pault

tea at Claire’s

On Friday evening, went to Claire’s for tea. Happened to have a digital camera in my bag. So what follows is a little gallery of shots from the evening. Just me mucking about really.

We had a lovely evening sat out in the sun and warm at the end of one of the hottest days of the summer. Good strong coffee, a lovely warm bottle of rioja, rocket and water cress salad and loads of veg roasted in olive oil. All accompanied with chatting and laughing and star gazing. Summer in the city at its best. Claire’s got an interesting garden with some funky plants and other stuff in it. I hope this apparent from the photos—if it’s not it’s the photographer’s fault.

For another good looking garden in Burngreave [just down the road in fact], visit markmedic’s garden.

This little exercise also gave me the chance to have a look at MT’s file upload capabilities. [This particular blog entry will therefore get updated a few times while I get to grips with it—apologies in advance to those who subscribe to the rss feed for this site].

To make full use MT’s facilities, we were missing the Perl module Image::Magick—which gives the option of creating thumbnails on the fly—very handy. This gave me the opportunity to go through the installation of the module with aland.

So here’s the gallery [click on thumbnail to see bigger version [in a popup window]]:

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Messenger madness

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]

Abbeyfield Multicultural Festival

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?

blog entries from elsewhere

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.

new burngreave.net blog

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.

you don’t have to be a black blocker…

This started as a comment on a comment of aland’s about my suggestion that he posted his piece on Sheffield Indymedia. It ended up being too long for a comment and turned in a blog entry. I hope all that made sense.

Mmmm. Not sure I agree with aland’s comment. IMC UK’s mission statement is the relevant document here.

First para reads:
The Indymedia UK website provides an interactive platform for reports from the struggles for a world based on freedom, cooperation, justice and solidarity, and against environmental degradation, neoliberal exploitation, racism and patriarchy. The reports cover a wide range of issues and social movements – from neighbourhood campaigns to grassroots mobilisations, from critical analysis to direct action. [my emphasis]

Now, I don’t think that arguing for better facilities for children and saying that Sheffield City Council should be doing what they take Council Tax for is outside this at all.

The Sheffield-IMC group have said that one of the good things about working on a small geographical area [rather than nationwide] is that we can have content that isn’t all big actions and demos in London, but is much more community based. Having a legitimate concern about the enviroment in the area where you live and your children play is intensely political as far as I’m concerned.

I would love to see reports of Tenants’ & Residents’ Associations [random example] activities on IMC-Sheffield, because it is people doing for themselves rather than being told what to do by bureaucrats and politicians. The great thing for me about Indymedia is that it is bottom-up, non-hierarchical and breaks the rules about what is political or not. It makes no sense to me to then have a “is it political [enough]” hurdle.

Originally posted on burngreave.net.

blue bin frenzy

Who else got a blue bin today?

Who’s excited?

Who wishes it wasn’t Onyx running it?

For more on Onyx by the good people at CorporateWatch:
Noxious emissions
Water privatisation

Originally posted on burngreave.net.

CIN musings

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.

Mac notes

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.