A Donkey on the Edge

Jed writes about life as a Devon councillor

Dear Douglas, I'm honoured to be on your blog, but to encourage you to take out the old stuff and put in the new, I've done another quick para.

You don't get to see much movement in local government. To try and get something done is like watching a glacier move. But tonight, as I write this, we are all celebrating--the glacier--and the Earth--moved!

Working with my fellow ward members in tonight's meeting, we actually convinced East Devon District Council to build a Skate Park in Budleigh Salterton.

A Skate Park!

For those of you unlucky enough not to have visited this part of Deepest Devon, I have to point out that this is a town of retired Lieutenant Colonel, Admirals, Colonials and such, where 50% of the residents are over 50 (Or is it 70% over 70?).

These gentle folk were behind the avalanche of letters of objection that were read out before I could say a word. I represent these residents as well as the non-letter writing youth. So I tried to balance my respect for their views with my personal conviction that we should do something for the younger set. The skateboard set more than helped their cause by raising an incredible £10,000 towards this--so it was certainly not my oratory that won the day.

When the vote was called ( suspense! suspense! ) we won an almost unheard-of unanimous vote. That's every single Councillor--Conservative--Lib Dem--Independent, all voting YES! And the icing on the cake is that it's going to be built NOW, not in some far-off political future.

I am elated it's true, but I promise you I will write of some of the bad days too, but not tonight…

Unanimous!

Cheers!
Jed

This material ©Jed Falby 2004

Alex,

I worry that compensation for crime and the increasingly popular idea of "victim's rights" are fundamentally wrong, and harm our justice system, undermining our unwritten agreement to abide by an equally unwritten social contract.

Victims do have rights--exactly the same rights as everybody else--whether a citizen be a victim, a perpetrator or a witness to crime. Among others, these include the right to face your accuser, be tried by a jury of your peers, and have the certainty of your guilt established to a high standard.

I worry that as more and more noise happens around issues of compensation, we move away from the idea of an impartial justice system and back to the bad old days of family vendettas that last for generations.

Anyway, with that off my chest, and in the spirit of the Creative Commons license, please feel free to use my code for http:// www.compensation4crime.com

All the best, Dug

Steve Allam is a maniac who has ported the VNC client to the Symbian os (P800 screenshot) which is both completely pointless and very very cool :-)

He says he's looking into a port for the Nokia 6600 in the near future, so my fingers are crossed. You can read more about the product at the imhotek website and if you've never played with VNC, you should definitely check out the main support site

Found this on Billy's iPod (I can't believe I hadn't heard this before--have spent the last hour laughing out loud)

(chorus)
she is pretty well
with fiends from hell
but lately we can tell
that she's just going through the motions
faking it somehow

Just thought I'd mention that the music files on your iPod are not hidden or copy protected. To download them, you can use the terminal to navigate to the right folder, and then issue a "ditto -rsrc" to copy them to your hard drive.

The music files are stored in a directory format that the internal iPod database uses, as opposed to a human-friendly album/artist hierarchy so really, the only really useful way to use this technique is to download all the files in the "F" directories to a folder on your hard drive ("ditto -rsrc /Volumes/your_ipod_name/iPod_Control/Music/F*/ ~/my_new_ipod_files/") and then drop them on iTunes which will sort and file them nicely.

Of course you could just use Drew Findley's iPod Access (though I've not tried it yet so no idea about performance)

As I mentioned earlier, James has joined the ranks of the online ranters;-)

He is maintaining an interesting typepad blog over at http://cherkoff.typepad.com where he spends time wondering about how the digital consumer is shaping what he calls Modern Marketing

He's been writing everyday since September and by now, Google should have indexed his pages. But for some reason, the query "modern marketing" cherkoff (the quotes around the first two words should only match the exact title of his blog) returns no results? The same query over at MSN returns the expected result.

So my question is, has Google stopped indexing bloggers? Do they filter out Typepad sites?

The ever helpful Mr Chris Carline wrote to me yesterday to remind me of the good old fashionned way of getting one's site listed on a search engine. When was the last time you heard the phrase "search engine registration"?

> On Thursday,/01/15, 2004, at 20:36 Europe/London, Chris Carline wrote:
>
> http://www.google.com/addurl.html
>
> It takes the hit and miss out of google indexing your site :-)
>
> Chris

So that was yesterday, and today James' site is indexed :-)

Still, I'm curious as to why the normal crawlers didn't pick it up… But maybe that's just the conspiracy theorist in me.

Dear Friend,

Thanks again for your purchase. To grow into a company that can take on the big brands we need to find a few more folks like you. At least 10,000 by January. Know a few? Of course you do. Do friends let friends buy from sweatshops? No way. If you will lift one finger to forward the text below we can keep slugging it out.

Venceremos,
The No Sweat Gang

----------------------

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http://www.nosweatapparel.com

The WFMU playlist composers best of 2003 is out

So I was reading this blog and the woman behind it had a coat of arms on her contact page. This coat of arms was created by some crazy enthusiast who is carrying on the lions rampant, balls bezant argent and c. He offers to make you one--you simply have to fill in an online form--so I did (o vanitas)

Quel est votre devise?
Ne pas éssayer c'est con.

Vous êtes plus métal, fourrure ou minéral?
Fourrure.

Quel est votre principale qualité?
Patience.

Quel est votre principal défaut?
Orgeuil.

Quel sont vos rapports avec la gente féminine?
Marrié a la belle dame Syminton d'Edinbourg.

Etes vous pacifiste ou belliqueux?
Pacifiste.

Que ce passe t'il si on vous cherche?
L'environement se transforme en un mélange relevé d'échapement enduro et épices proivrées, le tout arosé d'un bon Bourgogne.

Vous sentez vous attirer par les armes?
Comme par le péché. Je lûtte, je lûtte...

Que pensez vous des coutumes et des traditions?
Drole de question. Sans coutumes il n'y aurai pas de révolutions et sans tradition, pas de révolutionaires.

Quel animal (oiseau, mammifère, reptile) vous caractérise le plus? Et pourquoi?
L'âne ou l'ours
L'âne parce que je me sent perdu mais je m'obstinne quand-même,
l'ours par ses qualités physiques.

Citez moi le nom d'un chateau?
Dunnottar Castle.

Votre mois de naissance?
Janvier.

A vous la parole, que souhaitez vous ajouter?
Je suis typographe.
C'est a dire que je suis amateur des entreprises humaines qui investissent le plus grand effort dans les plus petittes chose.

A vous, citoyen ;-)

Dug

And while I'm posting, I just wanted to add that after almost two years of me speaking not a word of English to her, little Clementine has finally starting saying a few words of French...

"chapeau", "couteau", "murs", "pâtes", "yaourt"

Ok, so not the most useful vocab to have for when she parachutes behind enemy lines to hook up with the French resistance, but it's a start :-)

Oh, and yes I've taken loads of great pictures of her over the last nine months but no, you can't see them because my scrapbook application is crap (so sue me I'm not a programmer). Still hoping to get Moveable Type up soon, at which point lots more pics.

Cause I know that really, the only reason anyone reads this thing is to see picture of Clementine ;-)

Like more specifically how the video card seems to have died one month out of warrantee (grrr). While it is almost amusing how entirely disabled I've been since loosing the little thing, I thought y'all might be a little bored of me moaning about big nasty corporates screwing the little guy with their onerous contracts and dodgy, overpriced products.

So instead, the good news

Looks like the logic board fault is an acknowledged Apple manufacturing fault and they're mending it free of charge :-)