Cllr. Gavin Ayling

This is genuinely a question to my readers, not some deeper philosophical rhetorical question:

Why does Germany buy fewer games per head than the UK or France:

[Germany] is the third-biggest market for video games in Europe, behind the UK and France, with PC titles dominating the market.

This from a story about the PS3’s new PVR capabilities: BBC News

It would seem to me that Germany’s cultural similarities concerning alcohol and free time would make the number of games bought there similar to in Britain… But obviously not.

First, a warning. Adur Council’s telephones stopped working at 4pm this evening. While this is rectified, it is my duty to give you the out of hours Duty Supervisor’s number: 07713 889 128.

Last night’s meeting

Second, at last night’s meeting some more things were said that I didn’t really cover in my post because I was a bit of a hurry. As I’ve said many times recently, one of the items under discussion was key to a merger of services with Worthing and the accompanying savings in salaries which we must find because of the Labour Government’s swingeing cuts to grants and increases in demands on local Councils.

Members of the public are so infrequently in attendance that it is necessary to mention them when they are. Last night former-Councillor Peter Berry was in attendance. He had some questions to ask about the merger and, I quote, said that the Councils were “creating a staff surplus by reorganising the workload”. This, apparently, was supposed to be a negative criticism of the Councils plans whereas, in fact, it was a ringing endorsement of our policy. As a service organisation (as all Councils are) salaries and staff costs are the vast majority of our funding need. So to create staff surpluses is to create savings. To say that we are doing that by reorganising the workload is to say that we are creating efficiencies.

Many people criticise the NHS and other government bodies for ‘having too many chiefs and not enough Indians’; how wonderful then, that I can report that our Council is doing exactly what that adage criticises: reducing the number of managers by sharing managers between the two authorities! It’s really gratifying and a genuine good news story.

SEERA

In my last post I criticised the now dying SEERA for claiming that SEEDA was an unelected quango and I celebrated our Prime Minister’s decision to erase Regional Assemblies.

But I was, not unusually, being naively optimistic. SEERA is, for its faults, at least partially democratic in that some of its membership is Councillors from across the Region. SEERA, because of that, was becoming a thorn in the side of the central government and was likely to refuse to accept the house-building proposals that Gordon Brown recently announced. This would have been [in a fake posh voice] damned inconvenient, what! So in an act of sheer arrogance he decided to give it to the South East England Development Agency instead and close the troublesome assembly which was more and more likely to try to embarass him.

Far from being a positive step for democracy in England it is yet another attack on the democratic will of the people in this area who overwhelmingly do not support the ruling party. As the Tories came to regret using Scotland as a test bed, Labour will hopefully regret pushing the English — and especially those of us in the south — around.

Tonight’s Policy and Strategy Committee…

… was great, what more need be said? Well, actually, it would be nice to have some members of the public at the next one!

If you don’t like your Council tax rises, if you wonder how that hair-brained plan came to fruition, if you watch Newsnight or Question Time (or both!), if you enjoy debate or if you care about your local community then come along. It is really entertaining (normally) and it gives a real insight into how and why decisions are made.

I’m not over-selling it. Really.

No, really.

I’m now trying Safari (Apple’s browser) on my Vista PC and I have to say it’s surprisingly quick!

Here’s the link if you want to try it too: Apple Safari

Anyone who has known me for a long time will know that for all my criticism of the modern, socialist green movement, I have always been one who cares deeply about the environment. Before it was cool I used to chide friends who didn’t visit the recycling point (before doorstep collections) and I have always been amazed that you get free stuff by composting.

So, despite my criticism of the modern, socialist green movement, I bought an Electrisave recently and have enjoyed (perhaps too much) seeing what impact each device has on power consumption.

At the rate of 8.192 pence per kWh (kilowatt hour) a 100W lightbulb uses 0.6 pence per hour. A 20″ LCD TV and two 19″ LCD computer monitors don’t register any cost at all. A kettle uses a comparitively amazing amount (around 20 pence per hour) and an electric shower uses 38 pence per hour.

My PC (which is reasonably specced) uses a little less than a lightbulb and when it is on standby makes no impact on the meter at all. Fascinatingly, though, a 20″ CRT computer monitor registers a little less than a lightbulb on its own. And a 25″ CRT TV uses a little more than a lightbulb.

The most expensive things are kettles, electric showers and vacuum cleaners. But the most surprising thing of all was my Xbox 360. While that is running it costs between 1.8 pence and 2 pence per hour. When two PCs, an LCD TV, two LCD monitors, one CRT monitor, the fridge and double-height freezer, two cordless telephone base stations and two cordless telephone charger points as well as all the household’s standby lights and LCD clocks were running, the Xbox 360 doubled the amount of power being used!

So if you have an Xbox 360, and you care about your bills or wasting fossil fuels (or even CO₂ emissions if you’re an extremist) turn off your Xbox 360 when you’re not using it.

Oh, and in case you’re interested, a Wii doesn’t register even 1/10 of a penny while it is running.

The Electrisave is a sinch to install and works beautifully, I’d strongly recommend them to anyone who asked.

Amazon now have UK prices for Windows Vista. You can pre-order it too.

Sadly there is no upgrade available there yet, so if you’re champing at the bit but already have Windows, hold on!

James Higham’s got an interesting new take on the blog roundup (he couldn’t, afterall, compete with Tim Worstall’s Britblog round up).

You can read it on James’ Nourishing Obscurity blog, although whether I should have linked to it depends on your viewpoint (see the bit about Oliver Kamm).

I’d add that the internet (and society generally) is changing so fast that ‘normal’ people have no hope of keeping up. So if you already knew about Webcameron or knew that Google had paid £900 million to provide the search function on MySpace then you can consider yourself not-normal.

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On Webcameron, I wanted to make this a separate post but it seems pointless now that I’ve mentioned it. I just wanted to observe that, while it may make some people physically sick and while it does seem a little too pink, the whole idea of allowing slightly less polished presentations to be made (no matter whether they’re staged or not) is an interesting path for politicians to take.

I’m going to avoid the obvious reality TV references but I think this really will make people start to question whether politicians are different because they’re different, or whether being a politician makes all observations of you appear as though through a prism. If Cameron can come out of this looking like a normal person who has to do that politician bit, then its been a success.

I’m not sure that this is legal so usual heartfelt caveats apply:

An interesting video on how contact lenses are made can be found here.