Just posted this to UK IndyMedia:
what happens in Sheffield when war breaks out.
I’m going to reproduced it in full here because the IMC site seems to have mangled my beautiful HTML:
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what happens in Sheffield when war breaks out
by pault 9:05pm Thu Mar 20 ‘03
pault@burngreave.net
Striking Sheffielder reflects on a day of stopping the traffic, being inspired by teenagers and dancing a lot.
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Damn, it feels good to be on strike! Just got home after walking out of work 11 hours ago, with tired legs and no voice.
It’s really difficult to put this in any kind of order because so much of today was about spontaneity. Coppers were a little bewildered and decided to be “nice” to us for most of the day.
I walked out of work feeling low, angry and upset. The bastards have started this unjustified slaughter. I’ve been overwhelmed all week with a strange mix of rage and sorrow.
So what did we do? Amongst other things:
Hundreds of school (and college) students (including my daughter, bless her) walked out at about 11 and walked into the city centre, reclaiming major roundabouts on the way. The school students (who’ve been an absolute inspiration for anyone who’s been paying attention) were fantastic today – absolutely up for it, angry, vocal and confident. Once again the Sheffield students have demonstrated their opposition to this monstrosity being committed in out names. Many of them did all this after being threatened by their schools with suspension or worse.
Once assembled in town, we set off to try and acheived our stated aim: Stop Sheffield. We spent most of the next nine hours walking (and running (I thought coppers had some basic fitness test… not very apparent in some cases)) pretty much at will.
We went on a lovely winding walk around Sheffield taking in such major attractions as a sit down outside the main police station, most of the major roundabouts and dual carriagesways, disrupting business for quite some time at a major petrol station, forcing BBC Sheffield to get off their arses and filming some of what was going on under their noses (and being prevented from getting in by police horses).
After our afternoon stroll, we assembled back outside the Town Hall for an hour or so to allow more people to arrive, have a bit of a rest and take the piss out of the bored looking coppers. trollyd arrived to entertain the assembled throng with their usual mix of crushing beatz and spot on political samples. Some time later the Sheffield Samba Band marching into the space in front of the Town Hall to keep the dancing going.
It soon seemed time to go walkabout again, so the Samba Band lead us dancing down Fargate, stopping the buses and trams all the way down High Street and then onto Park Square. Park Square is a huge roundabout with five major roads (including the main route into town from the M1) all converging just at the edge of the centre.
We’d already been there as one of our early visits on our afternoon walk. We stopped traffic for a good twenty minutes, having a pleasant sit down in the sun, chatting with friends and making new ones.
This visit had a smaller number of folks, but the Samba Band were going strong, the chanting was loud and another sit down at the end of the Parkway was called for.
Back into town only to meet the trollyd crew with a bunch of traffic disruptors. Coincidently this was outside McDonalds so we made some noise while the South Yorkshire Constabulary guarded the Golden Arches. So the Samba crowd did an about face and off we went to shut down the major roundabout in Sheffield for the third time in less than twelve hours. It took a long time to get round this time (funny how that happens some times). The boys in blue were getting a bit fractious by this time (I think it was because they were wanting some tea by this stage and we just wouldn’t shut up and go home) and a bit of pushing and shoving took place. Nothing too serious though.
After a nifty bit of wrong footing the cops we samba’d our way past the railway station. The band played a tune outside the main station taxi rauk to the rapturous applause of the Asian taxi drivers. A quick sit down at the next roundabout and back to the Peace Gardens. Samba Band at the front, trollyd towards the back and lots of dancing people all around. A magic moment.
By this time, the band were shagged out (after drumming flat out for nigh on four hours), gracefully finished to yet another rousing cheer and trollyd took it up again. I left (to come and do this report) at about nine with a still sizeable crowd dancing and relaxing in the Peace Gardens to the sound of a Ronnie Reagan “Government is the problem…” sample colliding with Roni Size.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
We run a 3 Mac network at home sharing our broadband connection (though I do have a line of site to Abbeyfield Park House…)
As our finances have meant our newest Mac is now nearing its 5th birthday (and unless an as yet undiscovered rich relative leaves me some money, this will remain the situation for some time), I’ve made it a project to keep our three Macs as up-to-date as possible.
The three are: PowerMac 5500/275, 7600/132 and 8200/100. They have all been running OS9.1 successfully (and in a very stable way). According to Apple this is the maximum OS that can be run on these machines.
If your machine can run OS X you can stop reading here as the following doesn’t apply to you.
OS 9.2.2 is the most up-to-date version of the “Classic” OS. It offers real upgrades in speed (20-30% quicker for file copying for example) and stability (especially in networking and internet situations). There also a few pieces of software (eg FinalCut Pro) that will only run on 9.2.x, and if you’re flash (and loaded) you can connect to an iPod.
I came across a fantastic piece of software called OS9 Helper which allows you to install these OS upgrades on machines where it shouldn’t really be feasible. The guy who wrote the software gives timely advice and was really helpful about my questions.
The installation process worked flawlessly (and as stated in the Read Me file) and took about 45 minutes per machine. Another insanely great piece of software (and only $10 shareware).
If you run virtually any PowerMac or PowerBook and are running anything other than 9.2.2 (especially if you’re running 9.0.x or 9.1), I’d strongly recommend you look at this utility.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
An oblique reference was made to Project Gutenberg by aland in a comment really innovative on the trollyd sound system.
For more information on PG see my Project Gutenberg favourites page.
He mentions 1,000 books on a CD. This was a giveaway CD that PG produced last year at an College American Football game [attendance: 100,000], hence “The Million Book Giveaway”. I have a copy of the ISO image which hesitate to put on because of bandwidth issues [gz of 640Mb CD image about 250Mb].
I am however more than happy to burn a CD [which will work on Linux, Apple and other [I believe there are other] OSes] for the cost of a blank CD [approx 20p].
If you’d like a good proportion of pre-1923 classic literature [and much much more], let me know and I’ll burn you one.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
Spent the last couple of days mucking about coding a couple of pages for my mates trollyd.
These pages are not anything complicated. As always I’ve dead picky about making things conform to HTML standards (on which I’m sure there’ll be more in future blogs).
I’m hoping to be playing with drupal themes soon, so I thought I’d do a bit more CSS work.
Found a nice little trick which I’ve never used before. Use two different css files for the same page. So hey presto.
version 1: black background, red and white text. Looks nice, eats printer cartidges.
version 2: white background, red and black text. Doesn’t look as nice, but prints better.
Switching between the two is via a simple link in the navigation bar.
The CSS files live in trollyd css if you can be bothered to look.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
Attended this previously publicized meeting this afternoon. [Note IMC: Independent Media Centre aka IndyMedia.]
Chris reports:
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10 people turned up today to discuss establishing a Sheffield IMC (though due to other commitments not all 10 where there for the whole meeting) and there was a friendly, positive discussion.
People introduced themselves, explained why they were interested and there was a general discussion about the nature of Indymedia.
People who had not used the Publish facility had a look/play with that.
The conclusions of the meeting were that:
- We should ask imc-uk-network about the setting up of a Sheffield section like the Manchester one.
- We should all try and report anti-war activity in Sheffield this week and at Menwith Hill on Saturday.
- Having an open, public, meeting on a monthly basis would be good and that the details of this could be arranged on the imc-sheffield list.
There is probably lots of things I have forgotten – please post additions/corrections to the imc-sheffield list :-)
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For the second time this week I have been fortunate to be with a group of people who are seriously talking about IT as an emancipatory tool.
I intend to keep reporting progress of this group/project. In part this is because it is my intention to use my blog as my own record of my computer/IT activities/adventures. This will be interesting for me and I hope will have some use for others. Choose your own level of participation as you see fit.
The other aspect that I think is important in all this is the cross-over. Not only in terms of skills (I’m sure that what I learn about administering Drupal, contributing to burngreave.net, learning Linux et al will be useful with IMC and vice versa), but also in models of collaboration (“how we get the critical mass?” idea we’ve been throwing about a bit this week).
Originally posted to burngreave.net.
Attended the CIN meeting yesterday at Abbeyfield Park House. As I’ve already commented on aland’s blog, I found it very useful (and gave me a lot to think about). So some random thoughts.
We talked quite a bit about ‘critical mass’ issues. As I write the contributions to burngreave.net are from a very limited number of contributors (this site is after all new). So that we can give the drupal framework a real run for its money (and so stretch our knowledge and expertise) we really need to broaden things out. We need more contributors, more topics (on a wider range of topics) and a willingness to experiment. I feel we need to be encouraging more people to take up burngreave.net email addresses and for increased participation in burngreave.net generally.
I am very excited by the fact that there are rumblings about setting up a Sheffield node of the IndyMedia project (see Sheffield IndyMedia Training). I think there are could be a great deal of crossover between the two projects. Though IndyMedia doesn’t use (as far as I’m aware) the Drupal framework, I’m sure that there are going to be great amounts of transferable skills, concepts etc.
We also talked about looking at developing different interfaces for burngreave.net. I hope to do some work on this over the next couple of weeks.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
The Drum has been booked from 2pm to 4pm for doing some Indymedia training on Sunday 16th March.
There are around 10 networked computers there, it is located in the former NCPM which is just near the train station.
It is located on Paternoster Row, just off Sheaf Square.
All we need now is:
1. Someone with some Indymedia experience from outside Sheffield to come and show us the ropes—help!
2. Some punters!
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
Just for the sake of completeness I ought to add that there’s a page for actual [and potential] Mac users of burngreave.net. It’s at Mac notes, this page also forms part of the burngreave.net faq.
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commented by me
20:00 25 June 2003
This page has been updated. The webspace section has been updated.
The rss feed section is completely new.
Originally posted to burngreave.net.