Dorset
finally found some time to select and edit some pictures from our brief sojourn on the Jurassic Coast.
The Flickr set may be found here.
I ATEN’T DEAD
since perlmonger and I got back from Dorset on Sunday night (and yes, it was very very nice indeed, thank you – see his post; I am currently sloughing like a snake, as I was daft enough to go on a boat trip without a hat, and my face got sunburned). Also, I propose an addon for TomTom that takes me to the nearest cream tea.
anyway, I digress. Since we got back, I haven’t stopped. Apart from final LibDem leaflets to be PagePlus’d ($deity bless the shiny Macbook and Parallels), and endless liaising with deliverererers, there’s been a big and fascinating potential project to investigate and cost, involving about 300 hours of video footage which needs to be tied to written transcripts. This meant I had to learn, in a hurry, about Flash, Actionscript, Amazon’s S3 service, and lord knows what else so I could cost it. I hope it comes off, because it would be a fascinating and worthwhile thing to work on.
and then there’s the company accounts, which are overdue at Companies House. We are changing accountants, and the papers need to be transferred from old to new. And there is a delay, which turns out to be because the person who _was_ looking after our accounts has actually died. You couldn’t make it up, really.
then there’s stuff to do for the local LibDem web site (which I made a start on at 6.30 this morning), and ongoing work to do for the maps site, and and and. I haven’t even looked at my photos since I got back.
the weekend will be mostly delivering leaflets, I think, with a trip to see the excellent Phil Beer on Saturday night. Hopefully things will calm down a bit after next week.
sorry to those I owe an e-mail (yes, including you, purple_peril).
what’s my daemon?
gacked from brisingamen and behind the cut
we went out
we set off from home late morning, intending to have lunch at Barry Island. Unfortunately, so had everyone else, it seemed, and there wasn’t a parking place to be had.
our intention was to visit Barry Hawking Centre and what passes for their web site says that there’s a cafe, so we knew that *some* sustenance would be available, so we pressed on.
the cafe was closed. The grounds were incredibly dreary, there were hardly any bits of information about the birds, there weren’t all that many birds, in fact – well, not birds of prey (apart from quite a few eagle owls), but lots of hens and swans. I guess the chickens are there to produce chickies for the raptors to scoff, and the swans … well, your guess is as good as mine.
I’d phoned to see what time they were doing flight demonstrations; 12.30 and 3, they said, so we made sure we were there in good time. We hung about the flying area, where absolutely no sign of any birds or flying was going on, so we returned to the kiosk to enquire. “Oh no” , they said. “The falconer didn’t turn up.”
what sort of hawking centre doesn’t have its own falconer, FFS? You have to fly your birds regularly. The place really is a shambles – run down, untidy, and very disappointing.
so, should you be looking for somewhere to go on a day out, may I strongly recommend that you don’t bother with this place .
but there was this beautiful tawny eagle, so not all was lost.
we did other things too – more on that story later.
an opportunity beckons
like idiots, perlmonger and I a) got involved in the Parish Plan committee, and b) offered to do the data analysis. “How hard could it be?” we asked ourselves … it’s just some mySQL and some web forms.
we took it over to the Clerk to the Parish Council a few weeks ago, to show her how it worked, and she got in someone from Community Action to sit in (they fund Parish Plans in the County Formerly Known As Avon). They were both hugely impressed with it, and said that there was almost certainly a potentially very big market for it.
so we bought a domain and stuck some text on it, and ParishplanSurveys.co.uk was born.
we’re very slowly developing the software – here in Long Ashton, there are 1600 surveys with 110 questions each, plus the Young People’s one, so data entry will take a while, and we haven’t done anything about analysing it yet.
but now we must – we have been invited by Community Action to demonstrate it to a group of ten Parish Councils, all of whom are fretting about how to deal with their data. And this is on 24th May [scream].
there are 10,000 parish councils in England and Wales. And these surveys typically get done every five years. If we could get just 10% of that market, I’d be very happy indeed.
[returns to coding]
phew
By mac and has no comments yet.
the Thaab was leaking water – not onto the ground, but into the engine. Mark the Car shook his head this morning, and muttered about “head gaskets”.
it turns out to be a broken pipe, which is fixed, and he’s sealed the tyre with the slow puncture too. Forty quid well spent, I think.
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