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Author: RayB

Politics Promises and Buses

Politics Promises and Buses

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Well, that didn’t take long. As many will be aware, we have the mayoral elections here in London this week. It’ll be the 3rd time that London has gone to the polls for this purpose; Ken Livingstone won on the first two occasions and Boris Johnson on the third.

I’m not going to get political, that is not what this is about, but I will say that when Ken got in the first time he said he’d bring in the Congestion Charge. Like it or hate it, he did exactly what he said he would and a politician that does that has to be credited for it in this day and age, where vacuous nothings are muttered to the electorate followed months and years later by excuses as to why whatever it was didn’t happen.

In the interests of balance, when Boris was running for mayor, he said he’d rid London of the “bendy-buses”. Fair play to him the idiot actually did it! There were some routes for which the bendy-bus was suited, both in terms of capacity and road types, but does he do a feasibility study? Does he look at each route on its own merits? No. So we’ve now got loads more buses clogging up the roads in the capital. Well done, Bungle! I’ll save my comments on the new “Routemaster for London” or “Boris Bus” for another day, but to be clear, I am a fan of our bus network, I just wish he’d looked before we were all forced to leap.

Anyway – prior to the last general election I sought out the e-mail addresses of all the candidates standing in my local area and wrote to them all, asking about policies and the like. I got a grand total of 0 responses, yet they want my vote?

I sent e-mails to both Ken and Boris’ respective campaign teams asking for details of the planned dates and locations that their “battle buses” would be stopping so that I could perhaps find one and ask some questions. I also asked this on Twitter and with 4 days to go have heard nothing – yet they want my vote?

I don’t expect a personal reply from either of the main men, but from what I see and hear they have enough flunkies walking two paces behind with their tongues hanging out, so I think it reasonable to at least be sent a link to the timetables for these buses?

At a more local level, I’ve not had a single representative for any party come to the door and do that thing formerly known as “canvassing”. Not one. I live in an area that, not too long ago, had a number of wins for the BNP, but even they seem to have tucked their tails in, this time.

So, the quandary – who do I vote for on Thursday?

…and we’re off!

…and we’re off!

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As this is the first entry, I’ll probably hark back to things that have happened outside of the last week, but where I can I’ll try and give some background.

About 10 days ago, my main PC decided to retire. It would have been nice to have some notice – but putting its ticket in at late o’clock on a Wednesday is not really the thing to do , is it? I built it in 2007 and have treated it to the odd upgrade over time, but it this was seemingly “it”.

I was on a photo shoot south of the river on the Thursday so could not really do much about it until the Friday. Much investigation of my usual suppliers took place and I went ahead and ordered a AMD processor, AS Rock board and some suitable memory. Of course, new motherboard means new OS, which turned out to be the lion’s share of the cost. I still think it is grossly unfair of Microsoft not to let people who have already purchased and OS use it on upgraded machines – especially when there is an equipment malfunction, so wanker of the week award for that week went their way. I’m now the proud (?) owner of Windows 7 Pro 64-bit OS. So far, so good.

Having made my selections I called the supplier and placed the order, only to be told that it was too late now to send the kit out for a Monday delivery, so it would arrive on Tuesday instead. Not a lot to be done about that, really.

I was up in Nottingham on the Saturday and had some other bits to do on the Sunday so it was not really a hardship, besides, I’ve always got the laptop. I stripped out everything from the case on Monday and gave it a good clean – upon close examination of the extracted motherboard, I noticed signs of charring on the underside, roughly where the end of the graphics card would sit on the reverse side. As the card I was using was not particularly demanding, it was fairly clear that something else had gone wrong at component level and that the board was effed.

The “good news” was that the memory and processor were okay, so if anyone needs a an Intel Socket 775 2.66Mhz Dual core processor c/w fan and 4GB of memory, please get in touch. They’ll come attached to the motherboard, which I’ll throw in at no extra cost!

Luckily, all 4 hard drives and one of the DVD units could be re-used, so I set them aside until the new kit was in place. The kit arrived on Tuesday and was operational inside 2 hours. When checking that I’d have the right number of SATA cables for the new board I’d obviously cocked up somewhere and found myself one short. A quick order to www.kenable.co.uk remedied this but it did mean that it would be another day before the case could be closed up. Everything has been working fine up until this point (Sunday) so hopefully I’ll get as much service out of this as I did from its predecessor.

Some will know that I’m a fan of Southampton FC. If you didn’t, you do now. The club has been through a rough few years but since being saved from the brink of extinction in 2009, things have turned around. This Saturday saw the final game of the season for the football league and we were in contention for a 2nd place finish with West Ham – whoever did finish in second would gain automatic promotion to the Premier league, the other team may still make it but has to endure the lottery that is the play-off rounds first.

There were numerous permutations as to who needed to win/lose/draw, how many goals etc. and I won’t go into them all here – firstly they are all documented elsewhere and secondly there were so many combinations, I’d end up losing the will to live. In a nutshell, if we won, we’d be up, if we lost and West Ham won, they’d be up and if we drew and West Ham won, it would come down to things like goal difference, which way the wind was blowing at kick-off and all sorts. Luckily, we beat already relegated Coventry 4-0 so all you could hear when goal number 4 went in was the sound of abacus beads being shuffled as the stattos put their toys away.

I watched the game live on the BBC and have to admit to getting just a little emotional as the final whistle blew. Luckily I was at home so there was no one to witness my usual granite-like personage in a bit of a state, but we were up and that was all that really mattered. Soon after, SMS and e-mail messages started to arrive, which was nice. I had a quick exchange with a QPR supporting friend that I thought was still in Thailand on holiday, it turned out he was back in the UK so I called him and we had a good chat about the game and hoping that QPR can manage to avoid relegation (they got thumped 6-1 away to Chelsea today but I don’t know how that looks in the table yet).

When our teams were in the same division for a couple of seasons recently, we went to respective home and away games. As someone who used to go regularly I really enjoyed these days out as I’ve not seen Saints play too often since moving back up to London. My friend has been a season ticket holder at QPR for many, many years and has featured as fan of the week or whatever it is in their match-day programmes more than once. Our hope is that we can both be looking at the same fixture list come the new season and that we can resume trading insults, going to games and the “£5 per goal scored for/against each other over the season” wager. The last time we did this, I was £15 down, but I seem to remember the previous time, I came out on top.

I know he’ll read this at some point, so, in writing, I’m going to be an honorary Hoops fan for the remaining games and hope we get to go to Loftus Road and Saint Mary’s in the coming season.

One of the other “little projects” I’ve been working on this week is putting all of my CD’s onto a hard-drive. I did this once before but somehow a lot of them seem to have “vanished”. I’ll blame the troll that lives in the cupboard, but I’ve probably hit delete at the wrong time…

Why am I doing this? Well, I needed to put back that which had been at the mercy of the troll and it makes loading up my Blackberry with music so much easier. I can also listen to music as I write, or edit photos or do any number of things on the new super-powered PC! I’ve also got a collection of downloaded music, so it makes sense to have it all in one place, on the server here. In doing this, I’ve re-discovered some bands or artists that I’d not heard in ages but also come across some CD’s that have no business being in the collection of someone with impeccably discerning tastes, such as myself. I’m sure these few discs have been slipped into bags or put on shelves when I’ve been distracted…

Today has been spent handling the CD’s, reloading the site you are looking at now and just generally pottering about. I was going to go out with the camera, but the weather has been atrocious – it and the main lenses are “weather-proof” but I don’t think that extends as far as the deluges we’ve had today – I didn’t fancy the risk, anyway.