Au revoir vista
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008A late night uninstalling vista and re-installing windows XP. I give up after what must be 18 months of struggle, one new laptop and endless bloody tinkering to try and get it working the way I want.
Would I recommend it to anyone? No. If you can avoid it, do. If you must get it, then [...]
Conservative expenses – what does it tell us?
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008The prospective Tory parliamentary candidate has made a fuss over the summer about his publishing of expenses. Taking a look at his site it says, amongst other things:
2007/08
Taxable Gross Allowance Received: £7416.57
Charitable Donations through Give As You Earn: £1920.00
Expenses claimed: Nil
Other: Not applicable
Then some stuff about palace garden parties from this year, which [...]
End of the bypass
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008Haven’t posted in a while, just busy getting on with the day job and trying to make sure that we can get through to the other side of the forthcoming recession.
A lot of interesting things politically over the summer, the most interesting for me being the shelving of the Ormskirk Bypass for another 10 [...]
Kiva – loans that change lives
Monday, June 9th, 2008I received an email from an old colleague today about www.kiva.org a website where loans can be made to people in the developing world. Referred to as a “micro-lending”, it’s a truly amazing site and a great alternative to blind giving.
I’ll quote from their “about us” page:
Kiva’s mission is to connect people [...]
Weird duplicate postings
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008Not sure why, but I’m getting duplicate postings on this site. There must be something funny going on behind the scenes, and perhaps it’s time for a wordpress upgrade. Grrr… Something to sort out this evening.
Update: update worked. Happy now… back to family guy.
Merseyrail presses Network Rail to handover running tracks
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008This, in the Liverpool Daily Post says that transport chiefs in Merseyside are lobbying for control of the railway tracks. Apparently they’ve been pushing for the past two years for this, and despite the headline, it doesn’t look like there’s been much movement forward in the idea. However, it seems that Merseyrail are still pushing [...]
Personal fundraising – we should be doing this
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008Christopher Locke, author of Gonzo Marketing and The Cluetrain Manifesto, sent out a message from his RageBoy/Gradient Entropy Reversals blog/list over the weekend to this personal fundraising page on Barack Obama’s campaign site.
It’s so simple, I’m astonished that this hasn’t been done here. An individual can create a page to raise money and then [...]
Hung parliament speculation
Thursday, May 29th, 2008Found in my drafts from a couple of weeks ago….
Peter Kellner speculates on the Progress blog about what might happen if there is a hung parliament after the next GE. Rather than the usual stuff about jumping into bed with the Fib Dems it sets out a couple of scenarios and what might happen in [...]
West Lancs District Council – Committee Papers online
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008A useful link for anyone interested in West Lancs District Council:
http://webdocs.westlancsdc.gov.uk/Coins/
I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before, but this system is one of the most interesting on the WLDC site. You can get papers for all the public meetings, information about councillors and which committees they sit on.
For example, next week’s Executive [...]
Free Our Bills! (TheyWorkForYou.com)
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008TheyWorkForYou is a great resource for seeing how your local MP has been representing you in Parliament. When I last dropped in on their site they were promoting their Free Our Bills! campaign.
Quite sensibly they have been encouraging Parliament to publish proceedings in a way that can be better understood by computers. This might sound [...]
