tomment » politic

boris who?

tom — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:27:20 +0000

As an inhabitant of the Coldharbour ward, which really is a very small part of South East London (as we know a ward should contain 5,500 people), I was very pleased to learn that my ward came bottom of the list for votes for our new mayor. Coldharbour had the lowest proportion of votes for Boris of any London ward (just 12.3%).

Hoorah for my neighbours.

London sponsored Facebook poll

tom — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:39:54 +0000

Facebook just asked me to take part in a ‘London Sponsored Poll’. It looks like a cross between a public service poll, and an advert. I’m not sure what happens to the results, but it looked like this:

It’s not clear why Brian is at the top (unless the order is randomly generated), and the non-candidate options seem slightly weirdly placed. Is it an advert, and if so, who by?

Face the news

tom — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 23:15:54 +0000

Facebook seems to be in the news permanently. My two favourite stories of this week were:

Get a life and allow your staff to use Facebook, TUC tells bosses: where the TUC comments on the rights of employees to use Facebook
Facebook campaign forces HSBC U-turn: which talks about pressure (successfully) placed upon HSBC to revert modifications made to their service through a group on Facebook.
Finally, why not take a look at occurrences of Facebook in Hansard?

bikes on trains

tom — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 19:53:04 +0000

No time to blog properly, other than to say that this campaign is critically important, and should be of interest to anybody who uses or might use the combination of bicycle and train:

http://www.ctc.org.uk/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabID=4801

Good.

comes from a smoke-free home

tom — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 14:40:55 +0000

Last night I had my first taste of the smoking ban in public places which started in Scotland on Sunday. It was odd to actually be able to smell a pub, rather than the smoke contained within it. Waking up this morning and not stinking of smoke was also quite odd.

Summary: I think the new legislation removes some of the negative aspects of going out (for non-smokers).

beating the ban

tom — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 15:51:35 +0000

Thanks to bikebiz, I saw the best news article I’ve seen for a long time.

Following the Southern recently banning cyclists from their trains, a gentleman asked permission to take a cardboard bicycle on the train, which he was indeed allowed to.

It seems that you can take as much luggage as you like, and even a bicycle, just as long as it isn’t made of bicycle-type material.

salt

tom — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 13:30:12 +0000

is salt really worthy of a domain name?

www.salt.gov.uk

remix culture

tom — Sun, 01 May 2005 22:22:27 +0000

right on my doorstep:

REMIX CULTURE: Creative Commons and Creativity
Sponsored by the Department of Media and Film, University of Sussex.

this friday. magic.

celebrities fix everything

tom — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 12:55:23 +0000

the guardian reveals that jamie and his school dinners seem to have created something of a paradigm shift for food preparation outside schools. which is good.

maybe we need a celebrity to point out some interesting problems in the british political arena. speaking of which, my local green candidate has a blog. would you vote for someone who didn’t?

transportdirect dot NET

tom — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 10:31:31 +0000

Today the Observer ran a story about how Transport Direct gives rubbish advice.

A quick google search for Transport Direct turns up a case study at microsoft.com. I find titles like Fast Development, Lower Costs and Prepared for the Future.

Best quote:

We have been able to do it at a reasonable cost and in reasonable time frame.

I wonder how much of that £50 million went to Microsoft, and I wonder why they opted against open standards, instead preferring a proprietary, vendor lock-in approach.

Perhaps they’d have been better with an open-access, shared database. A transport wiki with more structure. Description of a Journey, anyone?

Did I mention, they also appear to have missed a lot of very important data. How about cycling?