Paul Keetch to retire

Can’t help notice Paul Keetch, the Lib Dem MP for the city where I went to school, is to retire.

Hem, hem, should I get my candidate approval papers in?

Course not. I’ve worked for MPs and why anyone ever wants to be one is totally beyond me. Yeah, you get the deference, the salary and somewhere to hang your swordlight sabre. But you also get the casework, the responsibility, the travelling, having to front a campaign that costs tens of thousands, having to raise tens of thousands, having to think/say something about every issue.

I can’t even really offer much help to any of my party friends thinking of putting themselves forward for Hereford [1] – although I know the city reasonably well, it wasn’t until I left the county that I started getting into politics, so I don’t really know the local party in Hereford, or any of the councillors.

[1] Specially not you, J, you carpet bagger.

Soldiers

Soliders don’t earn very much.

American satirical cartoons The Simpsons and Family Guy have both recently run episodes about US Army recruitment.

The Simpsons included a reference to recruits’ salaries, so I Googled it.

American soldiers start at $15,282, whilst in the UK, they get £12,128.

Well, it’s more than minimum wage.  In both cases, it seems like your money goes up quite fast with continued service and promotion. But it ain’t much when you consider what we ask them to do.

I’m too fat, too gay and too asthmatic to serve.

Especially for Grace

Grace asked for more cat pictures. I think she’s probably gone to bed now.

P5120120

Whilst we were doing so much with cat pics yesterday (less so today) a colleague pointed out that I have far more pictures of Fudge than Smudge.

This is true. Fudge is definitely my favourite. But it’s OK, because Smudge is P’s favourite, so it all evens out.

Here’s a few other cool things Duncan taught us to do:

catsil
Silhouettes… and

… Break-outs – photos where parts of the image break out of the frame of the rest. This takes hours in Photoshop, itself an expensive programme, but is relatively straightforward in PagePlus.
cat-co

Party training

fopuss

Spending the weekend in Birmingham on a party course learning how to use PagePlus – and look what that nice Duncan Borrowman has taught us to do.

I’ve been using the program for over a year now, and I’m pretty au fait with most of it, but there are still brilliant nuggets of information that I hadn’t figured out for myself.

We’re sitting in a room with our own laptops and source images, so every now and again, an instruction is “Find an image, do this, do that and voila.”

I suspect none of my constituents are going to be too chuffed to be sent pictures of my cats. It’s bad enough we do it here on the blog all the time.

Dan Savage podcast

I read Dan Savage’s eye-opening sex advice column every week.

He’s now got a podcast.  Do I dare subscribe to that?  The mind boggles as to what it might contain, and iTunes could easily end up playing it by accident in the office…

Here’s a handy list of quality things I read regularly.  I always skip straight to these when my feedreader flags up a new article

And here’s a list of the sites I fire up first thing each day over my first pint of black coffee (Sainsbury’s Continental)

  • Dilbert – every day for years!
  • APOD – only since recently, but well worth it
  • B3ta – usually just for their best front page images

Quick catch-up

Forgive me reader for I have sinned, it’s been days since my last posting.

So, a quick summary.

Weekend – long drive with a carful of local party activists to Regional Conference in Gainsborough.  A good time seems to be had by all.

Monday, a day in the Council House.  Turn up at 10am for a very bad-tempered meeting.  Check diary and see next meeting is at 2pm.  Not really worth going home and coming back, so I find things to read, and get on with other bits of work.  Then at 1359, someone looks over my shoulder and says “Hang on a minute, that meeting is Thursday.”  Bugger.  I can’t go on Thursday.  The meeting has been moved because of a diary clash for the chair, and I didn’t update my own diary. Then my next meeting is group at 7.30pm.  So I hang around for that too, nattering to colleagues and setting the world to rights.  Finally leave the building twelve hours later when Group finishes, as it always does, with the Council House staff coming around the building to chuck us out so he can go home.

Late at night, discuss recipes with UMRAT friend, who suggests a main course for…

Tuesday, delivery day, and having veggie friends round for tea.  Most of our veggie friends in one go, for convenience.  We had soup, cheese pudding and apple tart, supplemented by extra puds from M&S and rather too much wine.

After the wine, one of our guests made the startling discovery that if you back-comb Fudge’s mane, he looks like Ming the Merciless.

Temperature nerdism

I’m starting to follow in my father’s footsteps and taking an unhealthy interest in the weather.

So when I clocked in Lidl that they had very cheap digital in/out max/min thermometers, I jumped at the chance and bought two.

I have installed one in the office and one in my home office.

I can tell you that when I left the Chesterfield office at 23.40 this evening, it was 2.5 degrees. No wonder my car had frozen up. But with my new thermometer, I was forewarned!

At home, it’s registering 3.5 deg outside, and a whopping 20 in. I’m sure it’s not really so hot.

I now have rather a lot of thermometers.

New digital one with wired outdoor sensor in my office. Digital with wireless sensor in the sitting room (14 deg), and the sensor in the bedroom (17 deg). Alcohol thermometer over the central thermostat reads 15 and the alcohol max/min one on the lean to reads min 3 deg (which must be now or last night) and max 42 deg (which must have been in August!)

And of course there’s the one in the car, which read 1 deg in the Bingo carpark, 4 deg on the M1 and 2 deg where I parked at home.

Which is all very well.

But what I’d really like is a series of wifi thermometer sensors recording and sending info to my PC that could draw pretty graphs and alert me to problems with the heating over the internet, etc.

There do seem to be one or two things like that available, but they’re either obscenely expensive or involve lots of soldering and being practical, which is more than I can manage.

Thobut I’d love something capable of producing reports like these.