HossTheBoss.com

If you didn’t hear this on the Saturday’s live show (or the many repeats that we air during the week), well, that might be because you’re just logging on to vote for your songs but not ever bothering to listen to the dang station. If you’re doing that, well, you’re being a dang jerk, and I don’t really care if you’re upset at me for just now getting around to posting this on the site Tuesday night.

For everyone else, well, it sucks that you missed the announcement. Let this be a lesson: you never know what important crap we might say on the show in between all of our unimportant crap. So you just gotta try to pay attention to the whole dang show, painful as it is.

Anyway, here’s the announcement:

Voting will be ending early this week, and the live show won’t be live on Saturday. We’re going to do the live show at 8 p.m. central on Friday and voting will end at 7 p.m. We’ll start the voting for week 4 again after the show, and we’ll be running a replay on Saturday at the time we’re normally doing the live show.

Hope we didn’t confuse you too much. Everything will be all back to normal for next week’s show, when we announce the five songs that will go on to compete for Song of The Year on New Year’s Eve. (Oh yeah, it’s been suggested that we do the final voting on New Years Day instead of New Year’s Eve, since so many bands have big gigs on New Year’s Eve and will not be able to participate in the live show. That’s a good suggestion. I’ll let you know when/if we decide to do that. You can comment on that below if you’d like. )

Well, I discovered a few hours ago that some versions of Internet Explorer did not work correctly with the security system I had running on the song voting contest, and so a LOT of people have been able to vote many times a day in the contest while others were shut out for 24 hours after voting.

I’ve changed some settings behind the scenes, and now EVERYONE is, finally, locked out for 24 hours after voting. (If people figure a way around THAT, then I have a few other options, but, really, I don’t want this contest to be about my Internet security skills. If it becomes that, I probably won’t continue it next month. It ain’t worth the trouble. PLEASE just vote once a day, even if you know how to get around the system, dang it!)

To keep this dang little contest entertaining for the rest of November, I’ll be making an adjustment to account for all the questionable votes that have come in up to now. Here’s the new rules.

Voting will proceed as usual from now until Saturday at noon. All votes, illegal or not, will continue to count, for now, and we’ll eliminate the bottom 10 songs from the contest during the next live show at 2 p.m. on Saturday.

Then, immediately after the next live show, I’ll reset all of the remaining songs to 0 votes, and they will have to battle it out Even Steven for the final two weeks of the November contest.

Ya’ll like that idea? That’s the way it will have to be unless someone posts a better suggestion as a comment below. And, anyone who intends to get overly worked up about all this needs to re-read the Contest Rules, dang it.

As long-time Hosser’s (I dont’ know what else to call you guys who have been with this thing since 2006) know, the Hossey Music Award Song Voting Contest has been ruined twice by hackers over the last couple of years.

So it was alarming to discover a few minutes ago (on Sunday morning) that voting was “closed.”

I sure as heck did not intentionally close the voting, and I have not yet figured out how I might have accidentially done so. All I know is that I set the voting to restart, as promised, just after the live show on Saturday, and then saw that it was working just fine. Then, this morning, I awoke to a number of messages saying the system wasn’t accepting votes again.

I don’t know how long voting was down, and I have no idea why it went down.

If you are a hacker who somehow managed to close the system, well, okay, that was funny. Ha.Ha. Thanks for the laughs. But, as much as I appreciate your wonderful sense of humor, please don’t do it again. Seriously. Not everyone likes a good joke as much as I do.

That said, chances are strong that hackers had nothing to do with this temporary shut down, so, I’ll just stop worrying and apologize to everyone for my likely incompetence. Please go vote now! All systems are go again, dang it. (At least for now!)

I have received several messages saying that the last part  of the Hossey Music Awards Live Show replay did not play on Sunday or Monday. Thanks for the notes. It’s great to know you are listening and care enough to send me the messages! (more…)

Well, the city officials in Corpus Christi have suggested that everyone leave town because Hurricane Ike seems poised to blow up our butts. So, The Hoss’s are headed to Dallas for a few days.

We’ll keep the station running as long as we can, but, at some point Friday we’re going to unplug the ole’ computer and take it to higher ground.

It’s possible that we’ll broadcast from a back-up location later in the weekend, but we’re still not sure about that. We may not be back on until the hurricane has done all it’s going to do to Corpus Christi and power is restored at the office. I’ll keep you posted here as best I can about when we’ll be back on.

In the meantime, just get ready… when the HossTheBoss.com stream returns after Ike, some new, cool stuff will be happening. In fact, if Ike hadn’t interupted us, we would have probably launched a lot of the new stuff this weekend.

The new stuff will be delayed a little longer (but true HossTheBoss.com fans are USED to delays of improvements), but they will be worth the wait! Who knows? I may even post sneak previews here on the site over the weekend while I’m in Dallas.

Ya’ll please keep hangin’ with us. HossTheBoss.com really is about to come to life big time!

Followers of this site know that the hugely popular “Hossey Music Award Song Voting Contest” was never completed in 2006 and 2007 because spammers shut down our voting system. They also know that in May of 2008 (after nearly a year of hiatus) I launched a redesign of this site complete with several anti-spam features.

Well, the new security system has done its job fairly well, blocking more than 3,000 junk comments that spam bots have tried to post in the last four months.

But the system isn’t fool proof.

Since July, I have received at least 10,000 robot-submitted requests to be “Members” of HossTheBoss.com. No matter how I tweaked the system, the spammers figured out how to keep sending the requests. I don’t know what they hoped to gain from bombarding me with an average of 20 junk emails a minute, but they did it nevertheless.

So this means that the “members” program that I’d planned to begin about now is on hold while I figure out how to keep legitimate members from having to content with spammers. Once I’d had 100 people signed up for the program, I had intended to begin making special offers, sending out exclusive music news via email, and providing a number of other benefits. Initially, I’d planned to offer the memberships for free, but, once the program took off, I intended to ask for a $25/year fee in order to support the site.

All of that is just going to have to wait, dang it. Sorry.

Thanks are definitely due to the few dozen legitimate HossTheBoss.com fans who signed up for the initial memberships. (Because of the spammers, I am certain that I missed acknowledging some “real” requests for membership. Please accept my apology if you sent one of those.) I’m sorry that it just didn’t work out — at least not yet.

You may have already noticed that I’ve replaced that “Membership Sign-Up Page” of this site with a donation page. I hope you might be willing to donate so we can keep this site going and growing. If we get enough support from donations, we might be able to afford an even fancier security system and, then, I’ll start the membership program again quickly. Everyone who donates now will definitely be invited to join that — for free — when it starts.

Just another day in the life of an independent radio station being run entirely on a shoestring by volunteers. The best I can do in these situations is just be honest, dang it. Thanks for your patience. We really are  going to start kicking some butt on this station eventually.

Changing one’s perfectly good name is a weird tradition in radio. I was christened as “Hoss The Boss” in 1992 by one of my radio bosses. By the time I got fired from my final “real” radio gig in 2006, I had a decent little following as “Hoss,” so it just made sense to use that name for this site. (It was either that or try to come up with a few extra thousand dollars to pay to promote the thing at the beginning.)

I often wish I wasn’t Hoss, though.

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I usually don’t get along very well with guys who wear ties. This story I wrote one day a few years back helps explain that. I hope you’ll read it. I think it’s kinda funny. (I just posted a link to a pdf version of it here since the thing is a little too long to fit on one web page.) It’s called The Great Compromise. Was I drunk when I wrote it? You decide. Poor dang bunnies. If you like this story, you should really scroll up a little and become a HossTheBoss.com member.

Here’s an example of why I am an outcast in the music business.

Best in Texas Magazine is regarded, I have heard, as an “important publication” on the Texas music scene. And judging by the names of people who appeared in a recent edition, I understand why: Kevin Fowler, Aaron Watson, Dierks Bently, Cody Canada, Miranda Lambert, Tommy Alverson, George Strait and others. (more…)