Tom will have been on remand…

… for two years tomorrow: 10th May 2008.

Not a good anniversary, cheering thoughts for him at www.justicefortom.com please

Celebrating one year of Whitehall Webby

Slog on, Jeremy. Everyone, the WW blog is a year old, and has attracted much attention. I think it rocks…

http://whitehallwebby.wordpress.com/

Sadly… I cannot find anything today

… including - annoyingly - the Newsnight online continuum that was to be the Q&A. This makes me suspicious, are his responses to questions really written by him? Hmmmm, this is poor delivery on what was a delicious promise from Newsnight.

Not impressed, must try harder.

For those of you Miliband-ites

A friend of mine has kindly sent me the following re Newsnight 7th May:

Tonight Jeremy will be talking to the Foreign Secretary David Miliband live in the studio after he delivers what promises to be a radical speech on transforming Britain into a low-Carbon economy.

He argues that this is the only solution to the problems of spiralling energy and food prices as well as water shortages.

But will the shift to low carbon economy mean difficult decisions for all of us - especially the government - about how we live our lives?

If you have a question you’d like to put to David Miliband on this, or any other issue relevant to the Foreign Secretary, then please let us know.

When we’ve put this request to you before regarding other guests, there have been murmurs of discontent when questions haven’t made it to air. This time, as well as answering some of your questions on the programme, the Foreign Secretary has kindly agreed to respond to several more via
the Newsnight blog tomorrow morning.

Click here to post your question: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2008/05/david_miliband_on_newsnight.html

I shall certainly be watching - um trying not to drool - but I know some of you who have burning questions.

Off ye go

PS cannot let you go without sharing this little piece of joy just the picture, mind you

What is happiness if it cannot be shared?

(I just wrote that title mis-spelling shared as shred :))

As you can probably tell if you have been reading my posts in order - hello Mum - I have been navel-gazing for a month, not working as I usually do with government departments, rather choosing to have a little look at it all. (I go back next week… phew :))

I tell you I feel as if I have been completing a degree in four weeks. So much I have missed, so much to learn… too much. This has led to my monastic casting off of digital noise, and pushed me into the ‘hippy’ version of the web.

I watched the film: Into the Wild last night and it was both beautiful and brain-shatteringly obvious (if a film can be such a thing). Based on the story of Christopher McCandless, it details the frantic journey of a young American bloke, desperate to leave behind the shackles of the societal expectations of their young in the 1990s.

What resonated with me, and why I am sharing this with you, is that actually shuffling off this mortal coil alone and scared is not cool at all, and is not what we are seeking.

I have been pretty much married to the digital journey since 1997/8, when I lived and worked online overnight whilst my young daughter slept. Since then it has been a subversive family for me: my interaction with it has been fairly promiscuous: sometimes I have allowed indulgence and absorbed myself in online communication, at other times I have rejected it utterly and played rounders - or whatever

Lately I seem to have been going through my online menopause (sorry cannot find a pretty metaphor) and have embraced the hippy web. All is free, we can indulge and enjoy whenever we wish - anything I need to know I can find, gratis! It has been good, but something is nagging… something is wrong.

I am exploring the outer-lands of the Internet, through blogs, YouTube etc and am discovering such beauty - equivalent to Chris going to Alaska, but with crumpets. It is feeding my soul but I have had to cut off so many people in order to achieve this nirvana that my discoveries are starting to pall.

I want to share what I find, but I cannot do so without interacting with everyone - and once I go down that route, I have no time to explore. The choice is impossible, and yes, work will remove the issue, but…

A bed-time story for you all

Nothing to do with anything really, but still… we all need to have a bit of that every now and again!

http://outside.away.com/outside/features/1993/1993_into_the_wild_1.html

A bit creaky

I woke up this morning a bit creaky on my right hand side, knee, hip (1971 before you ask :)), tired, slightly disappointed in the weather and generally a bit put out. Firing up the computer I get the latest in what has become a stream of people emailing me about Tom.

Now I may sound a bit like an old drum, beating annoyingly in the back of your sub-conscious, however there are a great number of you who are desperate to do something to help. (Once again, for those of you not following the fascinating life of Emma Mulqueeny, go here for more info.)

Clearly my rather bleak mood this morning pales into insignificance next to whatever Tom is waking up to today, in fact I know what Tom is waking up to today, I have seen it. And he has no choice. I know he will be being unfailingly polite to anyone he comes across, and will go about his day quietly coping (it is the weekend therefore he gets no visitors). You see where I am going here.

A few of you have posted here and on justicefortom.com, offering all kinds of help and support, equally as frustrated as I am. More of you have emailed me personally, buoyed by the idea that we can now create a force for Tom, rather than just the quest for justice… ha! (Sorry that was just a small explosion of anger).

Problem is, the force for Tom I mentioned a few posts back, is in my head. I am as helpless as the rest of you, angry, frustrated, pretty sure that I should be making more of an effort.

So… there must be something we can do. I WANT you to come up with ideas, however barking, on how we can bring joy into Tom’s days, support Sally Dudmesh, support Lord and Lady D, highlight the fact that Tom is still on remand. If you prefer to email me directly, that’s cool.

Right, off to walk the dog - lucky me, eh?

 

Be fabulous

When was the last time you were so desperate to do something you threw on a vest, Barbie dress, ballet slipper and school shoe? This was my friend’s daughter last night, dressed and ready to go :- she was so excited about going outside that she just grabbed what came to hand. (I wonder if Sarah lets her out enough :))

I love this image and wanted to share the joy.

Feeling over-generous

Here are two presentation videos that have been filling me with joy lately - you might notice how old they are… yeah that is how far behind I am

http://identity20.com/media/OSCON2005/

http://www.benhammersley.com/images/the_semantic_web-hinted.mov

Enjoy, you can thank me with flowers

I count stuff

Continuing in the vein this week/month of reducing information clutter - and adding to my hardware clutter - more later - I decided to go one step further and try to make my Google Reader more effective. I had subscribed (if that is the verb) to so much that I could no longer bear to look… except as an insomnia cure, when quite frankly I will do anything!

Having this rather weird fixation with numbers - no not in a clever way, I wish it was - rather I just find myself counting, and I have often counted into the hundreds before I notice. (It is often the case that on dog walks I count the number of steps I take, and only when I get home do I realise what I was doing… I know, seek help :))

Any road, I also use my counting fixation to manage stuff, make decisions, picking a random number, and pontificating using many and varied (usually barking) tools of measurement stopping at that number and plumping with the associated choice. Er, this might make me seem rather slapdash to future employers, sorry - I try to keep this to the trivial, say Mac or PC? - or some such demotive argument. *Emma grins wickedly at all Mac bullies*

So, I decided to pick a random number to manage my Google Reader… I came up with five, and immediately told myself not to be so ridiculous. Then - the children being asleep - I chose to see if I could do it. Just five feeds, five people without whom I would not be able to do my day job, either for entertainment value or education.

Guess what? I did it

Do you know how many people I had subscribed to before I did this? 236 - I kid you not…

I am eager well, eager and also I added people because I could, every time I read a good post, or someone commented here, I would subscribe to their blog etc etc… news blah. Or searching for a subject that I was into and subscribing to the blogs with the most posts… madness.

Resulting in this horrific cacophony of digital noise: everyone talking at the same time, different subjects, random thoughts.

When I moaned, as I may occasionally have done, friends would tell me to file this stuff, streamline it… I don’t even file my nails, as if I am going to go in and actually manage this information flow! I know that I can, and easily too, but when you have that many feeds, even insomnia is more attractive to filing. (May just be me).

Deletion was the only answer. And so now I have five, and I have five feeds that I will be watching intensely. I will not bore you with my decision process, it is and should be deeply personal! But now my Google reader is a thing of beauty, and I am really quite excited about tomorrow morning…

In other news tonight

Emma has a Mac - get over it

My iphone is working, and I am so in love with it (would blog the last hurdle of getting to this point but really, you don’t want to know - it works, O2 head of customer services sorted it out for me, and was good, but it took blood, sweat and tears on his part and mine), just waiting now for the reimbursement… any time now… yip… I will just put the kettle on…