pault

Unprecedented

Was lucky enough to go to the pictures for the first time in ages last night to see the utterly marvelous Unprecedented. Here’s an item I put on the IMC-Sheffield newswire as Unprecedented at The Showroom.
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Ninety people attended a showing [in association with Sheffield Indymedia] at the Showroom Cinema of Unprecedented: the 2000 Presidential Election. As the name implies, this is a documentary about the chicanery, deceipt and fraudulent behaviour of the rich and [mostly] Republican around the infamous “too close to call” election in the self-styled “great state of Florida”.

Attendees were lucky to have Rick Pérez the film’s co-writer and co-producer in attendance and introducing the screening. After the riveting documentary, Rick fielded questions from forty members of the audience who hung around afterwards for about an hour.

The story is too long to go into here. The bobbings and weavings of Jeb and Dubya Bush, Warren Christopher, supposedly impartial state election officials et al, tell the tale well enough.

So impressions instead: I found myself in an unusual position while watching: I’m an anarchist and don’t believe in parliamentary democracy, but still found myself becoming more and more furious as the story unfolded. That the film could ellicit this response in me about something which I care little about is evidence that this a fine piece of film-making. In a sense the machinations of the career politicians is just a frame to hang this story on – I think the film’s main theme is really the utter contempt, that both the party political and [state and federal] bureacratic apparatuses, hold for the wishes and aspirations of working and oppressed people. Not one of these bunch of criminals had the supposedly sacrosanct vision of “democracy” at the forefront of their thinking or activity.

For more information on Unprecedented, visit their website. The film started as an Los Angeles-Indymedia project and is an excellent example of “becoming the media”. If you didn’t manage to get to the Showroom, never fear – Sheffield-Indymedia now have a video copy of this film [kindly donated by Rick]. If you would like to arrange a showing contact Sheffield Indymedia.
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As lots of IMC-Sheffield people are away at the Next Five Minutes event in Amsterdam or recovering from the exertions of Disarm DSEi, it fell to me to be liaison person for the collective on this screening.

In concrete terms this meant that I met Rick at the railway station and showed him to his hotel [not too onerous]. After a frantic day of running around—Ben had a craft stall at Sheffield Fair—got to the screening with ten minutes to spare with Ben and Ceils. Did a short introduction about Rick to the assembled throng, a few words from him and then settled into the Showroom’s luxurious seats and prepared to be entertained.

I think it’s apparent from the review that I liked the film a lot, and I haven’t really got a lots else to say [short of a very long analysis style essay].

I was really excited by the fact that so may people turning up for the Q&A session after the film. The questions were intelligent [for example: “How are [black, Democrat voting] people who were robbed of their franchise approaching the next round of elections? How is that anger being channeled?”]. Now that gives you something to get your teeth into. Rick told me that this film has been his life for over two years now. This was apparent in his answers [not in a ‘world-weary, I’m sorta bored’ kinda way—but rather in a ‘I know my way around this subject matter well and I can convey what’s a really complex story in an accessible and understandable kinda way’ kinda way].

Over an average/slightly above average curry in the curry house next door [competent though unexciting veg balti and naan, not enough salt in the salt lassi] with Rick, fellow Sheffield IMC-Sheffielder Steve and my family, we had what can be only be described as a broad-ranging discussion. Topics included the relative merits of the UK and US educational systems, the history of the Yemeni community in Sheffield [including the totally amazing Yemeni Steelworkers’ Union story, which I’ll post up here when I remember], Sheffield-IMC, LA-IMC, DSEi, anarchist federations in the UK and US, Sheffield’s recent and not so recent political history, consensus decision making, the Barbara Streisand Foundation, patterns of Mexican immigration in the US [and California specifically] over the last 80 years and many more.

All in all a fantastic evening—and see the damn film if you can.

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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sad story and a project

In May this year my trusty PowerMac 5500/275’s power supply died. At £115 for a replacement, it didn’t make sense to spend that much money to repair a machine that’s only worth £250–300 overall.

Friends have helped me out—manDA has lent me her [second gen] iBook and Claire her Titanium G4 at various times. Love and thanks to you both.

But the fact remains that the most powerful computer in the house is now my daughter’s PM 7600/132. Now this is a great machine [as was the 5500], but there’s no way to run Mac OS X on it. Having a G4 Dual 1.25GHz at work now I’m very spoilt and a lot of the things I now do are based on the unix underpinnings of OS X.

So I need another machine. I whip out my no limit platinum credit card… Meanwhile back in the real world: I can’t afford a new Mac, no way no how. Second-hand Macs hold their price very well, so they are really out of my price range—I can’t come up with £400–500 straight off.

In an email conversation with aland he mentioned how little money was spent on building some very servicable BITPart machines for Abbeyfield Multicultural Festival.

So I’m thinking I’m going to build a Linux machine for home for as little money as possible. The task: an up and running Mandrake Linux 9.1 box by 01 September 2003 for less than £100. I’m looking for bits people!

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Radio4All uploads

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.

distributed computing/Terminal

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.

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?

IMC-Sheffield programme #02

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.

Sharrow Festival

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.

IMC-Sheffield hits the airwaves

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!
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updates
20:15 10 July 2003
A link to the newswire article: Radio Sheffield Indymedia is on air!.
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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.
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18:50 17 July 2003
It’s up on The a-infos Radio Project at last.

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.

Reclaim the Public Domain petition

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.

BookCrossing

First of all I read this article in TidBITS, that piqued my interest in the BookCrossing project. Those who’ve been reading for a while will already know of my involvement in Project Gutenberg and I think it’s fits very well with that.

For those interested, you can view my [as yet very short] bookshelf.

More on this later I expect.

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.

Sheffield Indymedia launched

After much hard work and four months’ planning, Sheffield Indymedia [or IMC: Independent Media Centre] is up and running. This is part of a relaunched UK Indymedia site, running new Open Source software called MIR.

I have also added the Sheffield site to our site cloud.

Just like burngreave.net, Indymedia is only as good as its content. Please feel free to contribute.

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.

Project Gutenberg

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.

Sheffield IndyMedia meeting

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.

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.