Posts Tagged ‘Geek’
Sharing posts
Posted by: Gav in Gavin Ayling's blog on February 19th, 2009
I have added the 
Facebook, 
Stumble Upon, 
Delicious, 
Digg, 
email and 
Google Mail links you can see below. I am especially chuffed with the Gmail one which I had to work out for myself. Clicking the red gmail icon causes a new window to open with an email ready written with the post’s URL in the body!
I have also added a subscribe link to the right hand side of the page that adds this site’s feed directly to Google’s homepage or Google Reader (as you prefer). Thanks to Dave Taylor for that part.
The BBC’s Golden Age
Posted by: Gav in Gavin Ayling's blog on October 7th, 2008
It was not that long ago that the BBC appeared to be heading for trouble. For the first time since the BBC was created the renewal of its right to levy the license fee appeared to be under threat. With the Andrew Gilligan affair in 2003 the BBC appeared to have reached an all-time low. And even with the relatively recent issues surrounding fairness of phone-in competitions, the BBC is having a renaissance.
I recently checked my Virgin Media’s hard drive to see which channels I had recorded television from. There was one programme not from the BBC — and that was a football match on Setanta. The hard disk shines a light on the quality of the BBC’s programming at the moment and shows, actually, that its content is great while that of its competitors is apalling.
To be fair, my opinion is not enough to justify the tone of what I have said. But a completely unscientific straw-poll shows that the only non-BBC viewing of anyone I know has been of football — Sky Sports during the weekend and on Thursday last week for domestic and European football and Setanta Sports.
The BBC has excellent programmes including Eggheads, The Tudors, Only Connect, The Story of Mathematics, Bruce Parry’s Amazon, Harry and Paul, Mock the Week, Live at the Apollo, Heroes. And that’s to ignore the improving output of BBC Radio 4. This with BBC HD (the only HD channel on Virgin at the moment) and, most importantly, BBC iPlayer (which I am now smugly using on my Nokia N96) make the BBC a force to be reckoned with.
In 2003/2004 when the BBC was preparing for the renewal, things needed to change and many people questioned the value for money of the license fee. In fact, I carried a link on this blog to a campaign to remove the privileged position of the BBC. But it’s done good. It is now amazing value for money.
The reviews have worked and the BBC deserves praise. I still hate the bias of the BBC’s news and reporting, but the bias appears to be in favour of the party I support now, rather than in favour of the party I do not, so it’s difficult to summon quite so much concern… how terrible of me to think that!
One final thought for Robert Peston: Tonight’s BBC Four programme, The Greed Game was an excellent piece of work. It explained, clearly, how and why the credit crunch came about. It was, if you’ll excuse the gushing, the sort of programme that the BBC was made to make. Robert Peston’s name has become synonymous with the Credit Crunch as his excellent reporting has clarified the whole issue for the masses; this programme made sense of an extraordinarily complex subject. My only question is why, with his clearly great grasp of finance, he works as a relatively low-paid journalist!
Video games in Germany
Posted by: Gav in Uncategorized on August 24th, 2007
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.
Adur Telephones, SEERA and Policy and Strategy
Posted by: Gav in Gavin Ayling's blog on July 24th, 2007
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.
Windows Safari
Posted by: Gav in Uncategorized on June 11th, 2007
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
Vista on Amazon
Posted by: Gav in Gavin Ayling's blog on October 10th, 2006
Amazon now have UK prices for Windows Vista
Sadly there is no upgrade available there yet, so if you’re champing at the bit but already have Windows, hold on!
Not a roundup…
Posted by: Gav in Gavin Ayling's blog on October 1st, 2006
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.
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.
How Contact Lenses are made
Posted by: Gav in Gavin Ayling's blog on September 12th, 2006
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.
Del.icio.us links
Posted by: Gav in Gavin Ayling's blog on September 9th, 2006
I am reasonably new to del.icio.us… and quite amazing it is too.
Kudos, then, to John at the England Project for having ‘Add to del.icio.us’ links on his posts.
I have now done the same for you del.icio.us people!
For your information I am Adeling on del.icio.us as that is the Anglo Saxon version of my surname ‘Ayling’ and I felt like making it something interesting (relatively).
