Hugh Barnard

This site is for my personal projects, in computing and social change. These projects cover local improvement, digital literacy, open source software, urban ecology, biodiversity, financial reform and deep democracy (local councils in London).

There's hardly any time to eat at Wings Buffet, Tayyabs, Lahore Kebab, New World or even the Anchor Cafe. but I manage somehow.

If you want more information, use the contact form. The currently active projects are listed in the menu.

Now, as in any underdeveloped and corrupt state, our 'officials' or 'civil servants' (some would call them lazy unproductive, error-prone parasites, not me, of course) are now charging extra for things that they are already paid to do.

To wit, £8 or £13.50 for sticking on a label and then holding the item hostage until the 'fee' is paid. Doesn't that remind you of 'facilitation' fees that you pay elsewhere and are considered to be unethical, by various corporate hypocrites (the ones that have been caught, for example).

Of course, the Post Office itself has a lot of form, viz a viz the postcodes robbery. Still we have to find the execrable Adam Crozier's £1M salary from somewhere, don't we, m'dears?

Well, I'm not buying anything from Cadbury as of today, another US buyout. Of course, the advisors are apparently RBS, so mummy's boy will pocket another big wad from this.

It also turns out that they were busy stabbing Cadburys in the back. Good going for a publically owned bank and mummy's boy who didn't let anything approaching ethics or accepted practice restrain them.

Incidentally the sleazy 'half-truth in advertising/teaser rate' Direct Line are an RBS subsidiary, don't buy anything from them either, at least until some of these parasites are thrown out.

We lose one of our last big manufacturers and see nothing in return. Would you like chocolate cheese fries with that? Nice foreign war maybe? I don't think so..as they say.

Well, it's the election season again. Having been harangued during a TRA meeting and door-knocked by the massing hordes bearing a kind-of (pace, Jimmy Hendrix) wisdom. Here's my top tips for everyone from the conventional parties:

• Don't attack each other and conduct 'campaigns', we're not stupid and have grown out of Punch and Judy
• Tell us what you are actually going to do, at local level, you can provide quite a lot of detail
• Symbols and symbolic action are nice but only when everything else is perfect
• If you are standing, it's nice if you are local and we have detailed bios
• Even better if you participated in local life during non-election periods, don't be a stranger, as they (we) say
• Listen, don't justify, you may learn something
• Don't be 'politicians', we're sick of it, try and be servants/representatives of the people
• Be bold, break out of the Mulberry fortress and Westminster bubble to make contact with actual change
  

Well, the last round of discussion about the execrable, spintastic, inaccurate and childish (hey, choose an adjective!) East End Lies, the local Pradva produced by Tower Hamlets Council, met with some childish stonewalling from the 'complaints' department to quote Ms Dowden:

The Council has answered your complaint and is not willing to enter into further correspondence on this matter

Actually, all I've received is evasion and changes of subject, rather like a child caught in some trivial wrongdoing (except that council officers who create democratic deficit on purpose and try to ruin the local newspaper, that's not trivial, is it?).

So I'm happy to see the battle has broken out elsewhere in a more high profile way.

The BBC helped raised £38 million for Children in Need last year. They were so inventive, funny and delightful and we were so generous! Hurrah for everybody!

Let's look deeper, £38 mil is 1.2% of the BBCs current annual budget of 'about' £3 billion. This is the sort of figure that can be raised by simple economies in the BBC and a little tithing from these children of privilege. So we can find this £38 million via a little movement and generosity from the organisation itself. This is all public money too.

So, the current contribution can be raised directly without involving all the expense of stunts, payments by the public to network operators for SMS messages, telethons and assorted crass paraphernalia. If both happen (not my preferred avenue, see below) then the amount is doubled. If overpaid people at the top tithe, the results are even better.

Well I really, really enjoyed this, a delightful pocket festival and a big thank you to the organisers and everyone I met. Managed to make a certain amount of noise, probably too much.

Also ate a lot of cake, that does happen if one is unsupervised. I am hoping for some action from the government this year to stop this and the accompanying sugar rush. Secondary legislation of some kind will probably be fine, if clearly drafted, community health is an ideal starting point, hint, hint. People must be PROTECTED and we must THINK OF THE CHILDREN, mustn't we?

Here below is the notes I used for alternative money talk. Contact me if you'd like further reading etc. I'll probably upgrade this real-soon-now (that is, sometime next year).

We can see the collosal internal illogic of nu-lab, when we read this.

That is, the powerful people (as-if) in nu-lab central gov are briefing against them, our local nu-lab 'mp' (who slavishly votes with the party, could be replaced by a simple electrical circuit) refuses to do anything about them and Tower Hamlets nu-lab council loves them. I'm with stupid (or incoherent), eh, guys?

So much so, that this stupid, inaccurate, unbalanced, pathetic rag which is hated by everyone in the borough (well done, that takes some doing, uniting left and right like that!) is published each week, thus creating an negative externality (let me look that up for you guys, you don't know anything about democracy, so I don't expect any knowledge of neo-classical economics) in the form of an immediate recycling problem.

In recent months the U.K.Government has been supporting a switch to open-source software.

To discuss open source and see it in action,  we invite you to an open afternoon at the Social Club on the Exmouth Estate, Commercial Road on Thursday the 8th October.

There will be a buffet lunch and panel talk/discussion starting at
12.30pm. After lunch there will be demonstrations of open source
software and a closer look at the Linux based computer drop-in within
the Social Club (ProjEx)

You can see the full details of the event and register for it here: http://eday.eventbrite.com/  Places are free but limited to 150, because of the capacity of the Social Club.

We're about to try and form a Linux Users Group in the borough. If anyone's interested (and the group will be open source, in general, though emphasis on Linux) please use the contact form to get in touch with us.