bygjohn's blog

Yesterday was voting day for local elections across the UK. Where I live it's been the first election for representatives for a new unitary authority: Cheshire East. Yet it's the first time I've seriously considered not voting. In the end I did, though not without a sense of grievance you shouldn't be feeling in a democracy.

So what's the problem that led me, who has always felt I should vote after my forbears fought long and hard to get it for me, to come close to abandoning it?

• Nobody asked us if we wanted to have a unitary authority. The "official" call for opinions explicitly disallowed any option to retain the existing setup. Our local council organised a referendum, though of course it had no official weight behind it. 85% of people voted to keep the existing setup with improved co-ordination between the county and local councils. Ignored, of course, by the government...
  
• Of the two new options, they imposed the worst. Having one big unitary authority covering the whole of Cheshire would at least have left all the county services intact, but splitting it into two means that all the services, county and local, are now being restructured at great expense. Not to mention all the rebranding etc which is doubtless going to happen and cost a fortune. Of my money...
  
• Because we were electing a new authority, we were all given 3 votes. Except that I couldn't use then as here in my ward we had 3 Tories, 3 Labour, 1 LibDem and 1 UKIP candidate. I could never vote for the Tories after the Thatcher/Major years and the damage caused. I can no longer vote Labour because they are just Tories 2 now, no socialist policies left. UKIP are a reactionary joke, so out of the question. Which leaves me with one candidate (LibDem) I can vote for. So I couldn't use two of my three votes.
  

Talk about being disenfranchised.

I know, I know... it's a cliche that Apple kit just works and I'm beginning to sound like some mad fanboi, but I do like the way Apple stuff generally behaves itself and does stuff without needing a degree in nuclear physics.

After a couple of weeks with my MacBook I decided to bite the bullet and do something about a proper backup solution, to take advantage of MacOS Leopard's Time Machine backup software.

Obvious simple solution was an external USB hard drive, but the one I got (Seagate portable) turned out to use two USB ports to get enough power, which therefore takes up both available ports on the MacBook. So not something you want plugged in a lot of the time.

Eventual solution was to try out a Time Capsule - an Apple combined network drive and wireless router. Possibly overkill, but you can use it for file sharing across your network too, and it would speed up my wireless by providing 802.11n instead of the 802.11g of my current router (Belkin combined router/ADSL modem). I wanted to add the Apple unit into my existing setup as the Belkin has the modem and everything was happily working on it already. So yesterday I made another foray up to the Trafford Centre to the Apple Store and came away with a 1Tb Time Capsule, a bag for the MacBook and a wireless Mighty Mouse. Thank heaven for credit cards...

Anyway, reading the manual had me slightly worried as none of the examples matched what I wanted to do, though the text implied it was possible, as had an article I'd read online. I needn't have worried: after connecting the TC to the Belkin via Ethernet cable and powering up I launched the set-up utility and it worked like a dream. It's wizard-based, but unlike most Windows wizards which tend to tell you everything you don't need to know and nothing you do, this clearly explained the options at every stage, and by the end of a few minutes I had the TC bridging into my existing network via the cable and providing a 5GHz 802.11n extension network. So my EeePC, XP machine and printer server all connect to the g network with no changes and my Mac can take advantage of the faster n network and still talk to all the stuff on the g network, eg the printer. The TC can act as a print server too but I have it in the living room with the Belkin (where the phone line enters the house) and want the printer upstairs out of the way.

Time Machine was equally straightforward to set up - you just turn it on and tell it which disc to use. In the absence of a second Ethernet cable which would have speeded up the initial backup, I used the n connection and left it going overnight. It finished in almost exactly 10 hours, during which time it transferred 63.5Gb of data. So it's capable of transferring over 6Gb an hour over wireless.

Oh, and the mouse took seconds to pair with the laptop and similarly just works.

Happy happy joy joy! (OK showing my age...)

I've recently bought a load of vinyl-replacement CDs (as I'm at home anyway and here for delivery men, it seemed a good time to hit Amazon with an order). Which is fun anyway, rediscovering stuff you haven't played for a while (even though I have a turntable I rarely use it these days - mostly listen to the iPod, truth be told). But also this batch in particular has been a reminder of friends who first introduced me to various artists/records. In this case especially my friend Gaz, who I met at college, who introduced me to a whole range of music including Joy Division/New Order, other Factory acts such as the Durutti Column (well represented in this batch of CDs), Simple Minds (again, lots in this batch), The Cure (more in this batch!), plus whole genres eg P-Funk. So if you're reading this, hi, Gaz! And thanks: these records mean a lot to me and frankly are way better than most of what's around at the moment.

That said, there is some good stuff around at the moment. The new Nine Inch Nails album is great and worth $5 of anyone's money for the download version. And there's been some excellent stuff on Jools recently, such as The Imagined Village doing Cold Haily Rainy Night which was absolutely breathtaking, and the satisfying noise of the The Kills. Steve Earle's Satellite Radio was pretty good too, and I was mildly impressed with Vampire Weekend.

There are times when some people manage to be so daft it almost leaves you speechless.

Now is one of those times, and the person is the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Now I'm no great fan of the man, and I am writing from the position of an outsider looking in, being neither a christian or a member of the Church of England. I had (naively) some hopes about him when he was appointed, largely on the basis that the fundamentalists hated him so he coudn't be all bad. But then he failed to appoint a bishop on the basis that he was gay, then he sat on the fence in the teeth of appalling homophobic bigotry from a bunch of African bishops instead of supporting the US church. Now he suggests incorporating elements of sharia law into our legal system.

You wonder what he was on at the time...

And I'm left wondering how I ended up in the same camp as the fundies wanting his resignation. Erk...

Grumpy old man time, folks!

Was watching what should have been a fascinating documentary last night on Channel 4, about how we came disturbingly close to World War III in 1983. Totally ruined, however, by the idiot narrator who consistently and persistently demonstrated her complete inability to say the word nuclear, pronouncing it nucular.

Aaaaaarrrrggggghhh!!!!

It's bad enough when a halfwit US president does it, and I could have forgiven it if some of the interviewees did it, but what sort of production values are operating when no-one gives an illiterate narrator a slap, instead allowing the whole narration to be peppered by this idiocy?

Grrrrr!