Category Archives: Me, Myself and I

Tempted to bang on the walls to alert your noisy neighbour to your plight?

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Don’t.

Firstly and as many Londoners might naturally feel, there is of course the very practical consideration that fighting back in this way tends only to inflame an already delicate situation. Secondly, here in the UK at least, in your malice you might be creating an actionable private nuisance yourself!

Sound strange? Maybe, but look what happened when this kind of case was brought to court, many moons ago…

The case of Christie v Davey, 1893, 1 Ch 316

Seems that Christie here was a music teacher, who gave lessons in her house. Mr Davey, living in the semi-attached property next door, didn’t much like the noise. It seems he complained directly to Mrs Christie more than once. I’ve just found online a letter purporting to be penned from Mr Davey to Mrs Christie:

“During this week we have been much disturbed by what I at first thought were the howlings of your dog, and, knowing from experience that this sort of thing could not be helped, I put up with the annoyance. But, the noise recurring at a comparatively early hour this morning, I find I have been quite mistaken, and that it is the frantic effort of someone trying to sing with piano accompaniment, and during the day we are treated by way of variety of dreadful scrapings on the violin, with accompaniments. If the accompaniments are intended to drown the vocal shrieks or teased catgut vibrations, I can assure you it is a failure, for they do not. I am at last compelled to complain, for I cannot carry on my profession (the defendant was an engraver) with this constant thump, thump, scrap, scrap, and shriek, shriek, constantly in my ears. It may be a pleasure or source of profit to you, but to me and mine it is a confounded nuisance and pecuniary loss, and, if allowed to continue, it must most seriously affect our health and comfort. We cannot use the back part of our house without feeling great inconvenience through this constant playing, sometimes up to midnight and even beyond. Allow me to remind you of one fact, which must most surely have escaped you–that these houses are semi-detached, so that you yourself may see how annoying it must be to your unfortunate next door neighbour. If it is not discontinued, I shall be compelled to take very serious notice of it. It may be fine sport to you, but it is almost death to yours truly.”

Evidently the letter (which is also referenced and indeed quoted here) didn’t have much effect, and so it seems that Mr Davey took to making noise in retaliation whenever he heard anything from Mrs Christie.  Mr Davey’s noise in turn distracted Mrs Christie’s music lessons, and so Mrs Christie took Mr Davey to court to get him to stop.  According to records I’ve found cited many times online, it would seem that the court ruled in favour of Mrs Christie and granted an injunction against Mr Davey.

Surprised?

When I first heard this story, it was told as Mr Davey having brought the case to court, to get Mrs Christie to stop her teaching activities, and that the court turned the tables on him.  This would have been a much bigger surprise than what I’ve found to have been documented.

Given the presented evidence of his ongoing sufferings, if this case came to court now I might still ordinarily hope for a ruling in favour of Mr Davey. But on reflection, I think there’s an principle at work here:  one cannot justify the creation of a new nuisance, especially out of malice, in order to fix or protest against another.

A lot of water has passed under a lot of bridges since this case originally came to court in 1893.  I’m intrigued to see what others might think of this case in light of our present-day exposure to noise, and whether attitudes have changed about such confrontation.  I wonder if there are any more recent rulings that might counter this one?

Screenshot

Finding the right OS for a basic Asus Netbook

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Back in the fall of 2011 I found myself looking for a netbook-format computer, which I planned use for a combination of basic online, office and media work. Online work covers the usual email, social networking, blogging and surfing duties. Nothing too heavy, I’m not expecting to use this as a media playback machine for video, nor for games. Office-related work for me is the usual emailing, documentating and spreadsheet number-logging and number-crunching work, and the occasional printed letter. Media work is the basic management and non-critical editing of a large photo library, along with occasional audio mastering work.

Getting the hardware right

Lacking the funds for the MacBook Air that I would want for such duties, I had to look around at the netbook offerings from the rest of the market. All of them seemed to come with Windows 7 Starter Edition, and all of them seemed to offer the same 3 USB2.0 ports, SD card slot and analoge video output over VGA.

Aside from the occasional Nikon RAW photo, nothing of the work I want to do with such a machine is terribly processor-intensive, but I decided that something like the 1.6GHz Intel N570 dual-core Atom processor would give a reasonable compromise between cost, battery life, speed and future-proofing.

In fairness, there’s not much user-configuration to do on a Netbook beyond picking the right CPU/battery/storage-space for the job. All the netbooks I found were offered with only 1Gb RAM, which I thought would likely not be enough to get real work done in Windows 7, Starter Edition or not. I could easily see an upgrade to 2Gb on the cards, and was happy to see that all the netooks I found offered easy access to the RAM bays to do this.

So – I tried typing on a few machines to see how the keyboard felt, and how responsive each machine was. No point buying a machine which is unable to keep up with my slow typing, from new! Within a few minutes I found myself gravitating to the EeePC line, whose out-of-the-box software was slim enough to not bog the machine down in real use, while having a keyboard I could comfortably type on without feeling like I’m constantly having to “switch modes” from my full-sized work machines, Mac and PC alike.

So – The EeePC 1011PX became my weapon of choice – mostly because it was the only machine I felt comfortable with, that also offered a dual-core processor, decent-enough battery and reasonable hard-drive space: 320Gb is a welcome improvement on the 120-160Gb I found in other machines at a similar price-point, and should give me room to spare even with a decent (compressed) music and photo library on board.

Experience with Windows 7 – Starter Edition

So – I got the machine home, and started out with everything as it came out of the box. Windows 7 Starter Edition was a welcome modernisation on the Windows XP PC’s I’ve owned in the past. Coming back to the Windows from using Macs for 6 years was rather a shock I’ll admit – of the first 30 hours of real use I’d ended up spending 20 of them waiting for new updates to Windows, Office or other software. Thats not a good ratio, and the updates just never stopped. Absolutely hopeless.

When I was able to get real work done, I found the machine was paging to virtual memory on the hard drive pretty much constantly. Given that this only involved use of Google Chrome and/or LibreOffice, none of which for intensive tasks, it was pretty clear that a RAM upgrade was on the cards.

Asus says that this machine is capable of 2Gb RAM max, so that’s what I put in it for the princely sum of around £15 from a real bricks-and-mortar store. In Windows 7 the difference between 1Gb and 2Gb RAM was immediate, even under the lightest of use. No, it didn’t improve startup or application load times, but it was nice to finally have a machine that didn’t noticeably bog down over hours of use.

Over the next week I found a number of niggles with Windows 7 that lead me to ditch it:

  • Limitations of Starter Edition:
    • Maximum of 3 simultaneous applications. It’s not uncommon for me to have a media player, spreadsheet, word processor and web-browser open alongside each other. Bang – I’m over the limit already. None of these are intensive enough to bog down a Netbook, so this really is a silly arbitary rule that gets in the way unnecessarily.
    • Use of screen space. Again, this was a silly thing, but I found the task-bar taking up too much space for the functionality it gives. Netbooks with small screens need some thought applied to them on the part of developers, so that the content takes up more space than the UI that displays and manipulates it. All the Windows-based software failed this test badly, especially MS Office. I was able to do some things about this like hiding some toolbars, setting the taskbar to auto-hide, but it still didn’t feel right.
    • Typing lag. As the software updates racked up, the machine bogged down. I turned the bundled Anti-Virus software off which helped for a while, but the machine soon bogged down. There’s just no excuse for this kind of behaviour on any machine designed for real users.
    • Wallpaper. Yup – W7 Starter Edition doesn’t even let the user configure their wallpaper.
    • System backup/restore. I bought a 16Gb USB key to host a system-restore image because Asus, like pretty much every other manufacturer, doesn’t bundle even optical media to get the system reinstalled in the event of massive user error or hard-drive failure. It turned out that not one of the (confusing) array of built-in tools would create a bootable disk that would reinstall the system from scratch. The results were:
      • Software crash part-way through creation of the restoration media
      • Hardware crash during boot from restoration media
      • “Missing Operating System” error messages on booting from the restoration media
      • Once booted, the restoration software failed to see the backup image as a valid image, OR would refuse to recognise the machine as a valid installation target.
    • The results were repeatable across a variety of USB flash-drives, USB hard-drives and even DVD media created using an external drive plugged into this machine.

So, after wasting two days trying (and failing spectacularly) to get to a point where I was confident that I would be able to reinstall the system software in the event of a failure (which will happen one day), I took the decision to ditch the Windows install and look for something more suitable.

Alternative OS’s

I briefly tried and reviewed the following alternative operating systems, and concluded the following:

OS: Pros: Cons: Notes:
Android x86 ports Very, very fast even from SD card.Nice, modern interface, works well on smaller screens.Great battery life.

Small footprint.

Excellent syncronisation with Google mail, calendars, contacts.

 Software selection very limited.Getting the machine to sleep needs some hacks.Machine thinks it’s a phone, which means that its software doesn’t know how to interact with local file storage on a hard drive.

Too much reliance on a working Internet connection.

Stability issues.

Too much of a chore to get real work done, stored and sent out.

 

 One to watch.Releases 3 and 4 used.I really wanted this to work out – I’m all for “unusual” solutions where they bring real benefits.

 
Ubuntu 11.10 Well-known,All hardware works immediately.Stable.

Reasonable use of battery and other limited system resources.

Good selection of sofware bundled or in repos.

Long boot time.

Iphone Internet tethering worked out-of-the-box over USB

Great online forum community.

 Unity interface can get slow and glitchy.Gnome Shell nice enough but slow on mobile hardware.Needed time to whittle down the UI to make efficient use of display.

KDE too complex/fiddly for daily UI use, especially on small screen.

Flash video really slow, especially for BBC iPlayer content.

 Desktop/Window managers tried were:Unity (2D and 3D),Gnome 3

KDE 4

Openbox

LXDE
#! – Crunchbang linux Excellent speed.Light on resource.Highly customisable.

Hardware worked out-of-the-box.

Good range of software in repos.

Great online forum community.

 Iphone tethering took a lot of work to get running, including compiling a new kernel and some drivers/pairing software.Kernel and some other software running behind the times.  Recommended.My favourite out-of-the-box install, let down by driver support on newer hardware. 
Fedora 16 and 17 Faster than Ubuntu in general use.Great online forum community covering a wide range of uses. Even more resource-heavy than Ubuntu when running comparable desktop/window-managers.UI default settings not good on small screens.Slower bootup than Ubuntu. I loved releases 1-3 back in the day, but I think it’s been surpassed for most” normal” users by Ubuntu.
Haiku OS Fabulous speed and use of resources.UI is efficient and great on small displays. Clearly not a “finished” solution.Software and drivers not available. One to watch.I was a fan of BeOS 5 back in the day, and would really like to see its community-driven successor.
Joli OS (Jolicloud) Nice presetation of applications.Online syncronisation of apps, settings and content is enticing.Based on Ubuntu. Iphone tethering never worked correctly.Dropbox integration doesn’t produce a local cache.Integration with Google Docs needs a working Internet connection.

“Offline” operations are possible but not easy.

Application “store” not terribly intuitive.

 I wanted this to work, but the silliness of having no offline cache or operability with built-in apps made me run away screaming.
Chrome OS Similar to Joli OS Hampered the same way as Joli OS.Wasn’t able to try on real hardware as none of the available builds booted on this machine.
Pear OS Slicker than Ubuntu, slightly quicker to boot. French localisation can’t entirely be turned off.Some rough edges to UI,Some installable software didn’t work correctly One to watch, if it ever takes itself seriously enough to fix the rough edges.Watch out for a lawsuit from Apple – there’s a lot of UI similarities and even straight copies of some elements. Good for Apple-savvy users, perhaps. 
Peppermint OS Two Almost as quick as Crunchbang, to boot and in use.Quicker in use than Ubuntu.All hardware worked out-of-the-box.

Default Openbox config works well on small screens as it comes.

Insane battery life compared with box-fresh Ubuntu or Windows 7 installs.

 Some fiddling required to make it look and operate like a modern OS.Iphone Internet tethering worked, but only after installing ipheth-pair software.  The all-round winner in my testing.

The above list is by no means complete, and clearly doesn’t cover every option out there. It does cover a good range I think of the different OS concepts and OS’s out there,

Building my workspace in Peppermint OS Two:

So far I’ve imported my documents, music and photos, and have installed:

  • Peppermint OS Two base installation
  • LibreOffice office suite, with toolbars set to “small” mode.
  • Evolution for email, contacts and calendar management, synchronised to Google account with built-in tools.
  • Dropbox for online document storage/backup.
  • xcompmgr for screen shadow and transparency effects.
  • Docky for Mac-OS-like dock. I’m a sucker for UI niceties, so long as they’re capable of getting out of the way when I’m trying to get real work done.
  • Ipheth-pair utility to get iPhone Internet tethering working.
  • Shotwell for photo library management and basic editing.
  • Audacity for basic sound editing.
  • Gimp for more advanced image processing/editing.
  • VLC media player.
  • Google Chrome browser. It’s built-in bookmarks/app/settings synchronisation has been a genuine lifesaver while I’ve been trying to find the right OS/workspace for this machine, working for everything except Haiku OS and (strangely) Android.
  • Gwibber for basic access to Twitter.
  • Skype for transatlantic voice/video calls.
  • DOSBox for some light relief playing old games, such as:
    • Monkey Island
    • Simcity Classic
    • Simcity 2000
    • Lemmings
    • Pipe Dreams
    • Test Drive series

Things to fix:

As I’ve typed this post, I’ve found that everything seems to be working well together, with LibreOffice Writer consistently keeping up with my (not exactly stellar) typing speed. There have been a couple of niggles though:

  • Backup
  • Trackpad – it works, but a little too well during typing, sometimes invoking a click as I tap it accidentally while typing, even when I’ve turned “tap to click” off.
  • Screen colour calibration – I’ve been spoiled by how easy this is to do (by eye) using built-in tools on Mac OS X, and could do with finding a similar method here on Linux.

Facebook, Timeline and a new insight?

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Yeah-yeah, so I quit Facebook an age ago.  And I still make a point of asking “What’s Facebook?” whenever friends talk about it at parties and such.  But some family and friends are still getting useful things from it, so I get to hear different bits and bobs about it from time to time.  So far I’ve yet to have a compelling reason to go back, and the forthcoming new Timeline feature seems as if it’ll push more people away from Facebook when they realise how much of their privacy they’ve (knowingly or not) surrendered for the sake of “connecting online”.  More at Slashgear here.

An interesting comment under that article hit a nerve, and I wonder what others reading this might think of it:
They’ll update everyone to Timeline and have no option to switch back. What are you going to do? Stop using Facebook? HAHAHAHAHAFacebook has long been reminiscent of an abusive relationship. No matter what terrible thing they do, the victim stays with them anyway.
My bold – I mention it here because the sentiment resonates with so many behaviour patterns I see in the friends and family around me, especially in their relations with companies where they have a choice on whether to do business with them.

DHL collections: A special type of customer service fail

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So here’s a new customer service policy.

I had an expensive widget break down – a heavy widget.  So I sought help from the manufacturer who says “okay, we’ll repair it – and we’ll have someone collect it from you”.  Great.

So a couple of days later a DHL shipping label and a box arrive.  Dutifully, I put the widget in the box, then printed and attach shipping label to said box, waiting for courier to turn up.

Here’s where the wheels fall off the process:

Part of the process of the manufacturer booking the collection means that a weight for the package is printed on the shipping label. BUT: that data does not get transferred to the courier in the booking process.

So what happens is, the driver turns up, takes one look at the package and the weight, then says something like “too heavy. Someone will come round tomorrow”.  Except that nobody in our office remembers anyone doing that and the first I knew about it was a phone call that came in late yesterday to tell me what had happened.

So, rather than just calling me or a colleague to help with getting the heavy parcel into the van (about a 5 min job), they instead drive off to the next location, call it into base as too heavy, have someone call me to explain the situation, rebook after I get (hopefully not too) annoyed at them and insist it was picked up same-day, then someone else fails to turn up to do that job, then I end up spending most of my day trying to talk to someone about why things failed and how the heck we’re gonna get this thing outta my office today.  About 8 man-hours lost, along with lots more CO2 and a complaint made against a driver for not turning up.

Think it’s time DHL and other couriers get their act together to stop us wasting so much of our lives – and obvious flaws as crucial information not being fed through the data chain such as size and weight of the package really does need fixing. Surely this whole saga is costing DHL far more to sort out than it has me so far?

London Riots: God protects…

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Interesting seeing how God protects us when we choose to live for, work for and serve Him rather than ourselves. A while back I lived in Walworth, just a couple of roads away from the goings-on detailed in the following quote, submitted anonymously to The Guardian earlier this evening:

I turned up at the Morrisons supermarket branch on Walworth Road, SE17, at about 6.50pm only to find the place shuttered up and one of the few members of staff remaining by the back door telling me that they had closed early as it was due to “go off” in Peckham, four miles away, at 7pm.

I left and dropped into a bar to pass on ‘the news’ only to see BBC World footage on the TV, taken from a helicopter by the look of it, of nearby Lewisham burning, and Peckham soon after. Within minutes, fives and sixes of masked blokes were running past the bar and through to the main street, a handful dumping cars outside the bar on double yellow and charging through to the nearby thoroughfare, which the police had blockaded at the north end in the vicinity of the Tankard pub, along the side road from the police station.

Buses were stopped and abandoned, I’m told, and looters were laying siege to Lynne’s Electrical, jewellery and pawn shops, the Carphone Warehouse, Foot Locker and later M&S and finally Argos, and that’s all that I heard. Others will have been done, although the Turkish supermarket was apparently left alone.The pie and mash shop in the sidestreet of Westmoreland Road was also entered and trashed

Young men, 90% of them black, and the occasional middle-to-old aged black woman, then spent the next hour or so running through the sidestreets with their pickings, the first of them with widescreen TVs, boxes that contained kettle-sized electrical goods, trainers and the like from Foot Locker, and M&S clothing. A white 20-something one with a bad limp came to the door of the bar to ask them to call him a cab. The request was declined.

Some of the looters dumped gear in nearby gardens and returned to the Walworth Road, others had filled wheelie bins with whatever and were pushing them home, while the professionals returned to the double-parked cars (BMWs and the like, tinted windows in at least two cases) before replacing their masks and returning for any pickings they may have missed.

Innocent people turned up at the bar who had been diverted around the sidestreets, one telling me he saw a gang of about 10 black youths throw a man off his motorbike at Albany Road traffic lights before another rode it on in the direction of Camberwell. then the cyclists around him at the traffic lights who tried to help were attacked with weapons by hooded and/or masked vigilantes coming from the vicinity of adjacent Burgess Park.

People in the bar who lived on the other side of the Walworth Road were ringing relatives/kids on the other side of it not to open their doors to anyone – it was anarchy in the literal sense of the word.

Two police vans finally made it up to Argos at about 8.30pm, which dispersed the people in and outside there sporadically. They had been in there for about an hour though people were still loitering in nearby streets with intent at nightfall. We can only hope that nothing is torched by late arrivals who find themselves empty handed. That, or the police regain control of the thoroughfare.

What I find most amazing, is that had I not married and moved away, then after the day I’ve had at work today I’d have walked home. To Walworth. At that time. And gotten completely caught up in it all. There are no coincidences.  God knows what He’s doing, even when I don’t know anything…

I can only hope and pray that such protection continues to be afforded while the authorities bring things under control.

U-Turn ahead: cheques are not being phased out!

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Charities and individuals alike have been worried for some months now about rumblings surrounding the abolishment of cheques (or “checks” to any US readers) here in the UK. For the most part, the major concern has been that without them, there would be no easily-usable way of transferring funds to charities, to churches, or between individuals without learning Internet Banking or making a trip to the bank.

Well, we need worry no longer.  I’ve just seen a statement from the Payments Council saying that cheques will be kept in use, and the 2018 deadline for their demise has been lifted.  From their statement:

The Payments Council is today (12 July 2011) announcing that cheques will continue for as long as customers need them and the target for possible closure of the cheque clearing in 2018 has been cancelled.  The Payments Council Board will continue to focus on security, efficiency and encouraging innovation in all types of payments to ensure customers have options best suited to the 21st century.

I wonder what this means for cheque guarantee cards, and for the businesses who have already stopped accepting cheque payments due to the previous plans to phase them out? I also wonder what exactly it was that made the Payments Council change their mind?

A theory on sodcasting might be so prevalent

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The BBC ran an interesting article asking (and seeking to explain) why young people like to broadcast their (often poor) music tastes to everyone in shouting distance on crummy, tinny mobile phones, from equally crummy tinny MP3/MP4 files.  The Urban Dictionary refers to this as “sodcasting“.

I think the article is wrong, and here’s why:  Based on my experience with call centres recently, every time I get put on hold I get to hear some new canned music.  My usual response is to put the phone into “speakerphone” mode so I can get on with other things at my desk, thus broadcasting the mess to the rest of the office.  This has two effects:

  1. Everyone else in the office gets an opportunity to ridicule the company in question, awarding points for the longest wait, the cheesiest music, the worst call quality, and the highest importance placed on the call.
  2. Everyone else gets to have a bit of their soul eaten by whatever garbage is spilling out of the phone.  It’s group therapy of sorts.  ”I *so* know your pain…”
This happens on standard desk phones.  Well, now that mobile technology has moved on to allow for handsfree kits of any reasonable usefulness, the kids are making good use of it.  Maybe we need to give them more credit, and assume that the piped garbage is not actually part of their own music collection.  Maybe it’s the hold music of the companies they’re having to call to get topups and such.  And maybe when they call on the move, they’re only doing the same as I do here in the office.

More “Accident” spam texts – Ignore, report and ignore.

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Just got another SPAM message from +44 7591 260388 saying that I’ve still not claimed for that accident I never had, as I wrote about here earlier this year.

Again, I’ve ignored it and would continue to advise others to do the same.  Replying with the word ”STOP” as suggested in the text is thought to confirm your mobile number as being valid and active, opening the gates to yet more spam.

O2 SPAM prevention service

If you’re on O2, then you can flag it up wit them forward such suspicious unsolicited text messages to 7726, as per the advice on their website.  Thing is, my phone doesn’t have a “forward” function that I’m aware of for SMS, so I’m hoping they have the sense to block the number I quoted, not the number I sent it from!  Time will tell.

Why I committed Facebook suicide.

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So I pulled the plug on Facebook earlier today, which might seem a rather random action to those who follow me here and on Twitter. I gave no warning, I just went ahead and did it. Part of me feels a bit sad, and I’ll miss the ability to keep in touch with particular friends and family in the way that Facebook enabled. There are some things I won’t miss, as I’ll briefly explain.

Ownership of my information

So far as I can tell, WordPress currently only displays information about me that I choose to be there, when I choose for it to be there. I can delete and edit anything I like, when I like. I can move away from it to another site or system how and when I choose.

Twitter is perhaps a less-known quantity, even if it is currently my primary online social-networking tool. I can seek information when I choose, and it only displays on my profile what I choose to be there. Sure, people can mention me and I’ll appear on timelines in a different light than I might like. But in general I feel much more in control of the content I put there, and feel more able to trust what happens to that information.

Facebook has turned on many sharing features recently that have “leaked” things like contact information and relationships over the last few years, and each time has required me to jump through hoops to turn information feeds off to those to whom I’d rather remain just another face in the crowd. The news in recent days of facial recognition functionality being switched on without notice on the site itself was the final nail in the coffin. Yes, it’s only suggesting to people I know that I might be a person in their photo, but I’d rather have that functionality built into a computer operating system or web browser, based on information I’ve fed it, rather than have it as part of a bigger machine that can only make the functionality invisible to me.

On a more emotive level, there’s something more than a little creepy about a business that makes its money sharing and advertising to those who live their lives within reach of it.

Time is valuable

Various factors have come together recently that have conspired to help me learn to organise and use my time more effectively. Facebook was a time-sink for me, yet in the bigger scheme of things didn’t offer anything valuable in return.

Twitter has been a valuable resource for looking up realtime information about things happening around me, and has helped me engage with the local community in quite unexpected ways, especially when used in combination with blogs like this one.

WordPress has enabled some interesting conversations and interactions, and it seems that some posts have been informative to others facing similar situations to those I’ve described. I don’t claim to be a fount of all, or any knowledge – but my mistakes and lessons learned can help others in a way that status updates on Facebook just don’t hit.

Add to this that the Facebook interface had become generally feature-bloated and unreliable, especially on my phone, while things like email, blogs and Twitter carry on with their given functions with much greater efficiency and more tangible results.

Relationships are valuable

If I’m really set on keeping in touch with friends and family, then shouldn’t I be writing letters, picking up the phone, sending emails, sending photos or even arranging meets? Facebook is useful for all of these things in its way, but I don’t want such communications being owned by any company or entity other than myself and those I’m communicating with. When I send a letter, it doesn’t become the property of Royal Mail. They don’t sell copies of all or parts of the letters to advertisers. They don’t tell Amazon that they recently delivered an box of fluff to my door, so that Amazon can try to sell me books about that fluff.

And yes, it’s nice to be able to feel smug or angry about something and to share that with a select group of individuals, as I did so willingly on Facebook and will likely continue to do on Twitter. But I feel my relationships have suffered because Facebook was becoming the fount of knowledge about what I and those around me were getting up to, and I was willingly letting it stifle the very reason for those friendships and relationships to exist in the first place.

No, my personal relationships probably won’t get any better as a result of today’s decision, but at least I don’t have the ongoing Facebook conversations as the smug excuse for not spending time with or taking time for people.

So that’s the real killer issue for me – WordPress and Twitter have created real relationships with tangible output. Not always benefits, but experiences and genuine connections at some level. And that surely is what social media tools should enable?

“Yes” or “No” to AV? Ummmm…

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So it’s the night before the big vote here in the UK, where we will vote on possibly the biggest political change in a generation. So which way should we vote?

Frankly I can’t decide. And that disturbs me, because I can normally form an opinion one way or the other on pretty much any subject. But the best I can do for this one is say ‘meh’.

In my view, neither side has actually presented a clear objective argument for or against their own cause. Or at least if they have, I’ve yet to hear that through the media.

The answer I think will come to me in the morning, where I’ll take a look at each campaign’s website and see which feels more right to me – but as it stands right now I’m going to have to seek out the location of those sites. On the one hand, I feel good about actively engaging with the issue. On the other hand, it seems rather sad to me that neither side has used the media enough to send out enough of a clear message for such pro-activeness to be unnecessary.

Perhaps one ironic outcome of tomorrow’s vote is that very few of us will have cared enough to seek information to form an informed view on the matter, so either they won’t vote, or will simply flip a coin for it with no thought towards the consequences.

I hope the right answer comes out. I just wish I could decide what *I* think that is and why. I fear there are too many others thinking the same…

**UPDATE**

Some more trains of thought have passed since writing the original post. Let me explain:

Maybe what we’re being asked to vote on tomorrow isn’t the core problem with politics in the UK. Maybe the problem is what we expect of our politicians to be doing when they come to power. Party politics has lead to an interesting disconnection between what is debated in Parliament (along with how and why), compared with what the average person on the street is concerned with. I wonder how a shift away from party politics towards individuals voted on the basis that their views most closely reflect those of their constituents might affect the politics and decision-making in this country. Would such a system produce better decisions? Would it lead to more engagement on key issues from the “man on the Clapham omnibus”? Would it lead to more satisfaction among the general population, knowing that their opinions are better informing key issues? Would voter apathy become a thing of the past? Would the country be more stable?

As I muse over this tonight and tomorrow morning, I have a hunch that saying “yes” to AV tomorrow might be the better way to introduce such significant changes to the politics and mindset of this country, and that voting “no” might serve to say that the UK population is happy with the party political system as it is – which would seem to me to be a logical fallacy, given how many people surrounding me seem overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the major parties swapping governmental power between them with very little positive net change, and with what so many around me seem to think is so little input from them.