Monthly Archives: October 2006

Nottingham podcast

Not me!

The City Council takes advantage of free advertising by appending short sentences to the bottom of every email.  Not just the usual legal waffle, but also very on-message little snippets.  Last month it was ‘Congratulations to our children and teachers – exam results have improved’ or something like it.

This month they’re promoting the “Notice Nottingham” newsletter, and with it, the new “Notice Nottingham podcast”

You can now listen to Notice Nottingham as a Podcast by pasting the following link into your Podcast software:
http://feeds.readspeaker.com/app/podcaster/nottscity/feed/112.xml

It’s a really good idea, I think, but there are some wrinkles to iron out.

It’s a text-to-voice program, rather than a real reader, so some things sound a bit artificial.  There’s no mention of it on the city council website that I can find, so you only get to hear of it if you email the council about something.  And strangest of all, each separate item is a different MP3 file, so for any given edition of Notice Nottingham, you get lots of little 30 sec MP3s instead of just one 4min podcast.

I’ve just heard through the podcast that the Conservatives are planning their spring conference in Nottingham.  Eep!  Apparently, 500 delagates (seems very low?) will bring a £250,000 injection to the local economy.
Today for some reason I was on Lincolnshire County Council’s website, and that was really good.  Random facts (20% of England’s food comes from Lincs) a gallery of photos taken by members of the public.  Just didn’t list the councillors by political party, which is the thing I go on council websites for most often.

Eco debt day

9th October is “the Day Humanity starts Eating the Planet”

New research reveals rising consumption of natural resources is pushing the world into ever earlier ecological debt, or ‘overshoot’

New calculations released today show that from now until the end of the year we will be living beyond our global environmental means. Research by the US-based Global Footprint Network in partnership with nef and Best Foot Forward reveals that as of today, humanity has used up what nature can renew this year and is now eating into its ‘ecological capital’.

Each year, the day that the global economy starts to operate with an ecological deficit is designated as ‘ecological debt day’ (known internationally as ‘overshoot day’). This marks the date that the planet’s environmental resource flow goes into the red and we begin operating on a non-existent environmental overdraft.

The fact that this year, ecological debt day falls on 9 October, only three quarters of the way through the year, means that we are living well beyond our environmental means. This leads, in effect, to a net depletion of the resources. From October 9 until the end of the year, humanity will be in ecological overshoot, building up ever greater ecological debt by consuming resources beyond the level that the planet’s ecosystems can replace.

This has been called, ‘the biggest issue you’ve never heard of,’ yet its causes and effects are simple and logical. If we eat more than we grow in any given year, we have to dip into reserves. If we cut trees faster than they grow back, then our forests become smaller than the year before. If we catch more fish than spawn each year, then there will be fewer fish in the sea.

The day that we begin living beyond our environmental means is creeping ever earlier in the year as human consumption grows:

  • humanity first went into global ecological debt in 1987, with the first ecological debt day on 19 December that year;
  • by 1995 it had jumped a month forward to 21 November;
  • now, new estimates based on the latest available data indicate that in 2006, we run out of ecological resources today, Monday 9 October.

(via)

Argh! Lost email

About a year ago, I switched to Thunderbird to collect all my email rather than use AMEOL for cix mail and Agent for Zetnet.

I always meant to eventually copy all my historic mail across to Thunderbird. You know, one of those rainy-day tasks you wait for the tuit for.

Now, for some reason this evening I went back to Agent and… some of the emails are not there.

Specfically, 4,997 emails from between 07/01/1999 and 26/07/2005. I know this, because Agent still says they’re there. They have dates, and sizes. They don’t have contents, and ‘to:, Subject: and From:’ lines are blank.

I don’t know why I keep old email, any more than I know why my office is so cluttered with old things I can barely move, or my filing cabinet at the Council is full of papers I have kept because I ought to read them, even though I never will.

But it’s nice to know it’s there. It’s nice to go back through them occasionally and wallow in nostalgia. Until recently, there emails in there I’d sent and received while I was in Paris. There were old flings and net flirts, correspondences with strangers and firm friends, and people I’ve subsequently lost touch with.

Now they’re all gone. I don’t know at what point they were lost. I do have some backups, but is it worth returning to the data?

I just tried Agent’s repair folder function. It made matters worse — now it says there are no messages. At least before it knew there should have been 4,997. Now it doesn’t even know that!

Chris Huhne’s biscuits and my poor diet

Oh dear. My diet has been so poor this week. Last Friday, the office sourced some really excellent biscuits and cakes for a Macmillan Coffee Morning.

Some of the cakes and biscuits survived until Chris Huhne’s visit the following Monday. In addition to the tour and the official meetings, and photographs, we invited local party members to come in and speak informally to our environment spokesman, so we put the biscuits and cakes out again.

They didn’t all get eaten then, either, so they sat on the desk in the office for Tuesday. I didn’t eat anything else that day.

Or Wednesday. Lots of cake and biscuits and no vegetables Wednesday. Or Thursday. Or Friday. By then, the cakes and biscuits were a little past their best: the cakes dry and the biscuits soggy. But still, they were there. And they were cheaper than the excellent Italian deli, which is excellently priced, but not free.

So, now it’s Saturday. I just cooked. To my horror, it’s the first time I’ve cooked since before the Brighton conference. That’s weeks and weeks.

My diet when I cook is not too bad. We always have lots of veg, sometimes I cook meat free, it’s not too high fat. Tonight was olives and breadsticks (Crespo green olives stuffed with almonds – I love olives with a crunchy stuffing) roast sausage with baked potatoes and carrots and cumin, plus gravy made with onions and mushrooms. Later, when that goes down, it’ll be fresh pineapple for dessert.

Since we’re both home for the whole weekend (a rare event), I have a lamb joint to roast tomorrow as well, with broccoli, mange touts, and new potatoes. At some point, I have tomatoes, Greek olives and feta for a Greek salad, either for starter for the roast meal, or for lunch.

So, not too unhealthy.

However, Monday is Full Council. There will be a buffet for lunch and a catered tea. With evil pudding. I will stuff up on cake again and pour cream on my pudding, and probably go back for cheese.

I might cook again on Tuesday, but for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I’ll be in the office again. Downstairs from the office is a chippy, where we have lunch, ahem, occasionally, KFC, a Chinese. The Italian deli turns into pizzeria at night, and two doors further up in the other direction is a curry house. And with my strange working hours, it’s so much easier to go for a take-away than it is to drive home then cook.

Chris Huhne's biscuits and my poor diet

Oh dear. My diet has been so poor this week. Last Friday, the office sourced some really excellent biscuits and cakes for a Macmillan Coffee Morning.

Some of the cakes and biscuits survived until Chris Huhne’s visit the following Monday. In addition to the tour and the official meetings, and photographs, we invited local party members to come in and speak informally to our environment spokesman, so we put the biscuits and cakes out again.

They didn’t all get eaten then, either, so they sat on the desk in the office for Tuesday. I didn’t eat anything else that day.

Or Wednesday. Lots of cake and biscuits and no vegetables Wednesday. Or Thursday. Or Friday. By then, the cakes and biscuits were a little past their best: the cakes dry and the biscuits soggy. But still, they were there. And they were cheaper than the excellent Italian deli, which is excellently priced, but not free.

So, now it’s Saturday. I just cooked. To my horror, it’s the first time I’ve cooked since before the Brighton conference. That’s weeks and weeks.

My diet when I cook is not too bad. We always have lots of veg, sometimes I cook meat free, it’s not too high fat. Tonight was olives and breadsticks (Crespo green olives stuffed with almonds – I love olives with a crunchy stuffing) roast sausage with baked potatoes and carrots and cumin, plus gravy made with onions and mushrooms. Later, when that goes down, it’ll be fresh pineapple for dessert.

Since we’re both home for the whole weekend (a rare event), I have a lamb joint to roast tomorrow as well, with broccoli, mange touts, and new potatoes. At some point, I have tomatoes, Greek olives and feta for a Greek salad, either for starter for the roast meal, or for lunch.

So, not too unhealthy.

However, Monday is Full Council. There will be a buffet for lunch and a catered tea. With evil pudding. I will stuff up on cake again and pour cream on my pudding, and probably go back for cheese.

I might cook again on Tuesday, but for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I’ll be in the office again. Downstairs from the office is a chippy, where we have lunch, ahem, occasionally, KFC, a Chinese. The Italian deli turns into pizzeria at night, and two doors further up in the other direction is a curry house. And with my strange working hours, it’s so much easier to go for a take-away than it is to drive home then cook.

Tidy Desk


Screen shot

Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

It’s official, my computer is now nearly as untidy as my home office. I am running out of space for clutter on my desktop and on my desk.

I feel like I’m running round in tiny circles achieving nothing, and having time to do nothing. My job and my council work are clashing more and more often, and I don’t seem to have time to do either properly.

Either way, I certainly don’t have time for those trifles like tidying my house or trimming my beard or… Gah!

He uses the bed!

  Now both cats using bed
He uses the bed!Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

We’ve never before seen the cat actually using the bed, or at least not since we stopped shutting them in the kitchen overnight.

Mind you, it seems he’s not keen to be caught in the bed. He jumps out guiltily and sleeps back on the landing when we see him.

EDIT: now one cat has started using the bed, so has the other.

Amazon unbox

I’ve just had an email from Amazon.com advertising a new (?) service, Amazon Unbox, which offers videos for download.

Included in the list are all sorts of goodies, including the current season of all three CSI franchises, for $1.99 an episode.  That’s almost worth it, no?

In addition to all the expected US shows, they also have a peculiar mix of BBC shows – Keeping up Appearances, the Francis Urquhart series To Play the King and House of Cards, and Coupling.

But is it that good?  A scathing review on BoingBoing says not: you have to use Amazon’s software which you agree might be able to spy on you, and play commercials at you whether you want it or not, and even though you will have forked out your hard earned dollars to get access to the videos, you won’t actually own them.  Oh, and it’s not available to customers not resident in the the United States.

Delve a little deeper through reviews, and you’d be hard pressed to find a positive one at all.  All point to high costs (more for the movie downloads than the TV programmes) restrictive licences, spyware viewers and so on.

Pah.

National Poetry Day

Will tells me it’s National Poetry Day on the first Thursday in October, ie now. There is a theme.

I don’t know many poems, much to my chagrin. A few months ago, I sought out all the poems I could remember from A Level Eng Lit a decade ago that are in the public domain, and recorded them for Librivox.

Have a handy PodPress player for them here and now:

There’s loads of poetry on Librivox – here’s a good place to start.