Good news, Euston station is to be rebuilt. Always rather a depressing place to travel through, and the poorer cousin of the other major stations. Suprissed to see this though when these sorts of things normally are on the drawing board for years before they are actually given the go-ahead (think crossrail, or thameslink 2000).
Talking of Thameslink 2000, part of it’s work will include London Bridge being rebuilt and transformed in to something much more impressive.
The Tory’s have a majority, but not overall control. How? Look around you and play spot the tory voter. Sure there are quite a few well off people, but vastly out numbered by those who look ‘brighton-ish’, students and others who just don’t look like tory voters (of course, plenty of the well off, business types also vote labour, especially in Brighton). I just don’t walk around town and think that the majority of people I see are likely to vote tory (yes I know how stupid that sounds, can’t judge by looks).
I live in the Preston Park ward in Brighton for the May 2007 elections.
A couple of days a go I had received anything from any party so went for a look on the net.
What do I consider when deciding my vote?
My choice is Labour: They have done a good job in the last few years (though no party has overall control, they have the majority). I like the fact that the council has been progressive, the sucess of the Jubilee library as one of the first PPP projects to produce such an impressive building can not be over rated. In fact the whole area around the library has been handled well and created a pleasant area of town.
Likewise, plans for the marina (several of them), the King Alfred centre redevelopment, the Brighton centre and the New England Quarter near the station have all shown they are capable of allowing developments that are impressive, well thought out and radical. By this I mean they think of public spaces, impressive buildings and affordable housing where as other councils seem to just sell of the land to the first bidder often leading to nasty looking buildings and car-centric spaces. These developments help to ensure that Brighton stays as one of the most popular places in the south of England and attract new business and people to help boost the local economy. I was also slightly proud that Brighton was the first to make radical changes to it’s school admisions policy. Love it or hate it (seems fair to me), I liked the fact we took the lead! Though I was not impressed by the dirty tatics Labour used to get it through.
People are often cynical of election material, as promises that are never met (the same is true with the Divid Cameron’s annoucements!), but i find it important as it sets the general direction that a party would head in.
The Conservatives have not put anything through my door or seem to have an up to date website (odd as Brighton is not a lost cause for them so why are they not bothering?). I can’t comment on their policies though I would worry about them giving in to NIMBYs when it came to ambitious plans, opting for safe (read boring) options for new developments and being impressed more by big cheques when deciding on new developments, rather than the right mix of social spaces and affordable housing.
The Greens are more impressive this time around compared to the last. They have some good ideas, they say that “We support the principle of liberalisation of licensing hours” in regard to later opening hours for pubs, but would inform local resisdents of new applications (presumably more so than the current requirements), this seems sensible.
They talk about animal rights, I’m pleased to see this sounds like sensible plans rather than extremist or uninformed, though they talk about animal experiements and the Universities, again, the talk is moderate, but could be a slippery slope to stronger action. My problem with the greens is that their ideas are often not pratical. One comment I read said they were against park and ride schemes (presumably because it still involves a car) perhaps forgetting that many people outside of Brighton do not live near a train station or bus stop.
Another example is the New England Quarter Development, this scheme is impressive, the Sainsburys is almost totally underground (including small car park) with flats built on top and lots of pedestrian space around it. But the Greens weren’t happy, a big nasty supermarket! Even though it is a trillion times better than the one it replaced (which I swear Sainsburys HQ forgot even existed), the old one being on a busy main road (London Road), small paths and – while at one point years a go was a major shopping road – is now basically full of pound shops, and other not very impressive odds and ends. The Greens had an issue with the supermaket moving a few hundred yards, in real live nothing can be done to save London Road and the old store was useless.
Finally theLib dems are okay but nothing special, and their plans on the website are more long term and natioon (replace the council tax) than others.
I know at the top I also said that I consider my actual candidates, which I wont mention here as I think this is long enough, annoyingly there is little on the websites and printed material to really draw any conclusions.
FIP is basically the world’s best radio station. Fact. It plays a random mix of decent new music, jazz, classical, more cool music, with no adverts, or DJs, or anything except a news bulletin at the totally logical time of 50 minutes past the hour.
Oh and the news bulletin is in French (language of inferior foreign types). But that maybe due to it being a French station. But we could pick it up in Brighton. We don’t want to get too technical about it but it had something to do with the sea being very flat between France and Brighton. or something.
It grew a large cult (is that possible?) status and I listened to it quite a bit for the 5 years I’ve been here.
Then one day i pressed the little button on my hifi to listen to its crazy little mix, and all I got was the sound of static. French technology huh, well what would you expect but unreliable broadcasting, they were probably on strike. probably blocking the ports as well.
But the static continued. I had no choice, I turned to my friend to find out what was going on.
I found other lost souls like here and here.
But most of all I found out FIP in Brighton wasn’t totally down to the sea being flat between here and there, and more to do with a nice chap broadcasting it from his flat for the last few years. Someone not nice (you know, Hitler, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, Diana, etc) told teacher, teacher shutdown the transmitter that made FIP come all the way across the big flat sea.
Now what are we meant to do, I’m just going to resort to CDs or listen to it online, or listen to radio 4. ahhh yes, nice radio 4. Can’t beat it. Oooh time for a nice cup of tea. (oh and some of those links back there describe it all far better than me and use the same oh-so-clever title)
Yesterday I posted a link to the reviews page of Katie Price and Peter Andre‘s A whole new world.
In what can only be proof that Jeff Bezos himself is reading my blog on a daily, no – i correct myself – hourly basis, not a day later all the reviews have been deleted. Of course, the arts have always suffered censorship at the hands of facist governments and evil corporations. It’s something we live with, but with just a touch of pride that such dark work was all down to my own little hands typing away on this here web-experience.
Where was I? ah yes, google cache. My darling google cache. I could only get a few. It seems the ‘show next page of reviews’ link on amazon’s site links to the same URL of the page you are on. So using ‘cache:[URL]’ didn’t work on the rest of the comment pages. But I still got a few. Weirdly, looking at different cache results I got different versions of the first page (3 of them actually).
For the time being, the reviews that Jeff deleted (of course it was him) are just cut n paste in to a WordPress page, will try and do more later.
Found both of these on Phil Bradley’s blog.
first is http://www.addtoany.com/ which can produce a button like this, which will link to a page with every kind of “add to [rss reader]” button you will ever need.
Secondly, badged.net allows you to “add your favourite social networking badges to your blog or web site”. I can’t seem to paste the code in to a post, wordpress seems to remove the {script} code (probably with good reason).
Will have to add these to my template at some point
List of countries by external debt – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (see also CIA World factbook). This is not good.
BBC NEWS | England | Branson in Gatwick Express call
This is just one article covering the plans to make changes to the Gatwick Express service, as part of a wider review of use of the line capacity between London and Brighton.
The basic idea is the line is at full capacity, the trains are full and over crowded, especially at peak time, and with no major boost of cash in the near future, the only way to ease over crowding is to try and make best use of the track capacity.
One of the services that uses this line is often only a quarter full (and certainly never seems crowded at all) even at peak times when all other trains are completly packed and no room to even stand. This is the Gatwick Express, 4 trains an hour (though I understand that as it runs non-stop between Gatwick and Victoria it actually requires greater space between it and the train before, which means less time to dish out to other routes).
BAA who run Gatwick have done everything they can to stop this, including “The Murder of the Gatwick Express” and “save the Gatwick Express“. Their message is “do you want a gatwick express or not?” – which is leading question, based with just that question there’s no reason to say ‘not’.
The important thing for Gatwick airport users (and hence BAA) is surely that they have a high frequency of quality trains with plenty of seats and bag storage running a quick service to London (and other major catchment areas).
The Gatwick Express is not the only way to do this. Trains in this area are generally new and well kept, most have baggage areas and – by freeing up slots on the lines by replacing the Gatwick Express – the service would be very frequent. Plus, most only stop at East Croydon and Clapham Juntion (and those that stop at one or two more places? well if they get to London before the next fast service then they are better than that ‘next fast service’!).
That point in the brackets there is quite important, they say one of the important things about the Gatwick Express is the fast service, but a service which you have to wait 15 minutes for will have no real advantage over a service you wait a few minutes for but takes a few minutes longer along the route.
Their other point is that airport users want a premium service (high price and better service). But this does not need better trains. This is called First class. If people going between London and Gatwick want a high quality service with lots of space for a little more cost, by a first class ticket.
Finally, there is one more problem I see. The whole Gatwick Express idea presumes that the everyone wants to go to Victoria. The truth is the catchment area is much of the south east, plus many other parts of London.
Which results in lots of air travellers using Thameslink services to London Bridge & Kings Cross, and other train services stopping at Eat Croydon and Clapham Junction (which is a major interchange).
All in all, I think BAA are misjudged by going out and out for keeping the Gatwick Express as it is today, and change could improve services to the coast but also lead to great improvements for people traveling to/from Gatwick both from Victoria and other destinations.
Rant over.
Tom Roper knows everything, reads clever stuff, seems to have an impressive range of music taste and gets technology. Generally the sort of the stuff that makes illiterate uncultured un-witty people like me really hate him. He also posts things to his blog. Which is all a bit too much like work for me (blogs are like breadmakers… like the idea of having one, but never actually use it).
Anyway. He posted some stats and bits about his blog over the last couple of years and I thought of commenting and pointing towards the bloglines ‘number of subscribers’ feature as another little gem. In the comment, my brain thought, I would also point out that my blog only has one subscriber as a comparison (and hence ‘accidentaly’ end up linking to my blog from his comments…fame would then by mine). Oh, and that 1 subscriber is me. But here’s the but. But when checking this it turns out I actually have 3 subscribers.
PEOPLE: this blog is crap. I don’t update it for years and when I do it’s just a link to a bit of flash and how to do some bloody simple SQL. Look, there are millions of blogs out there and all of them will be better than this. You can do better. Have confidence in your self. Be a man. (or a women… urm, you’re choice really… or rather it’s not, but it can be sort of… I’ll stop now).
Anyway if there are 3 (well 2 and me) people subscribed to this via bloglines, there must be others as well. So hello, sorry about the google ads i’ve just stuck here. I had them on a couple of webpages for a year or so and have made $8! (yes fame and riches!) so why I’m bothering I don’t know. Feel free to comment. And if i mark your comment as spam when I mark all the rest as spam, I’m sorry but do try again.
SQL is one of those things I rarely use, and it’s normally the simple stuff, but doing anything a little more complex can be non-obvious. For example, I had a bunch of URLs where I just need to update a part of the URL, as we were moving some files on a website. I eventually found what I wanted within the comments to the MySQL UPDATE command documentation. (credit to Alex de Landgraaf on July 21 2004):
UPDATE xoops_bb_posts_text
SET post_text=(
REPLACE (post_text,
‘morphix.sourceforge.net’,
‘www.morphix.org’));
UPDATE table
SET fieldname=(
REPLACE (fieldname,
‘/somedir/images/’,
‘/newhome/graphics/’));
Does the trick nicely on MySQL :)