Lee Pearson. Camp men abounded.

Jad can turn in scores anywhere between 75% and 50% depending purely on how he’s feeling on the day. Today was an average day, and he scored just over 60% in both tests.

Meanwhile the support crew got on with the arduous task of drinking rose wine, and eating nibbles. In fact the event was so chilled out that we hung around for hours after Kirsty and Jad had finished their tests, chillling by the back of the box. The fact that we had been surrounded so completely that we couldn’t have got out without making serious use of the reversing camera had little to do with it, and it was only when the wine ran out that anyone showed an inclination to move.

Now that the finals are out of the way Jad is currently on a break. Come the end of August and Kirsty is going to enter some Elementary tests.

I took plenty of photographs and have put a photoset on flickr.

I’m going to have to play it to Jad in the stable though, the intro crashes in a bit so it might blow his mind a bit if he hears it for the first time in competition :-)

The reason for the stupidly early start was
a) so I could get it over with and Jad could still have a full day in the field and
b) so Nick could go straight off on one of his all day bike rides.

Myerscough’s arena is actually nowhere near 20×60, it’s more like 40×80 or something. It’s massive anyway. So, we had to resort to a high tech method of measuring out the size of arena needed. This is why any visitors to the arena would have seen busy with some baling string cut to 10m and 12m lengths and pieces of A5 paper with the letters written on. You may mock, but it worked.

Once Jad had calmed down enough to school (apparently seeing arena that size with nothing in it is scary) I rode through the test that I had carefully prepared. OK, make that thrown together in 10 minutes the night before. Anyway, it was a good minute too long. So we changed it around a bit – still a minute too long. We cut huge chunks out - 10 seconds too short. So I threw in a rein back and it was sorted.

We rode it a couple of times so Nick could video it and home we went*. All we need now is music!

* In Nick’s case via 70 hilly miles in the rain.

As ever, someone had been putting the practice jump up to 3ft for a 75cms class. It’s pathetic. I had to get off Leah, put the jump down to a reasonable size and then get on again to jump it. After 10 minutes trotting and cantering, we did a couple of jumps we were ready to go in. She doesn’t take much warming up really. She was brilliantly good fun in the class, she popped over everything although we did get 4 faults for a stupid stop that wasn’t really a stop but did break the rules… one of the fences faced towards the big doors to the arena. Parked right outside this was the ambulance. Leah thinks that ambulances are a lot more exciting to look at than fences and she refused to ride towards it. This meant that I had to circle to come into the fence she was supposed to be doing. Apart from that it was a lovely round.

Nick had problems at exactly the same fence. Puk did a beautiful round up to that point but then was eliminated by having 2 refusals. I think that it’s a real shame that riding club only allow 2 refusals before elimination. I can understand why the BSJA do it, but surely riding club should be encouraging the real novices? Still Nick was really pleased with Puk and even more pleased that just for once he managed to compete without falling off :-)

It was a really nice, stress free outing. We’re looking forward to the next one already.