Furthermore: April 2005

April 28, 2005

Gmail invites

I have a bunch of these, if there’s still anyone left that wants one. Reply here, or to matt dot freestone at gmail dot com

April 26, 2005

The Plough, Fen Ditton

Went to the Plough at Fen Ditton on Sunday for lunch. The food’s not the greatest, but it’s okay - Brewers Fayre I think. The main attraction is to be able to sit outside by the river and enjoy a drink and a meal with friends.

More on Cambridge Blogs

After a little work, I have a list of about 50 blogs that have been updated within the last year at least. You can see my list here:

del.icio.us/crocomancer/cambridge+blog

or if you look in the left column of the main page of this blog you’ll see all the feeds I could find in the blogroll. If you want to use them yourself, I have exported them to OPML here

If you have a blog you think I’ve missed, then by all means post a comment, drop me a mail, or just add an entry to delicious with the tags cambridge and blog - I have a feed for that page so I’ll see it sooner or later.

My plan now is to just sit on the links in bloglines for a couple of weeks or so and see what gets updated regularly, occasionally and not at all. I’ll probably add some more tags to the delicious list after that.

April 19, 2005

LibDems and NotApathetic

Just been out leafletting for the Cambridge LibDems and also for NotApathetic.com. I resisted the temptation to put deliver both sets of leaflets to the same houses - didn’t seem right somehow, so that added quite a lot onto the time it took.

Also just dumped my lazyweb idea for a living will generator onto the mysociety wiki.

Still lots of Cambridge blogs to sort through - I want to put as many of the feeds as possible into my Bloglines blogroll + update the delicious list with a quick comment on each blog.

April 14, 2005

Cambridge Blogs

I’ve been doing a quick (hah - it’s taken much longer than I thought) survey of Cambridge (UK) blogs. By a blog here, I basically mean something with an RSS or Atom feed. I’ve also restricted myself to individual or small group blogs.

So far I’ve found about 35 active sites using a mixture of Google, Technorati, and following other peoples blogrolls. I’m in two minds whether to list the sites here directly or just keep them on delicious. So far I’ve not really added any description for the sites, but I’ll go through the list now and have a go at that as I get some time. I’ll also try to add the rest of the feeds to my Blogroll.

I estimated there to be somewhere between 100 and 200 blogs in Cambridge before I started (guessing 1 in a 1000 are bloggers in the city basically). I haven’t really searched everything yet, so there could easily be as many again that I haven’t found, which would give 70 or so, which is not far off.

Anyway, if you are blogging in Cambridge (UK) and you see this, post a comment and I’ll add you to the delicious list (or just post there with the tags Cambridge and blog and I’ll see it when I next check that feed).

Update: I’ve now got about 45 sites, and I’m starting to see links back to sites I’ve seen already. There seem to be a lot of LiveJournalists in Cambridge. I’ve turned trackback on for this post (it’s going off again if I get a lot of spam) so you can use that too now.

Places to Go

I’ve just created a new category of Places to Go, which I’ll be using for all excursions, holidays, and suchlike. There’s a few pieces there already - Burghley House, Cromer, Wimpole Hall. More soon.

April 12, 2005

Election Links

I seem to have seen a fair number of election-related links, so I thought I’d gather them together here.

• Chris Lightfoot on the polling evidence - lots of interesting stuff, particularly if you live in Cambridge. I’m supporting the Lib Dems here (for this election at least) and there’s at least some hope here that the seat might be winnable, although it depends a lot how you massage the numbers. We’ll see on the night.



• Not Apathetic - one of the MySociety projects. I’ve sorta volunteered through the as-yet unfinished PledgeBank to deliver 100 leaflets in the local area. Blogging should reach at least 3 more…


• Pledgebank - another one I just saw. Mr Lightfoot wants some help comparing reasons for not voting logged on NotApathetic.


• VoxPolitics - just saw this the other day. Politics and social software for the UK


• Make My Vote Count - online petition for fair votes. via Paul Oldham on cam.misc

April 7, 2005

Links

I’m using del.icio.us for links now, and I want to push the feed onto this site, but I haven’t got round to writing the bits of script yet, so here’s a little catch-up:

• Petals Round the Rose - yeah, everyone’s seen it, but it’s still a nice little puzzle.


• Joseph Mugnaini - when I was very little, my dad read Ray Bradbury’s The Hallowe’en Tree to me and my brother. This guy did the fantastic illustrations.


• cam.misc - interesting thread on the workings of Cambridge City Council.



• How ID Cards were abolished - I heard David Howarth tell this story at the No2ID public meeting, but I couldn’t remember the details. Thanks to Richard for posting this.


• British Roads FAQ - via cam.misc. Ever wondered how the roads are numbered?


• How Rich Are You? - rough reckoner for your position in the global wealth list. Lots of quibbles could be made (and are in the CT comments) but it’s still a bit of an eye-opener.

More on Knee Problems

I went to see someone who actually knows about knees, and I’ve been diagnosed with chondromalacia - also known as runner’s knee as it is apparently pretty common in runners. Anyway, I have to rest the knee for a bit, and then I need to look into what might be causing the underlying problem - could be overpronation, although I’ve been using the same kind of fairly neutral shoes for a long time now without any problem.