So far this F1 season, Ferrari have been a little more like a lame horse, than a prancing one, and one really wonders if the team has the passion to actually do anything about it.  From Melbourne until today’s race in Barcelona, the Ferrari team’s actions have constituted a comedy of errors, embarassing the team, and disadvantaging their two, very capable, drivers.

It’s plain to see that Formula One has experienced a regime change this year, but the change has been further magnified by the poor progress made by Ferrari, McLaren and BMW over the off-season.  These three championship contenders are now faffing around in mid-field, fighting for the minor points places, whilst names like Button, Glock and Vettel vy for the wins.

The question to be asked, then, is “what has happened to Ferrari?”

In Malaysia, back in March, we saw the first in a series of ‘unforgivable’ mistakes made by the team: Felipe Massa was not sent out for a second run in the first qualifying session, and ended up 16th on the grid.  You’d have thought that the Prancing Horse would be once bitten, twice shy…. but the mistake was repeated, in all of it’s stupidity, this weekend in Barcelona (albeit, with Kimi Raikkonen falling victim to the poor call this time around).

As if that wasn’t enough, today’s race was another demonstration of gross incompetence on the part of the Scuderia, with the team failing to give Massa enough fuel to reach the finish at full pace.  Granted, Massa usually drives a bit harder (in terms of fuel consumption) than other drivers, but causing your driver to lose two (nearly three) places in a few laps, due to having to back off to conserve fuel, is not a smart move.  With Massa stopping on his way back to the pits, it remains to be seen whether his car was up to the 605kg mandated end-race weight…

Come on Ferrari, get your act together, for the sake of the your two world-class drivers.

Upgrade your Skype to version 4.0.0.266 or later, and you should be good to go. Thanks, Ivan

Until Monday…

I awoke on Monday to this email, that many AdSense publishers have received:

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we have decided to disable your account.

Needless to say, I was quite shocked.  Even from my ‘humble’ websites, I’ve made over $400 with Google AdSense in the past couple of years - notable income for a student - with $250 of that sitting in my account, waiting for a payout (I figure, if it’s in the AdSense account, I can’t spend it until I need it).

I appealed to Google, citing whatever evidence  I could, protesting my innocence, and offering to co-operate with them in whatever way possible to ensure that the problematic activity was stopped.  Reasonable enough, you’d have thought, for someone who they’ve had no problem with for 3 years, right?  Wrong…

Thank you for providing us with additional information. However, after thoroughly reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, we have re-confirmed that your account poses a significant risk to our advertisers. For this reason, we are unable to reinstate your account. Thank you for your understanding.

A ’significant risk’ to their advertisers?  Either they’ve been stringing me along for the past three years, or something fishy is going on.  Canned responses.

I’ve sent them another message since, but they haven’t bothered to reply… and I don’t expect I’ll ever see the $250 that I’ve accumulated over the past 2 years, or so.  They never sent a warning, never offered a reason, and for all I know, it could have been someone I dislike repeatedly clicking ads and getting my account banned.  The worst of it is that I’ll never be allowed another AdSense account again.

From searching around, it’s not hard to find publishers in a similar position.  Granted, a proportion of them have, in some way or other blatantly violated the terms, but there are plenty of others who have had their account disabled when they’ve reached a certain balance (around $250 seems to be common), or in the days leading up to a payout being due.  Extraordinary behaviour, and it just goes to show that organisations like Google can get away with pretty much anything, without giving any rhyme or reason as to why.  I’ve submitted complaints to Watchdog in the UK, but I doubt anything will ever get done about it.

The worst part of this?  All the ad revenue all went to support non-profit entities in their server costs, domain costs, etc.  Now all of that money needs to come from somewhere else.

Good job, Google.