I voted today and for the first time in many years, I felt odd about it. Unconnected from the process. Previously, walks to, and from, the polling station would have been filled with debate, and the odd argument, on the different candidates, their policies, and what it would mean. This evening it was just me and my thoughts, composing this post as I walked along. This is the first time in years I have not been actively engaged in the very policies that affect me.

I couldn’t pick my candidates out of a line up if you paid me.
I have no idea which party is best for my area.

So I was left voting for the party which has held my allegiance for years now. So I invariably voted for that party in the past as well, but then I at least felt that I was making an informed decision.

What is different about this year? It’s simple – this year I am not working for the local government. Between 2006 and 2008, my life was inextricably linked to the policies and the people that made them. My job was, to a certain extent, dependent on the whim of the councillors I voted for each year. They weren’t just faces on an election leaflet to me, or names on a ballot – they were people who I might talk to on the phone, or hold a meeting with. I wrote briefing papers to sway their opinion one way or the other. You couldn’t help but know the ins and outs of how the local government was made up, and it certainly made you appreciate being able to vote for new bosses each year!

Since moving to Oxford, I have moved in different circles. I have felt completely separated from local politics and I have missed the knowledge I used to have about what was happening in my community. I never thought I was privileged before, but I realise I was actually very lucky.

I could have kept myself up to date, read the leaflets, watched the news, but somehow I just couldn’t engage myself to do that. And if I, an educated, intelligent woman, couldn’t engage, are we really to be surprised when turnout is so low?

Either way, if you haven’t already, there is still time till the polls close this evening. Your vote really does matter. Feel your Council Tax is too high? (This, for the curious, is what has led me to have to depart from Palace Meadows). Want to grumble with me about the state of parking in the city, or how stupid the recycling system is? If you didn’t vote, I will refuse to talk to you about it.

Take it from me, your local councillors really DO have a lot of impact on how you live your daily lives. It’s up to you to make sure your opinion is listened to. As a nation we are incredibly fortunate to have regular and democratic elections. Make the most of it.

Just so you know, I’m breaking a cardinal rule and blogging whilst drunk here. OK, not drunk, just mildly merry, but still. Intoxicated. Not good. Please feel free to ignore anything said from here on in…

Why am I buzzed on a school night? Because this evening was the work annual party (because we rock), so the whole division went punting on the Cherwell, then had a lovely BBQ, and wine, and strawberries and cream. You really couldn’t have had a more English evening! Plus the weather was perfect.

Only one movie trailer for you today – it’s been a bit of a quiet week. There was this one to do with secret agent guinea pigs, but I just couldn’t bring myself to sully the blog with it. Low they might be, but I *do* have standards.

So the trailer?

9 – I’ve shown the teaser to this before (and actually the teaser works better, more intriguing), but this still looks like an awesomely screwball movie from some brilliant minds. A must see.

Before you start, yesterday was a bank holiday here in the UK, and I was busy riding on a motorbike and enjoying the sun too much to post. So we will have a Movie Tuesday instead…

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh – Michael Chabon is a genius, so of course I want to see this!
Gamer – mmmmmmmm Gerard Butler doing his stuff. See last week’s reasoning re pretty men and blowing shit up.
Quiet Chaos – something for a DVD I think, if only because a cinema release over here is a lot less likely, but the story really intrigues me.
Sherlock Holmes – oh, come on. Robert Downey Jr. Enough said! But it also look so, so kick-assly funny!

In other news, Meadow Palace is shortly going to become Meadow-need-a-new-name! I’m moving house in three weeks time. Eek! This whole spur of the moment stuff is turning into something of a habit for me. For someone who professes, loudly, that she wants to put down roots and hates surprises, I sure am putting myself in the way of a lot of change at the moment. Clearly the wanderlust side of me is stronger right now – it’s happy with the work side of things, so it’s meddling in the living arrangements.

All fun, though I am having serious doubts about how I am going to orchestrate the mechanics of the move. Despite being ruthless and ditching a shed load of crap when I moved up to Oxford eight months ago, I still have so much stuff, with the buggersome problem that it is all the stuff I WANT/NEED on a regular basis. Hmmmmm. When are the geeks going to perfect that site-to-site transporter beam, hey?

But I get a cat! The house has a cat!!!! She’s called Whisky and is apparently very, very grumpy, but I am sure I will win her around. And I here by promise not to post too many cat pictures. Perhaps a limit of one a week?

Till tomorrow my lovelies 🙂

I wrote most of this sitting on the train into London, whilst zooming across the country to spend the afternoon celebrating my brother’s birthday with a BBQ. Yes, we British are trying a BBQ on a May weekend – you wondered why the weather had taken a turn for the worse?

How am I writing a post if I am on a train? One of the multitude of notebooks I own? The PocketCalculator hauled out for a trip? Neither. I am typing this (with a few typos!) on my teeny-tiny new netbook, an Acer Aspire One with a 9” screen, 16GB solid state HD and running Ubuntu Linux.

I LOVE my MiniMe! It is just so, so… Dinky, to nick someone elses term. Plus it does all I need it to. Before I start my review properly, I should outline what prompted my decision to get a netbook/ultra-portable.

I have taken to doing writing during my lunch break at work, as I just never seem to get around to it in the evening. For a while I was taking in the PocketCalculator, but I never felt comfortable- it was heavy to lug around, and I was acutely aware that, if it broke or got nicked, I would need to shell out near one and a half grand to replace it. I just can’t afford that. So I started to think about netbooks. Really, really light and portable machines I could just use for writing. I wanted to avoid Windows if at all possible and all that lugging around made the thought of a solid-state hard drive appealing.

So after looking at lots of reviews online, I was leaning towards the Dell Mini 9, if only because people have successfully made them into Hackintoshes (i.e., running OSX), but they were pricy…

Which is where a recent trip back to Somerset came in very handy indeeed. Taunton is blessed with a Comet, a Curry’s, a Staples and a PCWorld all in a row. All four the main suppliers of computing technology offline. Result. I wandered around, played, asked questions, pondered, and at the end of an hour, the Acer Aspire One was the only (and best) choice.

It ran Linux. Check.
It had a solid state option. Check.
The keyboard didn’t feel too bendy when typed on. Check.
The screen was crystal clear, far more clear in fact than my PocketCalculator. Check.
It came in a colour other than black (blue). Check.
It had WiFI and a good smattering of ports (3x USB, screen, headphone, mic, sd/microsd/etc). Check.
It was light and had an approximately 3 hour battery life. Check.
The trackpad was really, really responsive. Check.
It was the cheapest of the lot. Result!

169.99 GBP (In Comet. The Windows/larger spinning hd options cost more)

So does it do all I want it to? How has the first few weeks with the MiniMe gone?

I love it. I adore it. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I should point out, I have ONLY been using it for writing. I have yet to connect it to the Net, but it has done everything else so well I can only imagine that it would do that perfectly too – after all, that is what it was designed for.

You boot it up and are greeted with a customized homescreen divided into CONNECT (Mail, Firefox, address book, Messenger, RSS reader and more), WORK (the OpenOffice suite, of which the Word-clone behaves almost identically to a stripped down Microsoft Word), FUN (lots of games, but the demo versions are all crippled so tend to stop after a certain number of moves. Annoying. You can upgrade to the full versions, but they cost and I am trying to keep the distraction down) and FILES (self explanatory).

You then navigate to what you want to do et voila.

It’s not as speedy as modern PCs, but then what can you expect from a stripped down processor and Flash storage? It is perfectly fast enough if you get over the desire for instantanteous programme opening.

The screen works well in bright environments (e.g., on a train with the sun streaming through the window), but I’ve yet to try it outside on a bright, sunny day. I’ll update when I have had the joy of writing in the park.

The keyboard is perfectly responsive, if a little ‘clicky’. The spacebar doesn’t always trigger, but that is more down to getting used to the much smaller footprint of the keyboard. Your early typing WILL look like a brain-injured spider has tap danced on the keyboard, but I adapted pretty rapidly.

Here’s a tip if you are in OpenOffice and it is refusing the UK localisation of your keyboard, despite what the global settings might be: go to TOOLS > OPTIONS > LANGUAGE SETTINGS > LANGUAGE, and in the LOCAL option, choose English (UK). Your keys will behave as they should do once more. It’s amazing what you pick up whilst BBQing a cows-worth of steak at your brother’s 30th party.

Yes, my brother is now 30. Holy crap, that means I am 27 this year. That’s “late twenties” territory… Eeek.

The trackpad is hyper sensitive, and it is very easy to accidentally brush it with your thumb and *bam* you’re suddenly typing in the middle of the paragraph above. Another foible is the page up/page down keys, right next to the arrow keys and under the right hand shift. It is very, VERY easy to trigger these by mistake and again, *bam* your cursor plays a game of “where’s wally?” I’m not the only AspireOne user to note this either, but it’s just a case of getting used to it, and being careful where you place your fingers.

What else? I got a LapJack sticker to cover the lid and give it some protection – the lid shows fingermarks just as soon as you look at it. The Acer is a common enough machine that most sticker websites have a template for it. There are also several different cases on the market if you want to give your baby a little more protection when you hurl it in your bag.

I will admit, at a price less than a new iPod, I am treating it in a remarkably cavallier fashion, slinging it in my handbag with narry a thought. But that is what I brought it for at the end of the day! The same person who taught me the trick of the language settings whilst grilling a cow, also taught me the trick to get into the command prompt (notoriously tricky on the Acer) but I’ll be damned if I can remember it. I blame large amounts of Somerset Cider…

But in the end, what is my verdict on the machine? That’s easy – I love it, I adore it, it is my writing soulmate! So there are a few niggles, but they are tiny, teeny niggles. It does exactly what I want it to do, no more, no less, and I didn’t have to read a 500 page manual before I could set it up. What else can you ask from a piece of technology in this day and age?

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately browsing round Flickr. I do just love looking at pictures other people have taken – from the professional to the snap shots.

I love pictures. Pictures tell stories, often stories that the photographer didn’t notice, or had no intention of telling.

But looking through one particular set of pictures tonight, I was struck with the desire to hand this guy a camera with just one roll of film. He takes good pictures, this chap. Some of his shots are truly beautiful and yet others are gleefully funny and irreverent. But the good ones are buried between the ok ones. There’s nothing wrong with the other pictures this guy takes but they kind of crowd out the great ones.

I can’t help feel if he sat back, thought for a little while before taking a picture, they’d all be brilliant.

The problem with digital cameras (and I am just as guilty of this as anyone else) is that it becomes too easy to keep snapping simply because you don’t have to worry about running out of film (or the development costs). I spent a while trying to think of a non-violent simile but failed, so guns will have to do. Machine guns will kill you just as dead as a single rifle shot, but the rifle takes more skill. Hunters don’t use automatic weapons for just that reason (that, and it’s harder to make a pretty trophy of the dead deer when it’s peppered with bullet holes).

It used to be you looked through someone’s photo album and there were maybe 36 odd photos from a holiday or event? Now you look at their Facebook or Flickr stream, and there are 360 to wade through.

I frequently find myself wandering around places and see a view or something and go “that would make a lovely photo”. Most of the time I don’t have my camera on me so I’m the only one who will ever get to see the ‘shot’, but somehow that’s okay to me. I can’t help thinking, a lot of the time, these people who photograph everything are missing out. They are so focused on looking through the lens, that they miss everything that’s going on around them.

One of my favourite John Mayer songs is 3×5. I think the lyrics say what I am trying to better:

I’m writing you to
catch you up on places I’ve been
You held this letter
probably got excited, but there’s nothing else inside it

You should have seen that sunrise with your own eyes
it brought me back to life
You’ll be with me next time I go outside
no more 3×5’s
just no more 3×5’s