On May 24th 2007 a story broke in the press about three people who where under control orders, a measure taken by the UK government to try and monitor potential terrorists, had dissapeared and where presumed missing. John Reid was called to parliment for an emergancy session to explain what had happened. You can watch his official statement on BBC Parliament . To simplify his statement to the main points; he blamed the system for the failure, claiming that the governement didn’t have enough powers to monitor terror suspects in a way which would ensure that they could not escape. He finished by saying that new legislation may mean that the UK has to ‘opt-out’ of the European laws on Human Rights, previously hammered out in the building pictured.
I think this is one of the most shocking and frightening changes to UK legislation our government has announced in it’s ten year tenure of rule. There are many factors that are each as equally as disturbing as the other, so I will try and distill what worries me so intently into managable bite-size chunks.
The first detail that jumps out at me is exactly who these people are and why this information is lambasted all over the media. All of the media was reporting on information they received from the Government, not journalism or investigation from inside the media itself. This means the Government told the media themselves of the missing persons that they consider dangerous.
(more…)
29.May.07 
Uncategorized 
Comments (0)
Over the last few weeks I have noticed a great number of people moaning and growning that life is difficult and they can’t take the strain. IT seems as the weeks and years progress in my life, more and more people are complaining of injustices done to them from others and how the whole world, yes - not just part of it, but the whole damn world; is completely against them and only them.
Well sorry to burst the bubble that is keeping so many of you above water, but that’s just completely and utterly pathetic. Life is difficult, anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something. We all have problems of differing types and scales. None of these problems are more or less important than anyone elses problems, yet so many of us seem to think that we’re in a unique situation that means that “I alone am SO hard done by!”
(more…)
27.May.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Today marks the 25th anniversary since the opening of FAC 51 - The Haçienda, a music venue that defined both Manchester and the UK music scene in the closing years of the twentieth century. Unfortunately it was almost exactly ten years ago that the lights went out on FAC 51 for the last time and today there is no sign of the original club. In it’s place is a large block of luxery apartments, which is a real shame that such a piece of modern history has been lost forever - at least the name plate survived.
All that know me personally will know I was too young to have gone to The Haçienda. Born just a year before it opened, I was approaching my 16th birthday when it shut. But I knew of it’s existance through the appearances on Channel 4 (The Tube) or the regular features on national news for another drug related murder. The club has been responsible for a lot of things in it’s time, most of all creating a new Manchester from the old industrial past.
(more…)
21.May.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
It seems as the UK national ban on smoking in public places approaches, the smokers are getting up in arms about it. One smoker in particular who doesn’t like this piece of European Law is my girlfriend, who has been smoking for longer than she can remember. The problem for her is simply that she will now be forced to go outside when she wants a cigarette rather than sitting in the comfy confines of a bar. She interprets the new smoking laws as a breach of her rights to enjoy be free to do what one wants to do, after-all this is a free country is this not?
Well, probably unsurprisingly to you, I do not agree. I think the smoking ban is a very good thing and long overdue. To put some perspective of where I am coming from I have smoked up until 3 weeks ago, not nearly the at the rate Siân does, but certainly more than is healthy at any rate; i.e more than none. I gave up because I know what was coming and I thought it would be far better to do it on my own terms than by force. But being a former smoker, I am certainly not in the anti-smoking lobby. Simply we all (yes we do) know that smoking is bad for us, but we do it anyway.
(more…)
15.May.07 Uncategorized Comments (2)
Apple rarely give wonderful free things away for developers. Consumers enjoy a whole host of wonderful free applications from the Cupertino company; well okay to be fair only iTunes and QuickTime these days. But it is even worse for developers who generally can only enjoy iTunes and QuickTime themselves. Actually I should point out that the Apple Xcode integrated development environment is almost free, if you purchase a copy of Mac OS X that is.
But behind every great product is an even greater Open Source project and Apple’s WebKit is one of them. To explain, WebKit is the Mac OS X variant of KHTML rendering engine common in the Linux KDE environment. Apple chose KHTML because of it’s rendering speed (far faster than Gecko in most cases), as well as it’s broad support of web pages due to additional Internet Explorer rendering quirks being supported. KHTML being an Open Source project itself requires Apple to release all of it’s code for Safari (Apple’s own branded browser) under the same LGPL licence as KHTML, thus WebKit was born.
(more…)
04.May.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
After many months of having our electricity supplied by Ecotricity, it’s time for a change. Ecotricity are a good company with their hearts firmly in the right place, but unfortunately their fuel mix is firmly in the wrong place. After many comments on this very blog plus some research of my own, I have unearthed a rather sad truth. Ecotricity’s green credentials are wilting rather.
Using data from the UK government, it has sadly become clear that Ecotricity’s fuel mix (a report on where they source their power from) isn’t as green as their web site. In fact in 2005 Ecotricity had sourced only 17.4% of their power from renewable sources, 22.3% from coal, 30.3% from natural gas, 24.7% from nuclear and 5.3% from other sources.
(more…)
01.May.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
