Category: Uncategorized

Amazing changeable weather we’re having at the moment, I wondered if I should start to think about what plants I wanted to grow in the garden this year and then out of of the East, blew the cold wind chilling away any ideas of that plan for the time being.

Again, Southern England is paralysed by a snowstorm, granted there were some exceptional circumstances in certain parts of the region. But why has Wokingham district closed all of its schools for the second day on the trot with less than 3 inches of snow on the ground!

I’m not going to go down that old route of ‘when I lived in a shoe box’  but for heavens sake, England has become a nation of incompetents.

How is it, as we saw in a TV news story, London bus drivers playing with snowballs in the street, yet their buses sat idly by in their garage as people struggled to work without any buses to use. Could they not have grabbed some shovels/brushes and cleared the snow so that the buses could be got out of the their garage? Is it because their union would not let them do this? I bet it was.

What about the TV news story that showed rail commuters falling down Waterloo station steps due to ice on them. Why had station staff not been out there and cleared the steps of snow and ice. Was it because their union would not let them do this? I bet it was.

It seems to me that a combination of over enthusiastic Health & Safety interference, combined with absolutely bad management/union interference, a seemingly lazy approach to care/responsibility and a growing incompetence has led us into this laughable situation.

I still have grave doubts that his country thinks it can host the 2012 Olympics successfully. If union lead strikes don’t bring the transport system to a halt, it could be another summer heat wave of 30 degrees that causes us all to stay at home with schools shut and public transport operators demanding personal air-conditioning units for their staff from public funds.

What a mess we are in!

I’ve started watching the second series of Dexter on ITV4, not sure why I missed series one, but there you go!

One thing that has struck me is the intro music. I knew that I had heard something like this before, but where?

The it clicked… The Ipcress File! that great Michael Caine – Harry Palmer classic film of the 60’s with music by John Barry.

Maybe its me, but the music is very close! Listen for yourself.

The Ipcress File…

What do you think?

It seems that the after all the fuss made by the Government and its Three Line Whip to keep MP’s expenses that they have lost!

Congratulations to MySociety who lead the online ‘revolt’.  Here’s their message…

“Blimey. It looks like the Internet’s won – a message from TheyWorkForYou

On the 16th of May 2008 the High Court ruled that MPs’ expenses must be published under the Freedom of Information Act.

Last Thursday, MPs were going to vote on changing the law to keep their expenses secret after all, just before publication was due and after spending nearly a million of your pounds and seven months compiling the data.

However, after a tremendous response from you, with over 7,000 members on our Facebook group, 4,000 messages sent to MPs, help from Stephen Fry, and a helpful 4th Report of the House of Lords Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee, it appears that the vote has been cancelled – Guardian, Times, BBC.

As President Obama said in his inauguration speech: “And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

mySociety is a non-partisan, non-profit. If you like our services and are pleased with how the campaign went this week, please read our pledge and support us.”

Read more on MySociety’s Victory Blog Post here.

I’ve been working my way through a really good book over the Christmas/ New Year break, Gulag – A History by Anne Applebaum. It’s not a new book, but one that I have had on the shelf for some time.

A fascinating read and full of amazing facts. Whilst the Holocaust remains rightly in our minds for the atrocity that it was; the numbers of people from many ethnic backgrounds that Joseph Stalin had sent through the Gulag system is staggering!

While many were not directly murdered upon their arrival at the camps unlike the Jews; many simply died of cold, starvation, overwork and abuse in a regime that few managed to escape from.

I seems that final figure of those who died will always be hard to determine, estimates run from from 2 million to 3 million. But surely as many ethnic (from Jew’s to Tartars) groups faced mass incarceration and probable death, it’s another aspect of the 20th Century that should not be forgotten.

As with many books I read these days, I can’t stop going to the Internet to check or look for extra facts, here’s some that I found about this terrible story.

• Forced Labour Camps

• The Soviet Gulag Era in Pictures – 1927 through 1953

• Alexander Solzhenitsyn, voice of the Gulag

• Gulag – A Wikipedia Article

• The Holocaust – A Wikipedia Article

• A Holocaust History Project

  Technorati Tags: Gulag, Labour Camps, Holocaust

On the 16th of May 2008 the High Court ruled that MPs’ expenses must be published under the Freedom of Information Act.

This Thursday(21st January), MPs’ are voting to change the law to keep their expenses secret after all, just before publication was due and after spending nearly a million of your pounds and seven months compiling the data.

Your MP may not even know about this proposal (it was sneaked out under the Heathrow runway announcement). Please take a few minutes to alert them to this attack on Parliamentary transparency and ask them to vote against the measure.

The outcome of this vote will be prominently displayed on every MP’s page until after the next General Election.

See some previous information here.

What an cheating and underhand way these MPs’ have behaved.

What can you do?

* Write to your MP to protest:
http://foiorder2009.writetothem.com/

* Join this Facebook group:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=50061011231

* Blog about it, call a local newspaper – our unfinished site
http://news.mysociety.org/ might help; text, email, and instant
  message your friends to let them know that about this campaign.

Read more detail about mySociety’s thoughts on this issue.
http://www.mysociety.org/2009/01/17/6-days-to-stop-mps-concealing-their-expenses/ 

With just three days to go for the end of the Bush era as President of the USA, there is much talk of  how he will be remembered. I would prefer for him to be remembered as one of the worsted US presidents ever, perhaps it would be better for him to be forgotten ‘forever’.

But perhaps Joe Klein phrases it much better in this excellent article in this weeks Time Magazine.

I sincerely do hope that some of the senior people in the Bush administration face some sort of trial and punishment for all the wrong doing and harm that they have caused over the past eight years, they may think that they made the world a safer place; I still tend to disagree!

What do you do with your old computer? I can’t believe the number of keyboards and ‘mice’ in this image of a keyboard mountain in China due we hope for full recycling!

Another similar story was carried in this weeks Time Magazine. I wonder why PC manufacturers don’t offer the ability to just bay new base units so that users can still use their existing keyboards!

Perhaps it might be better if everyone swapped over to Laptops then at least you have a whole computer that can be recycled – after you have removed the hard disc and smashed with a very large hammer, the only real way to destroy your old data!

I am not sure what is wrong with Reading’s railway station management. Perhaps there some of the new breed of nodding heads, but don’t do anything when you make a suggestion.

I made my first trip of 2009 into London last week and on three subsequent trips have pointed out that one of the automatic ticket machines in the main hall is positioned far too close to the windows of Costa Coffee, in fact it is right next to the window.

Anyone sitting ‘supping’ their morning fix, has a grandstand view of the pin keypad and can if they want to, see exactly what you are doing!

My suggestion to the staff at the station; simply turn the machine around by 90 degrees and the problem will be solved. Action so far? Nil!

You decide, would you use this ticket machine? Let see what has happened when I use the station next week.

I went to the BETT exhibition today and found this rather intriguing stack of shelves on one of the exhibitors stands. I had to take a second look and thought I’d take a short video of it.

This is exactly as it was happening and no editing has been done to the video.

We end the year with another good average, but also with a minor drop out that affected many user in South Reading at the end of the month, it was only for two and half hours, but as I was in the middle of moving some files around, it was a bit of a hassle.

However, sometimes things do breakdown.

I wonder what 2009 will bring with the move to better infrastructure in the BT exchanges and a increase in the speed of download. I’d like to see an better upload speed, with more of us storing more and more data online and pictures/video sharing sites still on the increase, this side of the bandwidth issue still needs some addressing.