Offloading books

Jan3

I’m trying to declutter a bit, and have put a whole loada books on BookMooch.com, a place where you offer to post books to strangers for free in the hope that someone will post you books you want. There are rules and things to try and keep it fair, and I can’t get any books until I offload some.

If you want some of my books, there’s a page here that should list the ones I have knocking about.

I buy too many books – usually the very cheap second hand ones from Amazon that cost £0.01p plus P+P. And then I hold on to them. I’m trying to get a complete collection of the Janet Evanovich / Stephanie Plum books; I already own a full set of Alphabet books from Sue Grafton, although a big wodge of those are on loan at the moment. I want to hold onto those.

But there are plenty of books still available. Lots of Kathy Reichs, lots of Dan Brown, several Stephen Booth (he’s v good – Derbyshire based policiers). Join Mooch, get a book, earn me new books. Strangely Mooch doesn’t seem to play well with Google Chrome – practically the first website I’ve encountered that struggles.

All of the books on the list are also on Bookcrossing, where I do not have a good track record. Despite picking up other people’s books and despite registering dozens on the site, and despite leaving helpfully tagged books in interesting places (eg Cyprus) no-one has ever picked up a book I’ve left somewhere and recorded the fact on Bookcrossing. Gah!

Talking of Twitter

Dec28

A meme has been doing the rounds amongst seasoned twitterers to find who you followed first. If you hop along to this helpful website it will tell you.

It told me that the first person I followed was Alan Fleming, who now seems to twitter once a day, like clockwork, and seldom blog. You can read my first post about Twitter here – and Alan’s here.

As you’ll see from my post, it was a toss-up between Alan and Troubled Diva about who it was who really first got me into Twitter.

It’s rather flattering, but since the meme came along, at least three people have disclosed that they followed me first, so I got them hooked. (@willhowells, @jonxyz and @rfenwick)

But perhaps the tallest claim I can make in relation to Twitter is that I got the Lib Dems tweeting. You can see from my first blog post on the subject that I thought politics was ripe for the twittering. I suggested it in a forum to the Innovations Dept, who were at first hostile, and then later took to it like ducks to crepuscular water. That led quickly to Lynne Featherstone MP taking up the twitter baton and it spread through the party and then through UK politics more generally.

Of course, had I not come along, the Lib Dems and politics more generally would have caught on to twitter without me just fine. I’m sure Innovations had been thinking about twitter before I made my suggestion. And the US presidential election was a massive time for twittering to catch on in US politics – @barackobama, @hilaryclinton and @fakesarahpalin all made their marks.

Don’t pee in public

Dec27

For the last few days, Twitter has been alive with people across the world forwarding links to this story on the local BBC site.

Apparently some prankster with a colour printer and a laminating machine has been making extremely official looking signs telling Nottingham’s revellers that they are allowed to urinate in certain spots after nightfall. A further letter with the official council logo on it explains that the spots will be cleaned by the Council in the early hours of the morning.

This is of course not true. It is not permitted to urinate in public anywhere in the city, and although a small army of people clean the city centre in the early hours of every morning, there is no group tasked with hosing urine off walls in back alleys.

Nonetheless, there are no public toilets in the city centre at night. During the day, there is a brand new, award winning toilet including an extra wide “changing places” toilet for the disabled. Unfortunately this is down a side street that whilst it is in the very centre of town, is a little difficult to find. My council colleague Cllr Marshall has been campaigning for ages for better signs pointing it out, as the current ones are a master of design, in that they look quite good, but fail to do the job of pointing things out, because they are quite small.

Councils are in a bit of a bind about public toilets. They are expensive to clean and maintain. Mindless vandals damage them. And even the busiest toilets in public places can find themselves being misused by gentleman seeking a different sort of relief, unless you fork out even more for an attendant. Over the last ten years, Nottingham has been closing the grottiest underground lavs, including the ones in Market Square, Theatre Square, Trinity Square, the Maid Marion Way underpass.

And yet there are a lot of people who come to Nottingham at night specifically to drink, whose late night needs are not catered for. If you ask the Council what people who are caught short are supposed to do, the official response comes back that people should go before they leave the establishments in which they have been drinking. This leads to a rather odd thought that bouncers should be redeployed to asking patrons “have you been?” on their way out.

Perhaps a better solution would be to adopt a version of Kingston’s Community Toilets scheme – local pubs and caffs are paid a small amount annually to make their toilets available to the public as well as patrons. The cost to the council is significantly lower than staffing their own toilets, and because they are in active premises they are less likely to be abused by the public.

Major group excluded from Tangerine Book

Dec15

You will recall I mentioned last week that I had published a book.

Of the many, many things that had concerned me when I was helping choose the articles was representation. The book contains barely 4% of the articles from LibDemVoice from last year. I’m reasonably sure the blog is reasonably balanced by dint of the sheer volume of articles. We have theists and atheists. Men and women. Gays and nongays. All sorts of people with non-vanilla sexual proclivities inhabit the comments (and are welcome to submit articles). Lib Dems and non -Lib Dems.

Over time, the balance of articles builds up quite nicely.

But when you select a subset of them, you are automatically distorting the balance. I was poring through my lame-joke-filled index wondering whether every major group was fairly represented. Was there some big policy initiative in 2008 we overlooked? A crucial campaign we didn’t cover? Some star of the year we didn’t mention? Some obvious person or body who would pick up the book, turn to the index and think “I’m not in it – but 2008 was all about me!”

My colleagues reassured me that a) we’d covered most of the bases and b) it’s always going to be the case that we miss something and there’s limited value in concerning yourself overly much.

Today, the sad news crosses my desk that we have, indeed missed a major group out from Lib Dem circles.

It should have appeared between these key words in the index:

descent, spiralling
detention without charge
devolution
devolved public services
disappointment, deferred
dreary archipelago
drugs
Dudley
Duffett, Helen

Can you see what it is?

Yes. Dogs.

I made a book!

Dec10

If you’ve been following my shameless promo posts on Lib Dem Voice, you will not be in any doubt that over the last few weeks I have typeset a book that we have published through the self publishing website lulu.com. It’s a compilation of work from our talented and beautiful crowd of contributors to Lib Dem Voice.

It took more than one go to get it right, and I will not entirely believe it has actually worked until I have the finished article in my hot little hand. But so far all the indications are that it will go fine, and scores of enthusiastic politicos from the Voice audience will be hotfooting it to Lulu from 7am tomorrow to buy the fruits of my desktop publisher.

One of the most enjoyable parts of making the book was releasing my inner librarian and creating an index. My DTP program – Serif PagePlus – made this relatively simple. Although it sounds like a dry and dusty endeavour, actually there was plenty of scope for humour and in-jokes, as the entry for Nick Clegg shows. I suspect vanishingly few people will get my jokes, but I like them all the same.

The main point of this post is to make available a series of icons for our contributors to use to help promote our book.

If you’d like to use the image at the top of this post, which links directly to the Lulu sales page, here’s the code:

And here are a series of subtler versions you may wish to consider instead.

A sobering thought about Christmas cards

Dec3

It’s no secret I’m not a particularly Christmassy person – read here about why I don’t like the orgy of commercialism – but I do like to send cards out. In the main this is to a group of people I don’t talk to much but don’t entirely want to lose touch with. So I send a jokey card from Private Eye, and one of those much maligned Xmas newsletters (here’s last year’s) about what the cats have been getting up to in school, etc.

And people send me cards too. This year, I’m definitely getting organised to do something with them. And getting organised to write down who sent us one.

The thing is, people also send cards to Jenny, who lived in this house until she died in August 2005. There were shovel-loads in Christmas 2005, which we took to the estate agent who (hopefully!) passed them onto the vendors who could marry them up with Jenny’s address book and let people know the sad news.

But there are a persistent handful of cards which still arrive for Jenny, still with bits of personal data (“Phil’s recovering nicely from his second heart-attack…”) but with no address. So we can’t let them know the world has moved on and their contact list is out of date.

So here’s my plea. When you send Christmas cards this year, include your address. Put a sticky label on the outside or your full address somewhere inside. That way, if the worst has happened and someone other than your intended recipient is opening their cards this year, they can let you know what’s what.

PS – one exciting thing this year for my cards… I’ve stocked up on James Bond stamps to make the festive greeting that little bit more interesting! Hmm, Royal Mail website has stopped working, will check link in AM.

EDIT 2011 – See this post for the final piece of information about Jenny’s friends sending Christmas cards.

Sheffield council sign

Nov25

Would someone please reassure me that the sign below is not something the Council is really wasting its time doing?

see more pwn and owned pictures

I mean seriously. Laminated signs with hole punches? They’re not nearly sufficiently weather-proof enough for that sort of use. Makes much more sense just to remove the bench to be on the safe side.

Your top Twitter words

Nov15

Remember this post? In it, I suggested people using twitter and wordpress and a plugin that copies your tweets to a blog also try using KB Linker to turn key words and phrases into hotlinks automatically.

If you’re wondering what words you use a lot, there’s a helpful thingie at www.tweetstats.com that tells you about word frequency. You can find a handy tag cloud it worked out for me – the larger the word, the more frequently I said it.

My top Twitter words are, it seems, “time, day, wondering, getting, watching.” Not sure what that says about me. But it also gives plenty of other frequently used words I could turn into links. @jamesgraham, @willhowells and @miketd could all be linked to their respective blogs, for example. I say “Nottingham” quite a lot and I could choose to link that to any number of things: the Council, the local Lib Dems, the open.guide…

ONe more Twitter thing – I have occasionally thought that it would be useful to schedule a tweet for the future rather than send it now. For example, if two amusing things strike me at once, it would be a waste to send them both together. So it would be handy to schedule the second one for, say, an hour from now, when I will be busy and have forgotten. This is now possible using a service at Twuffer.com (Twuffer is apparently twitter + buffer — maybe twitter + chrontab didn’t look so good)

As a trial, I’ve scheduled a series of tweets about what I will be cooking tomorrow for the good people of Nottingham Lib Dems who are turning up at my house to stuff envelopes. EDIT: Twuffer FAIL – it posted the whole series of messages hours early for no apparent reason 😦

Right. It’s gone 5am. They will be here shortly. I ought to at least attempt a little more sleep before then.

One true way to bundle headphones

Nov11

This cool vid on Gizmodo (hmm… two links in two days to Gizmodo, will have to keep this under review) shows how to bundle iPod earbud headphones.

iPods, as you will probably know, have revolutionised many of those dull dull jobs you have to do as a Lib Dem – many of them leaflet related. I now have a small metal box full of BBC podcasts to take around with me when I’m letterboxing and the time just flies past.

I’ve also been using them whilst printing leaflets recently – works fine whilst printing, but you have to couple ear buds with ear defenders in order to be able to hear anything over a noisy clacking folding machine.

And it’s using the ear defenders that is the only way I have ever managed to make the bud-style headphones actually stick in my ear for more than a few minutes. I don’t know if I have anatomically wrong ears or something, but for me, earbuds just fall out after a few minutes. I have to use sports (oh, the irony!) headphones that loop around my ear or the sort on springs that go around your neck – but those are uncomfortable for anything longer than a single edition of the News Quiz.

And while we’re at it, here’s a quick plea for the Beeb: more comedy podcasts please!

Californian trains

Nov10

I wrote about Prop 8, and the staggering 34 separate referendums on San Francisco ballot papers for Lib Dem voice.

One of the things Californians were voting on was a bond issue to finance a new high-speed rail link for CA, the “Safe, Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act.” Interesting the need to reassure about safety and reliability, even in the name of the bill before the Californian senate.

There’s lots of info about the proposed route on Wikipedia. WP also has a useful map of who voted for it – and if my geography isn’t way out, it looks like the counties who aren’t going to get any of the benefit were the ones who didn’t vote for it.

Gizmodo has some sweet CGI animations, and there’s also an official website.

Niles's Blog

Teaching, food and other random, infrequent wibblings

Category Archives: Politics