Although his list of the worst programmes is a little ideosyncratic. I like most of those.

Quote… Unquote can be dire, but sometimes it’s not too bad.

Loose ends. Well. With him on that one.

Comedy – oh, there are some pearls amongst the dross. Most of the ones he lists are OK.

Something Understood. Yup, Don’t like that.

In Our Time. Well, I quite like that, but not enough to work my way through the MP3 library of every programme there’s ever been.

The Afternoon Play. Don’t hear it too often, except when really late for work like today. Today’s was, erm, interesting. Weird. Kind of the airwaves equivalent of magical realism.

Today. Oh, gotta love Today. What else to wake up to?

The Learning Curve Oh, poor Libby Purves. She’s great.

Moneybox Always makes me feel guity I haven’t reconciled my bank book since 1998. Hell, I haven’t seen my chequebook since we moved.

Any Answers? Oh, no question. Full of loons. Worst 40 minutes in the schdule.

Read on cix.  No idea if it’s true or not.

In 1979 the UK had three times as
much motorway as France, Now France has nearly four times as much as us.

Read on cix.  No idea if it’s true or not.

In 1979 the UK had three times as
much motorway as France, Now France has nearly four times as much as us.

I’ve just spent a bit over an hour at a secondary school in my ward having a conversation with one of their Year 11 Talented and Gifted groups. It sounded rather daunting, but I think it went very well. Some of the group were a bit quiet, some of them quite outspoken, but they were all very well behaved, and had loads of helpful and sensible things to say and ask.

I’d gone in with a few things prepared in my mind to talk about, all on the “what councils and councillors do” type of thing, so I could have had “what I’ve done this week” (Full Council, residents’ meeting, group meeting, work activities, casework), “what does the council do”, “what say do politicians have in my school”, “what sort of things do neighbours of the school write to me about”.

But in the end, the conversation seemed to me to flow pretty well, and took in a huge amount of Council service areas, and I surprised myself with how much I already knew the answer to. We spent a disproportionate amount of time on rubbish, recycling and collection, possibly because I’ve just started turning up at a Waste Steering Group looking at the future of waste disposal, so it’s at the top of my mind.
There are one or two topics the pupils have asked me to raise in the Council, which I will, and their teacher asked me if he could give my details out to other teachers running similar groups at the school. I’d be more than happy to go back.

When I first started out as a councillor, three and half years ago, I wondered about writing to all the schools in my ward to say, I’m here, I wouldn’t mind visiting if you think I can help out in any way. I didn’t in the end, because that sounded hopelessly self-involved. “*Jazz hands* Here I am!” Maybe I will if and when I get re-elected.

The other thing in the back of my head, as one of my “what-if” plans has been, knowing that I don’t intend to do the politics thing for the rest of my life, I could go back to uni and do a PGCE.  But all I know about schools is what I remember from being there myself.  They’ve changed a lot in the last thirteen years.  The classroom I was in today had a pen-board marked up with WILF WALT boxes for the start of each lesson: What I’m Looking For and We Are Learning Today.  My teachers were good, but I’m not sure they were always so organised!

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!

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!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.

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.

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.