January 2003 Archives
We've had snow in London for the third time this year today!! It was only a flurry, and wouldn't be worthy of a mention anywhere north of the M25, but it was a major event here!
Last Thursday when we had enough snow to bring tube and trains grinding to a halt - aided and abetted by the "tube accident at Chancery lane" which has put the Central line (in it's entirety!!!) and the Waterloo & City line out of action since last Sunday. For some bizarre reason it seemed to make sense to me to go along with Tom's suggestion that Phil and I should go up to visit them in Crouch End, with the promise of being ferried back to CJ so that I would be able to dress appropriately for the IT Xmas party on Friday night. I should have known better!
Having made it to Finsbury Park to find the queue for the W3 stretching far into the distance (Phil counted 95 would-be bus passengers) and rendezvousing with Tom and Tony, we wound up walking/skating along the icy pavements and roads of Crouch End for half an hour, after our lift home almost slid into the parked cards lining the residential back route we were taking to avoid the standing traffic (including the W3), and we figured that lightening the Ageh's load by 3 would make their journey home a lot safer!
It really reminded me of winters in Solihull, when Tom and I would get very excited every time the Midlands was hit by a Big Freeze, crunching over refrozen slush and scrunching through centimetres of snow. Tom's uploaded photos of B&R enjoying themselves in a very similar fashion on Friday.
And dining on curry in front of a real fire made it all worth while! Plus the early morning light on the snow covered scenes from Ally Pally was beautiful. Very peaceful indeed - everything bathed in this beautiful early morning sun glow, and with that silence that snow brings.
Both barrells.
but I wish I'd asked them what prompted the "courtesy calls" in the first place -having ranted to dad and to Robert, I'm sure that that in itself indicates that they know that the problem is their end.
Anyway... read on dear reader....
Mrs Deening finally alighted upon "Citygate House, Finsbury Square" on her list of London Tax Offices. I wouldn't let her off the hook until she'd found one
which was local - she didn't even mention the IR HQ at Bush House/The Strand.
I ended up feeling rather sorry for her - she didn't even know that Enfield wasn't in/close to the City/Liverpool St/Bank.
How *do* you describe a London location to someone who's never left Scotland?
The power of the postcode was never more needed.
I'm faxing my MP now.
The lovely Herve set us a Test de Rentree Janvier 2003.... and it's the rentree demain and i've yet to do mes devoirs.
Aidez-moi etc mettez vos bons mots dans la boite "Comments" ci-dessus!
Merci
:)
ps I love the typo at number 43....
... right on cue, Tom Coates comes to the rescue, recommending Syndirella as an RSS news/blog/information aggregator.
Now all I need to do is see if we have the the .NET Framework version 1.0, and if not, whether I can download it.....
courtesy of Don't Link to Us!
.... check out the small print :)
Phil's looking for a map of London in the mid-17 Century for Pepys' Diary.
If you know of one, which he'd be able to put up on Pepys' Diary, then either contact him or post a comment here.
Bearing in my own historian's credentials and my close shave with the archivist profession, I thought I'd see how far I got combining my academic research skills with this newfangled interweb thing - it didn't exist as a resource when I was at university - and that was only in 1988-1992!
SingalongaPatate
Tis just lovely, and it's on it's way to my french classe right now, mes p'tites patates.
Janette and I are off to Istanbul for a long weekend at the beginning of March - yeeeeeeeeeeeeeees!!!
5* hotel, 3 nights for the price of 2. Thanks Lastminute.com!
The siege is over, and it wasn't not a happy ending for Eli Hall, nor for local residents.
and there's been precious high profile coverage of what happened, how the siege was handled, why it stared in the first place. It seems to have been fallen between the cracks caused by the "To play or not to play" question (Cricket in Zimbawe) and the US/UK's build up for War on Iraq.
... as covered in the BBC Technology pages.
So it's working then.
STAND picks up issues where they think that people who are reasonably techie might have a useful opinion that might otherwise be ignored.
Their current campaign aims to address the apparent imbalance between the public consultation exercise conducted by the Home Office and the one-sided views presented by those consulted so far. ID cards will affect everyone in the UK - don't you feel that you should have heard something about the proposals if we're edging closer to adopting them?
I do.
If you're reading this, then you're online, and you've probably got a certain amount of experience of and awareness about how often your personal data is collected and used.... and how often it ends up in the places where you'd never expect. Now just imagine what happens when you have a single unique identifier that anyone can use to correlate data on you.....
A lot of the problems of the ID card aren't about how it's been used in the past, but how it will be used in the future, and how the government plans to get there.
If you have an opinion, STAND have set up an easy-to-use means of joining in the consultation process. And at the end, you have the additional option of sending a copy to your MP, via the awarded-winning Fax Your MP.
The consultation ends on 31 Janaury 2003.
Day 14..... and it's still going.
Personal interest piqued on two counts:
1. It's taking place in Graham Road, 5 mins from Phil's flat, so I pass by quite often on re-routed buses (most recently 10 mins after the hostage* made his escape);
2. Lou lives and works inside the cordon and has been providing bird's-eye accounts of major events.
I returned from holiday blithely ignorant of what looks like becoming the London's longest running seige, which made the first few posts I read on re-subbing to Haddock somewhat mystifying. One week on, it's become part of the background of London news, with only the dramatic making it onto/into The News. All of which makes Lou's independent front line reportage all the more valuable, and this Obersever article amusing.
It *never* snows in London! Well, it feels like it hasn't snowed since 1775 (or whenever the Great Frost Fairs were - This Sceptred Isle has failed me...)
"From the arts to music, beautiful places to cultured civilisations do your best to visit one or other. Your appreciation for things foreign and exotic will be heightened over the next month. This is a fine time to plan an overseas trip, court a foreigner, or learn a different language. Expanding your horizons has a liberating feeling that is quite intoxicating. It's refreshing to know that there are many ways you can choose to live. Opening yourself to new experiences will enable you to forge the life you desire."
Time to get leafing through the brochures again.....
Just before lunch, I learned that the BBC is axing Tomorrow's World because of falling ratings.
I'm sure (I think) that the BBC has debated this decision long and hard, and I'd be interested in knowing the reasons behind it. To my mind, falling ratings is a euphamism for media euthansia, with all the ethical concerns proved correct.
Tomorrow's World was a staple of my childhood telly viewing - and one of the few programmes I used to watch with my dad. But I'm not arguing for TW on the basis of nostalgia alone, in today's world science is having a greater impact than ever before, and that's only going to increase - from Dolly to hygrogen cars, mobile messaging to superstring theory, Tomorrow's World has a place to educate young and old alike about what the future might hold.
Startrek is no substitute, and one off specials are easy enough to space ... out .... so ..... much ...... that ....... they ........ disappear ......... from .......... the ........... scheduling ............altogether. A regular slot in the week allows for regular viewing, and for small items to have their space. After all, who's to say that some small snippet today won't be tomorrow's sms?
...a little later....
One of the other comments on TW is that it:
"used to be = new scientist
became = daily mail "isn't this cool?" column with no science bits"
....which strongly suggests that I am guilty of supporting what was, rather than what is. But if that's so, then that lays the blame squarely at the doors of the BBC. It's within their power to produce a programme which is of New Scientist quality, and I'd go so far as to say it's expected of them under the Charter.
Choosing to axe TW suggests that they don't want to try to maintain such high information and education standards for science on television on a regular basis, preferring to hitch their horses to the Popular Science bandwagon with the one off specials focussing on whatever gadget is flavour of the month, or has the best PR machine.
It's the steady drip, drip, drip of information that educates - enabling the viewer to piece together a broader understanding, making the links and enjoying their own Eureka moments. Spoon feeding via the occasional science special risks leaving subjects segregated into separate pockets, some if which may seem impossibly deep to some viewers, and each with its own ring fence creating a barrier against making the connections which brings science to life, into the home and out of the lab.
The BBC has brought history into the mainstream by focussing on the social side, why can't they do the same for science? It doesn't need to be biographies of great inventors and scientists, that reinforces the idea that science is the preserve of priviledged, whether educationally or financially. The impact of science on society, the way in which our lives might change as a result of research or discoveries, how science moves from the theory we learn at school and which is worked on by 'boffins in labs' and into our daily lives, becoming the things we can consume, the things which create and shape the world we live in - this is what makes science accessible and thereby interesting to your man and woman on the Clapham Omnibus.
It's what Tomorrow's World did for me, with the result that I enjoy science features in the press, in magazines, on the radio and on the TV long after my schoolday studies have ended. Maybe, the optimist in me pipes up, this is what the "one off specials" will seek to achieve. I hope so.
I've posted my opinions on the BBC's Current Science message board, but now I'm wondering if the Points of View messageboard isn't going to be more effective, although I do wish I could make the case as cogently as Cait!
It's:
- The album statistics feature in the album editor, which lets me see who's been looking at my photos;
- The Album Stats summary on the site itself; and (this is the best)
- The Top Photographs.
Ok, so that last one is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy (no time to figure out the correct phrase to use there - feel free to educate me via a comment), seeing as people click on the top ten photos to see which ones they are, and thereby add another point to their tally, but it's still really interesting to see the stats change over time, and to marry that up with the referrer logs to work out
Booked my super advance train ticket to dad and jean's last night, only to realise that 31st Jan is the IT Department Christmas Party (cheapskates + management disinterest => January festivities) so the plan to spend the first weekend in Feb at Dinedor was a no go. Oscillated between saying sod it to the party, and rescheduling weekend with pops, finally settling on the latter. Checked that the following weekend was OK with dad and Jean - no earlier options being available due to their jetset lifestyle (off to see Kate and Warwick in the Cayman Islands) and bought another £30 ticket on thetrainline.
And then I went to look up what the procedure is these days for refunds, only to discover that they charge £7.50 cancellation administration fee, whereas if I'd changed my ticket details the charge is only £5 (which is what I was expecting). That pisses me off. OK, I'll concede that half the annoyance is that I didn't check first, but evenso..... I'd say it's a disguised penalty for cancelling rather than an admin cost, seeing as when the issue a revised ticket you have to send the previous one in to be cancelled before they send you your new one.
Whilst I was away, Phil was busying himself realising his idea for doing Samuel Pepys' Diary as a weblog, combining one man's personal account of daily life during the 1660s with 21st century technology to produce a truely accessible, bite size social history resource.
He revealed it (www.pepysdiary.com) to Haddock just after Christmas, and it was picked up by high profile blogs far and wide... resulting in a request from BBC News Online that he write a piece for their Technology section on 'Why I turned Pepys' diary into a weblog' (written last night as Hazel and I pored over Cambodia photos, with half an eye on the first episode in the new season of Sex and the City).
Coo - I've got a famous boyfriend (well, in the webworld anyway!). And I'm really really pleased and proud for him because it is a great site - a decade of a daily dose of Pepys, with links to biographies of people who feature in diary entries, and similar additional information on places mentioned, together with really handy links to maps from Streetmap.