Back at the beginning of 2014 I started another year of taking one photo a day. It’s something I had done previously (from March 2009 to March 2010), and decided to do again for a full calendar year. I managed 348 photos meaning that for 17 days I failed to take a photo. The full collection can be seen on the daily photo page, but the following are 15 of my favourites from right through the year. [read more]
I posted in November about a letter which I helped Monica write to our local MEPs (and a variation sent to some of the European Commissioners), and updated it a little while later expressing my disappointment that none of those we’d written to had got back to us. I also posted about my disappointment on Twitter, which got a bit more of a response from a couple of our elected representatives. (Interestingly a question I directed at my brother, who works in the office of Richard Corbett, the Deputy Leader of the Labour MEPs, about MEPs response times got a reply from the Labour MEP rather than my initial post. You can draw your own conclusions from that.)
Since then we’ve received two email responses from MEPs, and two letters from European Commissioners. The first email came from Anneliese Dodds on the 3rd December: [read more]
I wrote back in August about a consultation put out by Rushmoor Borough Council regarding a £4.5 million pound regenration scheme of the Aldershot town centre. The response I posted on my blog was the response I gave to the council in feedback. I was apparently one of 280 people to provide feedback on the scheme, and last Monday I recieved an email from the council regarding the consultation.
The majority of you were very positive about the plans and you also took the time to share your own ideas to regenerate the town, which included everything from encouraging new shops to Aldershot, supporting businesses, tidying up shop fronts and building on the town’s Victorian heritage.
Following Victor Ponta’s defeat to the (presumably soon to be ex-)mayor of Sibiu in Sunday’s second-round runoff presidential election in Romania, questions are bound to be asked regarding his political future.
Ponta has been the country’s Prime Minister since 2012 and has had a somewhat frosty relationship with the outgoing President Traian Băsescu. This conflict often lead to delays and political manoeuvrings playing a large part in new legislation being passed into law. Ponta and his PSD party had hoped that, by winning the presidency as well as holding a majority in government, they could ease this process. It was argued that this would lead to stronger government able to pass the tough legislation required to strengthen the economy (and appease, among others, the IMF).
Ponta has stated he has no reason stand down as Prime Minister, and it is not until 2016 that the country will go to the polls to elect a new government. So what pressures will Ponta be facing right now?
We got a note through the door a couple of days ago about a UCA student film due to be made in the car park which my desk overlooks. It’s not the first time the car park has been used for student filming — a couple of months ago a scene was filmed at night involving a car — but it is the first time we’ve been told in advance. I guess it might be as a result of the use of an imitation firearm. (Incidentally, I doubt that the story involves an imitation firearm as stated in the note. Rather I suspect that the story involves a real firearm for which they are using an imitation one.) So far I have spotted the British policeman, but not the firearm.
In the wake of the mess of last Sunday’s first round in the Romanian Presidential, I helped Monica to write a letter to our local MEPs asking for their help to ensure that the second round, due to take place on the 16th of November, is carried out in as fair and transparent way as is possible. A slight variation of this was also sent to a few relevant members of the European Commission.
Update Not a single non-automated “please make sure you include your home address” response was received between sending the emails and the 2nd round elections last Sunday (16th November). Not even to say “sorry I can’t help.” This is a very disappointing response from across the political spectrum. I appreciate that MEPs have large areas with lots of constituents, but if they don’t have the staff time to even acknowledge communication from the people who voted for them I would suggest that they really need to look at the organisation of their offices. I may well pursue this, at least with my own party. If I do I’ll certainly keep this blog updated.
Inspired by Bucharest Life’s post about the lack of campaign posters for all but two of the Romanian Presidential candidates, and with an hour to spare around Crângași in Bucharest’s Sector 6 last Friday, I decided to play a little game of Presidential poster bingo. I managed to collect 7 out of a possible 14, and a few funny looks along the way (especially while taking the Ponta photo). Some (Macovei) were harder to spot than others (Tariceanu). [read more]
I have just pushed version 0.8.4 of the Syndicate Out plugin for WordPress to the plugin repository. This version is the same as the v0.8.4 release available on GitHub for about a week. As always, I look forward to feedback and suggestions on this release.
0.8.4 brings with it a couple of major improvements. The biggest bugfix is in scheduled posts: before this release scheduled posts were synced, but with the current date meaning that on the receiving blog they were published immediately rather than on the specified date. There is also a user interface improvement for the settings page. By using WordPress’ build in tabs, the syndication groups are better separated meaning they should be easier to manage for sites with large syndication networks. This also opens the door to other more detailed settings being introduced without causing the settings page to become a mess. Finally, the plugin now has a number of hooks and filters to allow other plugins to work with it. Those are documented further down in this post. [read more]
The 20th and 21st of September was the weekend of the Open House London event for 2014. I had been to a previous Open House event with some friends and enjoyed it, even though we’d only managed to see one property, so I thought it was about time I went back and did it again. This time I went with Monica and we planned the day a little better. We had a few different places on the list of buildings we wanted to see, most of them around Westminster. We only managed to get to three in the end but I was pleased with the selection, and there’s always next year. The full set of photographs can be seen here.
The first building was the Royal Courts of Justice. It is a large Victorian Gothic style building built in the late 1800s on the Strand. Once through security you find yourself at the front of the 238 feet long Main Hall. [read more]
For the last few years, on and off, I have been researching my family history. It started just after my grandmother died when we found a letter from my mother’s cousin asking her if she could fill in any gaps in the research he had been doing. Enclosed was a print-out of the research he had completed up to that point. That was a great starting point, although I was later to discover that there were a number of errors in his work. So I set off doing research of my own with the help of my parents, my grandparent’s belongings, a whole load of historical records, lots of logic and a good dollop of head scratching. [read more]