Category Archives: Uncategorized

Librivox milestone

An email arrives telling me Librivox has just catalogued its 1000th book, and pointing out that there is the equivalent of 6 months of continuous audio available for free download over at www.librivox.org. The community-based project has become the most prolific audiobook publisher in the world.

I’m feeling immensely guilty for not making much progress with my own projects on LV. My recording of 80 Days Around the World is languishing incomplete. There are other things I’d love to read and haven’t got around to. And I’m letting others down by not playing my part in group recordings also.

On an almost weekly basis, I’m getting touching fanmail from people who have heard some of the work I have already done there. Every time I reply to thank them, and say I’m planning to do more, but finding the time is proving difficult.

The emails often include interesting snippets about what people were doing whilst listening. This is often driving great distances, often in the United States or Canada, and I am enjoying putting the journeys into Google Maps and seeing where these places are. Some people who mail me are listening to audiobooks because they are housebound or disabled, and are finding the recordings a lifeline.

Entrepreneurs have even begun selling the recordings on eBay! I must get back to doing it!

Happy Halloween

I have no chocolate or sweets in the house, so it’s apples for anyone who knocks tonight.

Off to a late Halloween party on Saturday and have no idea what I’m going to wear or what sort of costume.  What horror figure has a beard?  Bah.

Where were you when you heard?

I had known for a couple of days that conversations with Ming were brewing, but I had no idea that he planned to resign. Kudos to him for taking decisive action and pre-empting weeks of will-he-won’t-he speculation.

We were in Full Council on Monday when we heard. I leave my phone on, but on silent. At some point, a friend who follows politics closely texted to ask me my views. Obviously, I didn’t have an opinion before I knew it had happened, so I slipped out of the chamber to go and check the BBC News website to get confirmation. Then I printed out the relevant story and went back in to pass it round my group.

The local newspaper phoned for a comment, and I sent a PPC out to go and give one.

Then the Labour leader of the Council got some info through a news wire or a text service, and walked across the floor to show us the news on his phone. It didn’t quite twig at the time, but he had the courtesy to come and show us the news before he passed it around his own group. A real mitzvah.

All the while Full Council was raging on around us. We discussed the most recent local government bill, a motion on HMOs, and a motion supporting a bid for a new visitors centre in Sherwood Forest.

Then, at the rise of the main meeting, we had a special meeting to consider granting the Freedom of the City to the Mercian Regiment. The Sherwood Forresters already had the Freedom of the City, but their regiment has merged with many others to form a new one, and so the Council had to re-grant the freedom.

It was important to do this at this time: the Mercian come off active service in Afghanistan soon, and once they are home, they want to be able to march through the streets of Nottingham. Six of them won’t be able to march with their comrades, because they were killed on active service.

I’m no fan of armies. I’m a classic beardy multilateralist pacifist. But I do think it’s right and proper that the servicemen and women who are called upon to go and do and see awful things in the name of Queen and Country are respected when they return. It’s vital to make the distinction between those who call the shots and those who are called upon to make them. I also have friends in the forces.

During the Council debate we heard from three councillors who have sons on active service. One intervention was particularly moving, from a councillor whose son returned safely recently. For all the time he was abroad, his parents were glued to local and national news, hearing about soldiers injured and killed abroad and dreading a phonecall themselves from the MOD.

In the end, we passed the motion unanimously. The City of Nottingham will be welcoming the servicemen and women on parade on the 4th December. I’m cross that I won’t be able to join them. Just a week ago, I persuaded the council to send me on a town planning conference that day, so I’ll be in London. I’ll have to get my friends to take photos.

With the ramifications of Ming’s resignation merging in my mind with the flurry of emotions that went through me for the military debate – not least how awful it is for the families of the soldiers who were killed – I was in a bit a of a tiz when I left the building.

But I got brought down to earth with a jolt to see merrymakers in the street carrying with business as usual: it was the annual 7-legged pub crawl event for new students.

The four values of Robin Hood

Do you know what the four values of Robin Hood are? I’ve asked a few people, and they tend to come up with robbing the rich to pay the poor, and then struggle a bit.

According to Robinhood.co.uk, they are

  • championing the community;
  • promoting sustainable living;
  • capturing myths and magic and
  • respecting the past to influence and inspire the future.

Urgh. I can only guess robbing the rich falls under “championing the community.”

Extreme weather

Roundabout lunchtime today, the weather station recorded an extreme wind speed in excess of 180kmh.

A brief google suggests that’s the sort of speeds associated with hurricanes, and if we’d had wind like that in my garden, it would probably have to be because the surrounding houses had blown away

An alternative suggestion is that the guys currently building our conservatory were exploring the lower garden on their lunchbreak.

They’ve been quite entertaining to watch during the day, whenever I’ve gone into the kitchen to make a cuppa, or twitched the bedroom curtains to see how high the walls are now.

At one point, they seemed to be having a competition to see who could hold the maximum paper cups in one hand.

There was also a brief but entertaining period whilst an apprentice to tried and make a big bit of rubbish fit in the skip. Sawing it backwards and jumping on it featured. I was watching in case I ended up having to call an ambulance.

I don’t mind. They seem to have got a huge amount done, and seem to have almost finished building the walls.

This week’s project

Distracting myself a little from frantic general election planning, I’ve been installing a wee weather station at the bottom of the garden.

It’s the cheapest available (as far as I can tell!) that measures lots of different things, and communicates with a PC for logging the data. It’s a Lacrosse WS-2300.

weather

The site I chose for the sensors was the best available, but there are a number of flaws. Firstly there is nowhere anywhere near our house that’s suitable for a wind meter. We’re surrounded by trees, and there’s a huge hill on one side. Even sticking it on the roof wouldn’t do, as the tree in front of our house is taller than the highest point on the house. And the roof would also not be all that convenient for access when it comes to replacing batteries. So wherever it goes, it won’t be terribly accurate as the shadowing from buildings, trees or hills will funnel the weather and shelter it from the lower breezes.

The other issue I thought about when installing was that the fence post I’m using is a little too close to the compost bin, which is rotting away merrily and producing quite a lot of heat.

It’s become clearer from today’s temperature readings, which are about 10 degrees too high, compared to other nearby people’s observations, the forecast, and my other outdoor thermometers, that the thermometer is in full sun. I will either have to move it, or make a Stevenson screen.
The software it came with has fairly serious limitations, so for the last day or so I have been using Weather Display on a free trial, which has been uploading to a webpage. Weather Display has thousands of features, most of which have very limited application. The screens are a complete eyesore, and the website it generates is an affront to the eyes, and web standards (huge images covered in text, for starters.) See for yourself.

I’ve been experimenting with a Mac application called Weather Tracker, which says it should work with the weather station I have but that isn’t quite right…

Have been happily uploading data to Weather Underground, too.

Not only

Not only does Stephen Fry have a blog, but he also chose to go for a WordPress installation.  Good for him.  I haven’t actually read it bcause I’m not particularly sober, and he seems to like to write quite long pieces – not blog posts, but blessays.

I’m sitting in a pub in Oxford that’s also a hotel – a place I found on Laterooms.com so that I could go to the gay bellringing tour in Oxford.  Somehow it feels that Fry would approve.

I’m on my third pint, so I can’t guarantee that anything I write now will make any sense in the cold light of day.

The first pint cost £2.50.  The second, of the same ale – London Pride – cost £2.70. I was a bit concerned and told the barguy it had gone up by twenty pence in $respectable_time_for_one_pint. When I went back for my third he told me it cost £2.90, which I thought was highly amusing.

The first two pints have been spent reading an abandoned copy of the Daily Mail.  It’s still vile.  Even when drinking on an empty stomach (because I’ve arrived too late for food and seem to be in a part of Oxford that doesn’t have late nite stores.)

Good grief, is that really the time?  I have to be at Carfax Tower by the crack of dawn tomorrow.

Missing Ming two years running

I skived off the last day of Conference on Thursday, much like I did last September, if not last March. Still, it seems that the speech has generally been well received, by bloggers and pundits alike.

Instead of going into the Conference hall, I took advantage of being on the South coast already to go and see my little brother, who has just bought a boat which is presently moored in Southampton.

And it’s a very nice boat indeed. I’m quite keen on the idea of sailing out to sea in it (there have been suggestions of popping over the channel to France, or to the Channel Islands, but I’m holding out for Biarritz…)

He will hate me for this, but there was an element of the layout inside that reminded me of, ahem, a caravan. Something about the compactness, the dual bed/couches everywhere, the fact that everything needs to be tied down and away in lockers. There were elements of the boat that were infinitely more impressive than the caravans I’ve been on recently:

  • the boat sleeps 11 (although there’s barely any space to get away from the other 10 if you needed to).
  • It had two toilets heads – more than my house!
  • The oven has a thingy which means it stays level when the boat is pitching and doodahing around in high seas.
  • There was much more specialist language in describing a boat than there is in a caravan – fore, aft, port, starboard, stern, bow, fo’csle, etc, etc, etc. Much of this I have instantly forgotten after having it explained.

The yacht (technically, I think I remember him explaining, a ketch, and not in the Lady Bracknell sense) is ready to go to sea, but bro is working hard at improving it – making sure all his stuff is stowed and there’s enough food aboard; adding in hi-tech stuff that makes life sweeter, like a telly, and toilets you don’t need to be 5 miles out to flush.