My frantic week calmed down a bit today, so I had chance to catch up on a bit of stuff, including uploading the rest of the IMC-Sheffield radio show mp3s to Radio4All [aka The A-Infos Radio Project].
Here’s a complete list of the programme pages on Radio4All.
imc-sheffield radio 20030708 | 1:00:27
imc-sheffield radio 20030715 | 0:58:09
imc-sheffield radio 20030722 | 0:59:06
imc-sheffield radio 20030729 | 2:05:47
Please give them a listen. I’m fairly confident that we’ll be doing more of this kind of thing in the future—though weekly was a heavy commitment for a first attempt.
First of all I came across this item—Self-modifying hardware via distributed genetic algorithms—on the intermittently marvellous Boing Boing.
It interested me enough to look at original website—Distributed Hardware Evolution Project.
Now I’m a fan of distributed computing projects. I’ve been running SETI@home for over four years—here’s my SETI@home stats.
I’m also looking to expand my unix/linux knowledge as I’ve recently got a G4 Dual 1.25GHz as my main machine at work. So in conjunction with the excellent Mac OS X in a Nutshell, I’m taking on little Terminal projects.
I therefore installed the client for this project. Want proof? Look at the stats page.
I’m proud of myself. Having now successfully installed Movable Type and now this, I’m feeling a little more confident in the Terminal.
This entry I suppose is the next in the series of introductory essays. It’s nearly a week since I posted last, which is a while for me to be silent.
I’ve had a busy week—I didn’t even do the radio show on Tuesday. I work part time for the Burngreave Messenger, which is an independent community newspaper/magazine, which covers the Burngreave Ward [1] of Sheffield [UK]. We deliver a twenty page publication free to every household and business in Burngreave ten times per year.
I work as design/dtp/general computer worker, and so for one week per month I work my ass off getting the thing ready to got to the printers. This week was that week. After Abbeyfield Multicultural Festival last week, which is a lot of work and a week’s worth of frantic activity, we put the thing to bed earlier and I’m knackered.
The whole thing is worth it though—it’s work I’m really proud to do. Have a look at the website for a flavour. I’ll let you know when it’s updated.
[1] Ward—basic administrative unit of UK local government. Burngreave is one of the 29 wards of Sheffield City Council. [back]
Well, I suppose I raised expectations in Sharrow Festival last week—Abbeyfield Multicultural Festival did not disappoint.
After the forecast said warm, humid and a strong risk of thundery showers, it was hot, sunny, not too humid and no rain at all.
Highlights of the day: Sheffield Samba Band leading the carnival procession with tonnes of brightly-dressed school kids and stiltwalkers, Stephanie’s roast pepper wrap and dumpling [second mention on the site already], Mr K’s pakoras, my mate Akiel [age 6] break dancing [very well] on the main stage, our yearly encounter with Carlos [and this year we remembered to swap phone numbers!], seeing hordes of people with I read the Burngreave Messenger—Do you? stickers on, selling loads of stuff from the stall, having a giggle with Rob, seeing Rich and Ian in BNDfC baseball caps, the Yemeni dancers, aland grinning at the setting up of four networked PCs in Abbeyfield Stables, ACAB wearing a cardboard copper hat, Special bigin’ up everyone and loads of other stuff.
The main greatness of Abbeyfield though, is that the whole of Burngreave in all its diverse wonderfulness comes out to play for the afternoon. The park is full [12,000 entries to park during day—which includes people going in and/or out more than once] of folks from everywhere—Yemenis, Somalis, Kashmiris, Kosovans, Pakistanis, Iraqis, Africans, Caribbeans, Chileans [and quite a few different flavours of white too]; of all ages from babies to great-great grandmas.It’s one of the most diverse environments I’ve ever come across in my whole life and swear I didn’t hear a cross word all day. Though there are trappings of commerciality [in which I take part—Abbeyfield is an important pay day for Crafty Things, I’ve got kids to feed you know] there is an air of liberation in the air. There’s a feeling of our space around. It’s a chance to catch up with people you haven’t seen for a year, to have that no worries vibe all around and to laugh a lot.
Many places claim to be a fun day out for all the family, few deliver on the promise. Abbeyfield Multicultural Festival does. See you next year—well you are coming aren’t you?
In preparation for the launch of the new rising7 site, I’ve started to transfer items from my blog on burngreave.net.
I’m not transferring all the items—I don’t intend to transfer all the items from this testbed blog either. Rather I’ve weeded out the ones where the topic was specifically burngreave.net and tried to include the entries that are relevant to the themes I’m trying to develop for rising7.
We [the IMC-Sheffield radio crew] did our second programme on Sheffield Live! last night [Tuesday].
Very enjoyable again, but mighty shambolic for the first ten minutes or so.
Good content though, including a live interview with Deacon Dave who was part of a Christian Peacekeepers mission to Iraq during the recent war. Now I don’t hold with religion [being an anarchist and all that], but I can’t help but like Dave. He plays with the Sheffield Samba Band which is a definite point in his favour and he shaved his bright blue mohican off for his trip to Iraq. How can you not like a peacenik vicar with a blue mohican? [And did I mention brave—anyone who goes into a situation like that, whatever their motivations has got to be worthy of respect.] So another addition to my [short] list of religious professionals that are worth the time of day.
Earlier in the day I had the pleasure of a doing a great interview with Helen and Nick [also IMC-Sheffield bods] about their trip to Evian for the G8. Not only was the content of the interview good, but we did the interview al fresco in a secluded green spot only 50 metres from a major road in hot sunshine [with sun protection I might add]. You can even hear birds singing in the background of the recording. Lovely experience.
We should be able to get a downloadable recording out a little earlier this week. Stay tuned.
It seems like everytime I do a new entry, a new introduction is needed. My partner Ben is a self-employed craft worker, running a one-person business called Crafty Things. One of the good things about this way of making a living is that we generally have stalls at the local community festivals around Sheffield over the summer.
Today was the beginning of Sharrow Festival, a month-long event. Today was the In The Park portion of the festival in Mount Pleasant Park and we had a great day. The weather was great—hot [but not too hot], sunny, very slight breeze, loads of folks, good food from all over the world [I had tasty vegetable somosas for dinner and a vegetable wrap [involving red peppers roasted in olive oil and herbs] with dumpling for tea], music [reggae, dub, punk, folk, samba, bhangra, live electronica and some metal/freeform jazz hybrid thang which was strangely pleasing]. We had quite a good day financially on the stall and endied up being put next to a couple of our favourite other stallholders.
We got rid of a [metaphorical] tonne of Indymedia stickers, and there were quite a few IMC-Sheffield bods about—Christina and Sophie from the Trouble Soundsystem were running a free DJ workshop, Steve was chatting to everyone and grinning from ear-to-ear, Dan was about, but I didn’t catch up with him, so I don’t know what he was up to, Lucy, Matt and some others. Also of note: a samba workshop and performance by Sheffield Samba Band [good], a Sheffield Live! tent and live broadcast [also good] and lots of Christians handing out flourescent pink crosses [bewildering].
I love living in Sheffield. Next weekend is the best of the lot—Abbeyfield Multicultural Festival. It’s in the area I live—Burngreave—and is the biggest event of the year in lots of ways. I’m fairly confident in predicting there’ll be an entry next Sunday about it all.
Things are moving apace with Sheffield Indymedia.
As this is my first post on this site about IMC-Sheffield, I suppose I ought to clarify a little. I’m a member of the collective that runs the Sheffield section of the UK site. We only got together as a group in March of this year, but since then we’ve got together a Sheffield page, some members have been instrumental in the technical implementation of the new UK Indymedia site and tonight we did our first radio broadcast!
The show went out on Sheffield Live!, which is broadcasting 03–30 July on 106.6FM in additional to the usual webcast. We’ll be there every Tuesday evening from 1900–2000BST [UTC+1] throughout July.
A small group of folk got the show together which went rather well I thought. Respect and love to Bill, Christina, Dan, Lucy, Matt and Steve.
My small part of this endeavour? Doing an interview with oi and muke from the trollyd soundsystem—good mates of mine—who went to Evian for the G8 at the beginning of June. Editing was a collaborative process, many thanks to oi, muke and tso especially for help on this. I’m also did a bit of link/anchor style stuff during the programme itself. I’ll update this post when the mp3 makes it onto the site. We also plan to post an mp3 on The a-infos Radio Project.
It was a blast!
—
updates
20:15 10 July 2003
A link to the newswire article: Radio Sheffield Indymedia is on air!.
—
17:00 15 July 2003
You can now listen to the show. It’s Realmedia unfortunately. So here’s the stream. You can also get eleven mp3s of the show. I hope to upload the whole mp3 to The a-infos Radio Project tonight.
—
18:50 17 July 2003
It’s up on The a-infos Radio Project at last.
Sheffield Indymedia have got a radio programme.
As part of Sheffield Live!’s month [03–30 July] of FM broadcasts [on 106.6FM], IMC-Sheffield will be doing an hour’s programme every Tuesday evening during July, from 1900, starting tomorrow [08 July].
We’re trying to have a mix of local, national and global news with reports on local folks involvement in everything from community campaigns to the G8 at Evian.
Please tune in and let us know what you think.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
Implemented smarty_pants options on following tags:
MTEntryTitle
MTEntryBody
MTEntryMore
on the following templates:
Master Index
Master Archive Index
Date-Based Archive
Individual Entry Archive
Also mucked around with the date and time formats in MTEntryDate tags to make times 24 hour clock and dates in my preferred format.
As part of getting to grips with MT and its templates, I’ve started amending the templates for this site. If you pay close attention, you see the site start to incrementally change.
The first change I’m making is installing the SmartyPants 1.4 plugin, from John Gruber [who authors the excellent Daring Fireball site].
Anyone who knows me will know that I take pride in my typesetting [and am constantly frustrated by the low quality of website [and other] typography generally]. A piece of software which advertises itself as: smart punctuation for web sites has got to be a good idea.
I’m impressed by this plugin and it gave me the opportunity to get a feel for the way templates work in MT.
Got my first [known] refer from another blog. Anarchogeek, in the person of rabble. The link is to my burngreave.net piece you don’t have to be a black blocker….
Inspired by my Drupal experiences and also by my recent playing around with rss/xml feeds I’ve decided to have a go at converting my existing rising7 website into a combination of static and weblog pages.
My motivations are multiple:
We’ve talked about expanding what burngreave.net can do and here’s another option for potential users to utilize.
I want to expand my own knowledge in this area, as I’m very excited by it.
I’m feeling inspired to be creative at the moment. I’m in the fortunate position of being involved in some great stuff and would like to record it.
Please feel free to comment either here or there.
I apologise in advance for the initial high percentage of test and rubbish postings, but these will be weeded out eventually.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
I suppose it would make some kind of sense to have some kind of introductory statement about what this is all about. It’s my intention to use this pault blog as a testbed, while I get to grips with MT, blogging in general and all the associated stuff.
So I’ll be using the mt and webdev categories for recording the learning process. Please feel free to comment my blog entries if your level of knowledge is greater than mine.
This blog will also serve I hope for my more general Macintosh, computing and miscellaneous technology musings. As I learn more of mt’s primary and secondary categories, I’ll be adding and widening.
You’ll probably read [quite a lot] about politics and activism.
I’ll probably be writing about living, working and being an activist in Burngreave [an area of Sheffield, UK] and beyond.
You may even get some thoughts about baseball and music and books and films and coffee [and whatever else occurs to me] if you’re lucky.
I’ve also outlined some of my motivations in a post to my burngreave.net blog.
Downloaded Movable Type [MT].
Trouble free installation with well-written, comprehensive and accurate installation instructions. Thanks to aland for mysql [and other general] help.
So here we go this the first entry for my new experiment blog. I’ll be messing around with stuff on here, before launching the fully-fledged rising7 blog.
Have just signed the Reclaim the Public Domain petition.
This petition is directed to the US Congress [who are considering further awful changes to the already outrageous copyright laws].
In the sense that the majority of burngreave.net readers are not US resident [though if you are let us know!] and therefore not directly relevant for us it might seem a fruitless exercise, the ramifications for the rest of the world are important as the US is starting a quest to impose copyright hegemony across the world via the World Trade Organization.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.