I’ve always been impressed with the way Sweden and other nordic countries seem to balance a successful economy while providing very high public services and social care.

UpMyStreet.com‘s neighbourhood profiles are pretty good.

Here’s what they say about my area:
Neighbourhoods fitting this profile are found primarily in Inner London in Westminster, Camden, Islington, Haringey and Hackney as well as in Brighton, Bristol, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Here is an overview of the likely preferences and features of your neighbourhood:
Family income Very high
Interest in current affairs Very high
Housing – with mortgage Low
Educated – to degree Very high
Couples with children Very low
Have satellite TV Low

These young people live in urban areas in purpose built and converted flats. This group has the highest levels of people aged 25-29. They are very highly qualified, and are making their way up the career ladder in the professions and managerial roles. They earn high salaries.

40% of people live alone. There are also high numbers sharing larger properties. They are typically renting rather than buying, which reflects the more transient nature of these communities.

They are hard working and as a result make optimum use of their leisure time. They are twice as likely to use services such as ordering their groceries online for home delivery, and the Internet for shopping.

These people are keen readers and have wide interests which include art, music, the theatre and cinema. They also eat out regularly in restaurants and pubs. They really like to travel abroad and will take the full range of holidays including winter sun and snow, weekend breaks and long haul trips.

Given their high incomes, they do invest some of their money in a broad range of investments. They are keen users of credit cards for their purchases, with high monthly spend and correspondingly high credit limits.

This type more closely follows current affairs than any other. Like other urban groups, they will buy a daily paper to read on the way to work and will choose from the Financial Times, The Guardian and Independent. On Sundays they choose the Observer and The Sunday Times.

This pretty much describes me exactly, well exactly some of it is more what I would like to be than currently am (ie, keen reader, arts, full use of leisure time, high salary).

So, a couple of years a go we had a teacher shortage crisis, today we are still short of teachers, recruiting from all over the world to fill the shortage. With such a high demand, those who do not really have the right skills (even if they have the qualifications) to teach, inspire and control a class are finding jobs. Oh and add to that a large number of teachers are soon to retire. You are the government, what do you do? reduce the number of teacher training places of course. Obvious. That’s why mere mortals like us will never be able to come up with such great ideas.

Google Reader. Summary: nice way of reading your favorite blogs and news sites. Keyboard short cuts are great.

The less good bits: no way to mark all posts as read, usefuil if haven’t read for a couple of days. Also very slow to add a number of feeds at once. Add each feed takes five or so clicks, and you end up back at your Google Reader homepage, and so have to repeat process all over again.

Finally, there seems to be a whole load of stories that are never marked as read for me, and currently constantly sitting at the top of my ‘to be read list’. annoying.

Time to take stock on how much I rely on my google drip of goodness and tools. What happens if they take it away from me. Cold turkey like. I would die dear reader. die.

Any way, So for work I use Google Scholar, and I’ve set ‘Google University search as our University departmental website search engine. Then there’s my gmail account (which I can not mention without slipping in that I was one of the first to get one, and was invited by Google themselves, yes, I’m on first names terms with Larry and Sergey… um sort of) and my ‘google groups’ account for newsgroups.

I read the news with Google news, and have various news alerts coming to me each week (which are real useful). I’ve installed Google Desktop, and Firefox of course uses Google search by default.

I love Google maps, so much quicker than multimap.com. I contantly use the various tools and extras and often check google labs. I’ve signed up for Google adsense (adverts on my website), and almost made a whole dollar. And lets not forget my old blogger.com account plus Picasa and Google Earth software.

Now there’s Google Reader, a Feedster alike RSS reader. It can import RSS subscription list from other sources. What would have the best list to import? Of couse that would be Google Desktop at work, which displays emails, news feeds and loads of other stuff down the side of my desktop. It adds RSS fields to it’s list of news sources as I browse. So I’m importing from one Google app to another.

They have my email, files, RSS feeds, newgroups I read and know who clicks on my adverts, If Google ever turn evil then I’m fucked.

Added this feed of dribble (hereafter called ‘my blog’) to technorati, bloogz and Feedster… which is nice (why do you read this thing?)

“Where Dinosaurs and the Bible meet!“

Apparently we (‘we’ being the mightly and superior south of england, not to be confused with north of england backward types) have a regional assembly. When? why?

Actually I’m slightly interested in this idea. I believe that the English Counties are too small to have much power/responsibilities delegated to them from central govenment, and yet there are issues which are best addressed at a fairly local level (especially on issues where different parts of the country have different needs). Maybe these regional assemeblies are the answer, big enough to run complex public services but local enough to address different needs?

While I’m on this subject (which is a stupid thing to say as anyone reading this – ‘anyone’ = ‘me and only me’ – will be reading top down, ie newest first, ie will be unaware I was on the subject… what subject) ah yes, the subject of library catalogue searching.

Nothing too exciting really (this post has the word ‘library’ it in, so that was a pointless fact) but I’ve been reading with intrest how Talis – who supply the library management software for the Universit of Sussex – have been playing with A9, and how to get it to play nice with their web catalogue.

Basically A9 uses a technology called opensearch, which allows you to place a xml file based on this on your web server. This allows your catalogue (or search engine) to be searched via a9.

To try this out, do a search on a9.com, once on the results, click on ‘See more columns’, type ‘talis’ in to the search columns box, and then select add.

We’ll see if it is possible to add the University of Sussex to this search.

Another nice little thing is a utility called librarybooks for Apple’s OS X. It provides an item on the menu bar showing how many books you have on loan from your local library, opening this as a menu shows you what books you have out, and when they are due back. Again, Talis seem to be ahead of the game with this.

Final thing to mention: whichbook.net, might just point you towards your next read.

a million years a go (1999?) M25 came along with a union search for most academic libraries in my part of the world. which was good, especially when looking for something obscure.

At the time, I thought it was only a mater of counting to ten before a union catalogue of all uk libraries would turn up. Where is it? I want one.

In the mean time we have a number of other options which can help for looking for odd stuff that only one or two places might have.

First there’s redlightgreen.com, though once you have found the book you are looking for, you can only select one library to see if it has the book (typing in a post code and seeing what’s near by would be far more useful).

There’s worldcat from OCLC. I’m sure there must be a good reason but I can’t find a normal search screen for this, you seem to be required to install a plugin, which itself uses google or yahoo, to sarch it. But once on the site a search box appears at the top. I’ve linked to a record for a random book which has the search box at the top.