“My participation does not in any way indicate support for the harsh and oppressive manner in which the Chinese regime continues to treat the people of Tibet.”

Sorry Konnie but it does. As does being involved with a showpiece during which the Olympic torch will be “guarded” by Chinese students :

Pro-Chinese students to guard torch | World news | The Observer

Chinese students in the UK are being mobilised to form an unofficial guard for the Olympic torch when it passes through the UK next weekend, raising the fear of clashes with protesting Tibetan activists calling for independence.

As does running with the Chinese Envoy :

Chinese envoy hit by London Olympic torch row - Times Online

The Chinese ambassador to Britain has been invited to run through London with the Olympic torch, sparking outrage from critics who regard the move as politicising a sporting event.

Fu Ying, the ambassador, is set to line up alongside stars such as Dame Kelly Holmes and Sir Trevor McDonald for next Sunday’s Olympic torch relay through the capital.

Shameful.

1,438,800 have signed the petition - show your support for the people of Tibet and sign the petition today.

Posted by Mark at 8:03 PM | Permalink

Posted by Mark at 10:24 PM | Permalink

Tonight I have been sitting here typing the sort of words you wouldn’t use in front of your mother into Google.

Porn, you see, is everywhere, even if you are looking for a show from the BBC’s childrens channel CBBC.

With Martin now on broadband the inevitable has happened with the most innocent of searches. A few jobs back this wouldn’t have happened thanks to the content filtering we used from Websense which monitored every attempt to view a webpage and blocked the more inappropriate ones.

I’ve been looking for something equivalent for the home user for a while and have settled on K9 Webprotect from Bluecoat.

There are ways around it but not the sort I hope a nine year old knows of (well not yet) and it offers content filtering and reporting so you can see where your kids are surfing.

Best of all the product is free and allows you to over ride the settings to authorise individual sites like this one which for some reason isn’t categorised.

Posted by Mark at 10:15 PM | Permalink

It’s not the size and scale of the Titanic which leave their mark on your memory - it’s the human details and the tragedy.

Sig. Gaspare Antonino Pietro Gatti was in charge of ovens that stretched for over thirty feet. He brought with him to the Titanic the staff from Oddenino’s Restaurant in London which he used to run. The Ritz Restaurant was situated on B deck and was for the exclusive use of First Class passengers only and was so expensive that booking a table for the whole voyage ensured a reduction in the price of your ticket. Gatti and his staff were not employed by White Star Lines so when the ship was evacuated they were of little consequence. Of all the Roast Cooks, Assistant Roast Cooks, Pastry Cooks, Fish Cooks, Soup Cook, Icemen, Entree Cook, Wine Butler, Waiters, Barman, Glassman, Carver, Maitre D’, Platemen and Page boys only three members of staff survived.

For the family of Captain Edward Smith the tragedy stretched on long after the loss of their husband and father that night. His wife died after being knocked down by a taxi outside her London home on April 28th, 1931. Their daughter Helen Melville Smith later married a stockbroker and had twin sons, one of whom died of polio and the other was killed in the war. Her husband Mr. Russell-Cooke shot himself in the 1950s.

The sad stories go on and on, like the scale of the ship immense and humbling.

The Southampton Maritime Museum takes just a few of these stories and explains them in their Titanic Museum and (on a drier and less windy day then today) you can wander around the city on the Titanic Trail.

Posted by Mark at 10:09 PM | Permalink

What with Twitter and Friendfeed does the blogsphere matter any more ?

More and more aggregation sites are building the ability to centralise and publish information from all of your lifestreaming applications using RSS so what is the point now in the blogsphere ?

Is everyone using Twitter to microblog ? Just how do you centralise and track all those Facebook status updates ?

At the moment I’m trying Friendfeed but hopefully with the launch of their API I can take all the feeds that I create (my blog, Flickr, Google Reader, last.fm etc), aggregate them and publish them back onto my own blog.

It’s either going to end up with me writing some PHP or upgrading Movable Type to release 4 and using this plugin.

Upgrades ahead !

Posted by Mark at 7:35 PM | Permalink

Remember how proud Mrs Thatcher was about BA ? How she draped her hankie over the tail of the plane displaying what was known as the ethnic liveries ?

We were sad and proud the last time Concord flew. People came from near and far and admired just how good our national airline was. Supersonic flights, the only people to ever do that commercially.

After 15 years planning and execution and at a cost of £4.3 billion BA’s Sir Nigel Rudd boasted, “It is by any standard a triumph of ambition, commitment and collaboration. It will breathe new life into Heathrow and put it back where it really belongs - at the leading edge of global travel.”

What happened today was described as teething troubles, but for anyone who has traveled BA recently chaos, indifference and complacency are the everyday values that Forster’s fine design cannot paper over.

I used to travel through Heathrow quite frequently. The staff were demoralised and didn’t care about the customers. After the first few long waits for baggage and the explanation by the BA staff (“See all those people waiting at those three belts. All there baggage is being unloaded from those three planes by four people, of course it will take a long time”) I flew only with cabin baggage. I walked past the piles of baggage and tried to get information on planes - it was actually easier to call someone in Sweden who worked for SAS and get the updates from her.

The last time I was at Heathrow there were piles of bags hidden under the stairs. The problem isn’t the building and it’s not the vision of the managers. The problem is the complacency that exists in the fact that the company is BA and how can we fail not to love it. The needs of the short term shareholders return mean that Willie Walsh has cut costs to the bone. Behind those problems is the sparse manning, arrogance and financial position of BAA in operating the airports. BAA is now owned by the Spanish company Ferrovial which has total debts of £22.6bn, that’s more than £1bn a year just in interest payments.

With 2012 around the corner our airports will come under even more strain. Let’s hope that this complacent view of life and business changes soon.

Posted by Mark at 10:21 PM | Permalink

Remember a few years ago when we discovered Mixed Tape ?

Now we have Muxtape a neat way to upload some MP3s and roll your own mixtape that others can share and download.

After all the problems with copyright material on the Net I can’t imagine it lasting forever so make sure you go visit it soon.

Posted by Mark at 10:11 PM | Permalink

Years ago it was my old Sharp radio and a copy of “International Radio Stations Guide”, by P. Shore.

After that it was my Sony Worldband receiver and the occasional summer night sitting out listening to some distant radio station, DXing as it’s known to radio hams.

I had big hopes for DAB radio and loved the fact that the cricket was now crackle free but, latterly, it seems to be dying a death.

So today I bought a Freecom Internet Radio. Someone asked me why I didn’t just use a PC to listen to all these stations. The practical answers are that sometimes I just don’t have enough CPU cycles when I’m playing around in Photoshop; that it takes more power to run a PC and speakers than this radio; that in the summer I want to be able to sit outside without moving a laptop and cables; that there is too much temptation with a PC on to read blogs and surf the web.

The real reason is I still get a kick from turning a dial, discovering new stations and listening to voices from the other side of the world.

Posted by Mark at 10:49 PM | Permalink

Even in the centre of London today it was cold.

Standing frozen on a street corner we wondered where to go to keep warm and escape the sleet and cutting north wind.

Welcome to spring !

Posted by Mark at 10:29 PM | Permalink

“So, have you any experience of working with computers ?”

The faltering answer is a no but in his eyes there is a desire.

I pickup my beer and wonder if in today’s world of MCSE, ITIL, SOA and outsourcing if there really is a chance for someone who wants to learn.

That’s how I started in the 80’s. A sudden career change and a job where all I did was pick up the phone and type things into a VDU during the day and nag people to show me how to program in the evenings.

In those days, in a small, hungry firm there wasn’t any problem getting a MUMPS partition setup on a system and being allowed to play in my own time.

Today that resource would have a cost associated with it which someone in a company would need to pick up. Today the competition is from people who are graduates or who have been through numerous boot camps to cram the essentials of the technology into their brains.

But it worked for me and, just perhaps, it could work for him.

Posted by Mark at 10:02 PM | Permalink

“As you have the nicest one and the biggest you get to sit at the very front, in the corner”, said the woman leaning over me looking into my lap. I could hear the ghost of Sid James laughing in my ear.

K and I had wondered if we should turn up at all. The second wedding of one of K’s friends was supposed to be a low key affair and the space for friends to attend had been limited to standing room only at the back. Driving through the sleet we both thought about just turning around. I had only met the bride once and K only knew a handful of the people invited but, in the end, we decided to push on.

The wedding was in a red brick Elizabethan mansion built by Thomas Dolman, a member of an old Yorkshire family, who had settled in the area as a clothier and, having made a fortune, retired to live as a country gentleman. Clearly this wasn’t a popular move with the townsfolk who said of it :

Lord have mercy upon us, miserable sinners,
Thomas Dolman has built a new house
And has turned away all his spinners.

I’d wondered about bringing a camera with me, and if I did just which one to use. In the end I settled for the Nikon and the external flashgun, as much as I dislike using it. My plan had been to take a few informal pictures and perhaps get one framed to give as a wedding present. The bride and groom had other ideas and that’s how the Registrar came to be telling me, as the formal photographer, where to stand for the best shots.

“During the service no one can take ANY pictures apart from him”, she said pointing at me. All eyes turn my way and people start to mutter, “Just who is he ?”. I stand there and wonder just how I had been voted to be the official recorder of the day.

I take a few frames then notice the Health and Safety notice on the far wall between the bride and groom which will be in very shot. There’s nothing for it. I take a step to the left to hide it behind the groom’s head and decide it’s best to worry later if I’m standing on the four year old boy at my side.

The service is a blur. I try to take all the stock shots the professional photographer would have taken and pray the batteries in the flash will last as the spares are the other side of the room.

At the end of the service they both thank me for doing it and everyone goes to the reception. Apart that is from K and me who weren’t invited.

We head swiftly to the pub on top of the downs to watch the snow, drink a very well needed pint of beer and wonder if that really did just happen.

Posted by Mark at 9:36 AM | Permalink

Perhaps it’s the very early Easter this year. Or the fact that Good Friday is also the Equinox, which will be followed by a full moon, closely followed by Easter Sunday. Or the fact that March 22nd is the least likely date for Easter to fall on.

Whatever it is I have been out to buy a suit…

Posted by Mark at 8:58 PM | Permalink

Imagine if the next time you went shopping someone followed you around and made a note of everything you looked at or picked up. Then, using that information about you other shop keepers were told to wander up and sell their wares just on the basis of something you’d looked at a moment ago.

If you use BT, Virgin Media or Carphone Warehouse as an ISP that will be happening soon to you. For ages now ISPs have looked on enviously as the likes of Google made revenue from advertising on the web. Now with the formation of a company called Phorm ISPs will have a chance to get some of that revenue.

These ISPs have agreed to give Phorm access to their customers’ surfing records, letting it track their every move. Using this information an advertisement can be sent directly to the marketer’s target audience, anywhere on the Web, rather than hoping an Internet user lands on a site displaying that ad.

Phorm used to be known as 121 Media Inc, a company with a murky past in adware and spyware. Now reborn it’s facing several searching questions about it’s new business and the financial stability of it. It’s rumoured to have paid BT T £85 million for the ability to install it’s servers deep within the BT network where they will capture BT customers clickstreams.

As Political Penguin notes :

Political Penguin

I’m sure you can understand people’s concerns that a company which on paper only appears to have a virtual and or shared office space in London and an address in Delaware in the US that has previously been identified as a base of operations or indeed simply a forwarding mail service for e-mail spam/scams so I’d like to ask a few questions regarding these two registered addresses.

What about URLs with bank details contained in them ? Who sees those ? What happens to the ability to opt out of the system, does the ISP scan your PC for the opt-out cookie every time you browse ?

Do you really want that ?

Posted by Mark at 10:14 PM | Permalink

This is a rather amazing and somewhat worrying film showing what happened to someone videoing Oxford Street in London.

Aside from all the arguments around just how good or useful Community Wardens are there is a deeper issue here around the rights of people to use cameras in public places…

Posted by Mark at 10:59 PM | Permalink

Sometimes I can sit here for hours and wrack my brain for something, anything to write about. Other times it’s hard to pick out what to share with you from all the things I want to say.

Whichever sort of day it is I can freely decide and the only censorship I’m subject to is the self-censorship I choose to apply to myself.

I’m really lucky to be able to do that, free to blog. Hu Jia isn’t that lucky and today faces trial for blogging critically about the Chinese government. For doing what I’m doing now he could face five years in jail.

Bloggers are an odd lot. Some write openly about their lives and share their every thought, some just want to tell the world about their favourite puddle.

Whatever they do I like to think today we are thankful we can do it freely and spare a thought for Hu Jia and his wife Zeng Jinyan today.

There is a series of documentaries about them on YouTube, a report on the trial from The Guardian and the view from Human Rights Watch.

Posted by Mark at 9:43 PM | Permalink

I was wrong about St Patrick’s Day, it hadn’t moved this year.

In the crush of people at the bar in the Irish Club Martin and I raised a glass of Guinness to our fathers and watched the old folks dancing to the band.

Some people had shamrock, only a few had novelty hats - this was the real celebration of Ireland and being Irish.

Later at the pub next door we met James for glass or two more, to watch the football and plan a summer of cricket.

Sláinte !

Posted by Mark at 11:29 PM | Permalink

I still miss The New Piccadilly.

The wet streets of London at 10:00 in the morning can be a very unfriendly place for a hungry man in need of a cup of tea and a fry up. There are loads of places offering panini from a chain of coffee shops but that’s not what I want. I want a cafe that’s unique and offers something other than a plastic wrapped euro-breakfast.

Looking at the hoardings that scar the front of the old cafe I’m not the only one to feel this way. There are messages left by people who haven’t heard it’s closed and who came in the hope of a meal; by those who met their partner across the formica and by those who just want to say what an injustice it was that it was allowed to die and there, written in biro, is a message from Lorenzo.

At least at Ray’s Jazz Cafe there’s a welcoming smile, a decent coffee and some nice music to listen to while I watch the buses slosh up and down Charing Cross Road. London on a Sunday morning is a place full of unexpected sights. All of a sudden shops you have never noticed and views you never see suddenly appear from behind the crowds of people. In Soho Square the congregation of the Church are standing in the porch holding palm fronds before the service and the sounds of the choir spills out into the street.

The early Easter this year has meant that, at least in the eyes of the Church, St Patrick’s day has been omitted from the liturgical calendar and the confusion about when the day actually is along with the bad weather seems to have put a dampener on the parade in London. People mill around in small groups wearing Guinness hats and Irish flags but something just doesn’t seem right. Perhaps people just need some sun on their backs….

May your blessings outnumber
The shamrocks that grow,
And may trouble avoid you
Wherever you go

Posted by Mark at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A long way from the streets of Lhasa, where monks have been arrested, and the protests in Amdo province China is taking steps to stopping what they fear most.

Over at ExplorersWeb climber’s have been aware of the possibility that Mount Everest will be closed.

Everest - Mount Everest by climbers, news

This morning, China announced it is restricting world mountaineers from climbing Everest and Cho Oyu. Only Chinese climbers will be allowed, carrying the Olympic torch to the summit in a supposed celebration of sportsmanship and Olympic ideals.

But why take this drastic action ? The simple answer is that China plans to take the Olympic torch to the top of the mountain. Their nightmare scenario would be a picture of the flame at the summit with the Tibetan flag visible in the picture.

Last April protesters were arrested while China tested the feasibility of taking the flame there.

So why is this important ?

Everest - Mount Everest by climbers, news

While the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is small change compared to China’s genocide in Tibet, China seems too hot of a potato for most western mainstream journalists today. Editorial rules are already in place in many cases for how the event will be handled. Of course China knows this, allowing them the impudence to simply close Everest if they want to.

The world should take note though. History teaches us what happened after the 1936 Olympics in Berlin; and it also gave Tommie Smith and John Carlos right. We should take warning while China still is more dependant on us than we are on them.

To gain stability, the country and its people need Democracy. The change could well come from within, but not if the Chinese and Tibetan population are led to believe that the world agrees with their dictators.

Reporters need to write what matters and the world should remember that the country is not holding a few short range dirty bombs. The world’s largest population; China is held hostage by a band of volatile autocrats who have their hands on intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Signs are often early, but they are always there. What happens on Everest can happen anywhere.

Posted by Mark at 7:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I’ve always been squeamish.

I’m sure that’s why my Mother used to buy me The Teddy Bear Comic when I was young. In it were the stories of a brother and sister who used to play doctors and nurses (this was a long time ago in an age of innocence).

Every week they sorted some adult’s malaise. This normally involved Doctor David doing the serious stuff while Nurse Susan arranged the daffodils in the “ward”.

Being an enthusiastic reader even back then my Mum took this as an early sign of a medical career ahead of me and headed off to Giffords (a magical emporium in the town which sold everything from a bag of nails to a twin tub washing machine) to get me a toy doctors bag.

Unfortunately her hopes were dashed over the years. Every time I was in a life threatening emergency (OK tooth removal, cut finger, gash in head) rather than enjoy the experience and admire the skill of surgeons and doctors close up I chose the easier option of fainting, throwing up or squeezing the nurses hand so hard that she had to have it x-rayed.

Finally she got the message when she rushed into the front room to hear me screaming “Turn it off, turn it off”, as they showed some major surgery on the TV. Giving me one final chance she turned the sound up and provided a running commentary on the bits they weren’t mentioning.

Clearly I was not going to be the new Harold Gillies, a man who my Mum had worked with as a theatre nurse, who was the father of modern plastic surgery and who she held in very high regard.

I’d like to think that I did learn something from Doctor David and that his comic ghost rushed to my aid last night.

After all one of us being violently sick at 4am was bad enough…

Posted by Mark at 10:51 PM | Permalink

The other day I purchase a copy of Monocle simply to sit down and read a magazine printed on paper.

I find myself wondering if the light meter in my Father’s old Kowa H camera still works and what sort of pictures it will take.

I have an Ipaq but write notes in a Moleskin.

Has the allure of digital been lost to me ?

Posted by Mark at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

With the death of Lazare Ponticelli France has said farewell to the last fully verified French veteran of the First World War.

Born originally in Italy his mother moved the family to France when he was two in search of work. After the death of his father he traveled to Paris and worked as a chimney sweep and paper boy. In 1914 he lied about his age to join the French Foreign Legion. He was the last veteran of the legion to have fought in World War I.

After surgery and convalescing from the effects of a shell burst he returned to the front only to be gassed.

In 1920 he was demobilised and returned to France. With two brothers he founded the stovemaking and pipework company, Ponticelli Frères. Judged too old to fight in the Second World War he turned his factory over to the war effort then fought in the Resistance when France became occupied.

His company was restarted after the war and still exists today and employs thousands of people.

He held both the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Interalliée and, like all surviving veterans of the First World war, was recently appointed a Chevalier, Légion d’honneur but remained typically stoic about his status and achievements only recently accepting a simply service from the state when he died.

“You shoot at men who are fathers,” he once said, according to an obituary by Reuters. “War is completely stupid.” He kept his many war medals in a shoe box.

He remained to the end a “Poilu”, the French word meaning hairy or tough, given in affection since Napoleonic times to French foot soldiers.

Posted by Mark at 10:19 PM | Permalink

BBC NEWS | Politics | Brown urges UN action over …

Gordon Brown has called on the United Nations to send its envoy to deal with the crisis in …, saying that “the whole world is now watching”.

The comments come amid reports that police have beaten and arrested demonstrators and have fired warning shots on the ninth day of protests.

The UN Security Council is meeting in New York to discuss the crisis.

The missing word ? Burma. The missing comments from Brown, the ones he’s not making on Tibet.

In May this year The Dali Lama will visit the UK. Gordon Brown has still yet to make up his mind if he will meet with HH. His silence and lack of strength on this matter are at odds with other statesmen around the world :

Canadian PM defies China, meets Dalai Lama - India

The meeting came barely days after US President George W. Bush met the Dalai Lama to confer on him a US congressional gold medal, a move that annoyed China greatly.

Harper, who became the first Canadian prime minister to meet the Tibetan leader, Monday said: ‘I will not back down on speaking about human rights in China for the almighty dollar.’

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Tibet leader awarded top US medal

As he presented the medal, Mr Bush hailed the Nobel Peace Prize winner as a “universal symbol of peace and tolerance”.

“I will continue to urge the leaders of China to welcome the Dalai Lama to China,” Mr Bush said.

“They will find this good man to be a man of peace and reconciliation.”

He said the US could not close its eyes to the plight of the religiously oppressed.

From Brown ? Silence.

There’s a petition you can sign at the Number 10 website

Meanwhile in Tibet the police crackdowns on demonstrations continue.

Please vote.

Posted by Mark at 10:41 PM | Permalink

Shirin Oskooi is the Product Manager for Google Calendar and seems very happy with his latest product, Google Calendar Sync :

Official Google Blog: Google Calendar Sync

I was probably the most excited person on the team when we started developing it, because now I can access my calendar at home or on my laptop, on Google Calendar or in Outlook. When I add an event to the Outlook calendar on my laptop, Google Calendar Sync syncs it to my Google Calendar — and since I also have Google Calendar Sync running on my desktop, the event then syncs from Google Calendar to Outlook calendar on my desktop. All of my calendar views are always up to date, and I can choose whichever one I want to use.

Sadly, I’m less impressed. Most of my Outlook calendar is full of invites sent by other people. These don’t seem to be copied across to my Google Calendar making it more or less useless to me. Another nice feature I would have expected Google to include would be support for authenticating proxy servers for outbound Internet connections. If Google want to move their business on from simply using their applications in fun to using them in business they need better designed, more feature rich applications.

Much better is the support offered to iPhone and iTouch users over at the BBC iPlayer.. Within a day of announcing it’s support for this new platform I was sitting in bed watching Mad Man. Things seem to have moved on a long way since the BBC’s head of technology Ashley Highfield said :

BBC ‘not in bed with Bill Gates’ over iPlayer - News - Tech.co.uk

We have 17.1 million users of bbc.co.uk in the UK and, as far as our server logs can make out, 5 per cent of those [use Macs] and around 400 to 600 are Linux users.”

Perhaps no one told him what the iPlayer runs on. Mind you this is the same man who thinks DAB has, “mass market appeal”.

Aside from the problems for all those people whose ISP caps their downloads the industry as whole has some major concerns over video streaming :

Telco 2.0: BBC’s iPlayer nukes “all you can eat” ISP business model

The key outputs from the Plusnet data is that in January:

* more customers are streaming;
* streamers are using more; and most importantly
* peak usage is being pushed up

This equates for Plusnet to streaming cost increasing in total to £51.7k/month from £17.2k, or an increase of 18.3p/user from 6.1p/user. This is a 200% cost increase in just the first MONTH of the service.

If we assume that the Plusnet base of 282k customers is a representative sample of the whole UK internet universe than we can draw some interesting conclusions about the overall impact of the iPlayer on the UK internet. On the whole UK IPstream base of 8.5m the introduction of the iPlayer would equate to an increase in costs to £1.5m in January from 500k.

Perhaps I’d better enjoy my streaming while I can.

I’ve been tempted recently to get a sub-notebook for those moments when the TV doesn’t interest me but I don’t want to be stuck upstairs alone. The MacBook Air is a little outside of my price range but the ASUS Eee PC looks a good alternative, if you can find one around. Luckily there’s a rather nifty stock checker which I’m going to keep an eye on …

Posted by Mark at 9:51 PM | Permalink

With K in recovery after last night the best cure was a walk around the Roman walls, a gentle pub lunch and roast shoulder of lamb for tea.

“Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.” Seneca the Elder

Posted by Mark at 8:32 PM | Permalink

It’s been a while since I caught up with films but with K out tonight I hired in a couple of films and settled down to catch up with the silver screen.

I hire my films from Blockbuster which hasn’t been doing too well of late financially. Under the management of Peter Keyes (a manager who used to run the 7-11 chain of corner shops) Blockbuster is finally returning to profits but at what cost ? They seemed to have a lot less stock on the shelves for hire and racks of DVDs for sale. Gone are the days of picking up the empty white box in favour of fewer jacketed boxes for hire.

The World Cinema section (surely a growing market if you look at the awards given to films like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) seems also to be suffering in the “cost re-alignments” being undertaken. That’s a real shame I think - people need to have access to these sort of films but I guess they are the very ones which don’t pull in the fees when compared to the outlay of buying and hiring them.

In the end I settled for Michael Clayton which makes the world of corporate lawyers and lawsuits exciting, tense and engaging and A Mighty Heart which tells the story of Daniel Pearl’s wife during his capture and death. Despite the fact it has a “big name” in the role of Mariane Pearl Michael Winterbottom’s use of a hand held camera for most of the shots and his insistence that the film was shot chronologically with the actors in a house (copying the way the actual characters got to know each other) brings a sense of intimacy to the film and conveys the strength of a person in the face of a terrible situation.

The Daniel Pearl Foundations website is here.

Posted by Mark at 10:30 PM | Permalink

First ‘ignore your sat nav’ roadsigns go up | the Mail on Sunday

If lorry drivers can tear their eyes away from the satellite navigation system while approaching the village of Exton, they could well save themselves hours of trouble.

There at the side of the road are the first signs in the country specifically warning them to ignore the satnav.

Owing to a fault in the electronic information system, many drivers are sent through the Hampshire hamlet only to find the lane narrows to 6ft and they get stuck.

Villagers hope that the signs will spare them, and HGV drivers, any further grief, and stop the destruction of hedgerows and verges in Beacon Hill Lane.

Brian Thorpe-Tracey, whose property borders the lane, said he had regularly had to rebuild cobbled kerbs as well as help stuck vans to reverse.

The 49-year-old company director said: ‘The problem mushroomed overnight with the advent of satnav.

Just as the signs go up to ignore your satnav we went out to purchase one today.

I’ve always been happy to use a map but the justification is the travel K does with her job and the fact we nearly ended up on a ferry to France the other day.

Luckily we don’t drive HGVs so this sign won’t apply to us…

Posted by Mark at 10:17 PM | Permalink

“Do you think a DAB radio would be a good giveaway”, said K as we headed out to what is now a regular visit to the The Bengal Brasserie for a Thursday Curry.

Judging from the news today, no would seem to be the best answer :

FT.com / Home UK / UK - Crisis talks seek the tipping point for digital radio

Urgent talks involving many of the most senior broadcasters in the UK are being held in an effort to make digital radio commercially successful, the Financial Times has learned.

Proposed solutions to the slow take-up of digital audio broadcasting, the UK’s chosen format for digital radio, include radical steps that would have been unthinkable only a few weeks ago.

They include the possibility that the BBC could be persuaded to transfer its principal radio stations - Radios 1, 2, 3, 4 and Five Live - gradually to digital-only broadcasting over a prolonged period.

“Without these kinds of measures, if you leave it to the market, then the switchover to digital radio is going to take a long time,” one senior figure told the FT, adding that talks were shrouded in secrecy.

“And it is certainly going to be too long from a commercial radio point of view.”

The catalyst for the urgent discussions was the ann-ouncement three weeks ago by Fru Hazlitt, chief executive of GCap Media, that she would pull her company out of all the digital radio projects to which it was not contractually committed. She said DAB was “not economically viable for us”.

“She had to say that as part of her defence against the [proposed] takeover by Global [Radio],” a member of another radio company’s board said.

“But we all know that behind it is a kernel of truth applying to almost every-body’s digital radio businesses.”

Another radical idea would be to use public money to support a huge switchover advertising campaign - and subsidies for elderly and low-income families to buy new radios - in the same way that as has happened in aiding the switch-over to digital television.

Posted by Mark at 11:44 PM | Permalink

Photography isn’t a crime. Taking pictures and recording the world around you isn’t a bad thing to do. Reporting people to the police simply because they happen to be taking pictures of places (and let’s face it most tourists in London are taking pictures of sites which may be on the lists of terrorists so do we report them) and looking “suspicious” seems to be another step to demonizing photographers and street photographers in particular.

The current UK police campaign (PDF available here) does very little to make this country safer. As Nick Potter says :

Nick Potter Photography

The majority of the photographers I know carry medium to large digital SLR cameras and don’t exactly hide the fact they are taking photos. Any terrorist is not going to do that. Why bother when mobile phones have such good cameras nowadays? All this is going to do is result in increased occasions where we see what I like to call “the theatre of security” taking place. This is when the police react solely in an effort to show they are doing something, and therefore reassure the public, regardless of whether they consider you a threat or not.

Indeed in many cases the Police ask for pictures taken in the run up to a crime.

Photography should be free to all.

Posted by Mark at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

“Take this book and read it, it will be one of the most important ones you read - change will be everywhere from here on in”, said John Wenburg passing me a book.

I took it and read it and put it on the shelf thinking to myself that change is everywhere it’s part of the industry I’m in, it’s not something I need to worry about or manage just now.

Year after year passed and changed slowed down for me for loads of reasons but now things need to change.

“If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa quotes (Italian Writer, 1896-1957)

Posted by Mark at 7:56 PM | Permalink

The plan was to get up, drive to the coast in the sun, take the ferry across to Dorset and get some sea air under clear blue skies before finding a country pub and enjoying a nice lunch and a walk.

What actually happened was almost get on the wrong ferry which was heading to France (perhaps not so bad an idea), watch the skies get darker and darker and the temperature drop from 11 to 2 degrees, give up and turn around, baked potato in the shopping centre and an afternoon of leisurely shopping.

Posted by Mark at 7:48 PM | Permalink

“Do you know where you are going yet ?”, asked K as the taxi turned off the main road.

Even the taxi driver had been sworn to secrecy, preferring to tell us all about the gory death of someone last summer.

Despite being close to home and in an area I knew pretty well I didn’t have an idea until we pulled up at the impressive main gates.

I’ve known about this place for years, it was mentioned in the family from time to time as some aged aunt worked here as a maid when it was “The Big House” but I’d never visited it.

Welcomed inside by Christophe we sat next to the fire, admired the Grade II impressiveness of the place and wondered which wine went best with Chateaubriand before we were seated in the candle lit dining room.

There has been a mansion house on this site since 1561 but it was Sir Lionel Phillips who almost completely rebuilt Tylney Hall in l985 and incorporated the Great Hall. Partially panelled in Italian walnut, its ceiling was brought in sections from the Grimation Palace in Florence.

The gardens outside are no less impressive influenced by Gertrude Jekyll and an Italian Garden by Seldon Wornum.

Today, however, it was the food that kept our attention, along with the wine, the piano player and the quiet click of the tappitrees.

All in all a very Happy Birthday…

Posted by Mark at 11:59 PM | Permalink

“There’s something about children’s cake”, said K as she ate a slice of my bithday cake.

We nearly didn’t make it to the party as there was a fire at the dump and K had to blow kisses at The Men With Big Hoses but we got there eventually.

“I wrote my own name”, said Sam proudly handing me my card which was animated and made sounds.

Even more exciting was the tea party with sandwiches, sausage rolls and birthday cake.

Later, we opened oysters and dipped into “The Art of Looking Sideways” by Alan Fletcher and wondered how to think by jumping…

Posted by Mark at 11:58 PM | Permalink