Electioneering

I sent the following email to the Conservative candidate (Andrew Percy) for My Constituency:

Good Morning Andrew,

When Labour came into power in 1997 I was just about to leave High School aged 16. In the last 13 years I have been to College, joined the RAF as an Officer, left the RAF and had a series of jobs and promotions in the private sector — I currently drive to Leeds every day where I am an IT Manager in a software firm. I got married nearly 3 years ago and have a little girl who is 1 in a couple of weeks. In the last 13 years, I have become increasingly frustrated with what I get out of the government. This may seem selfish, but everything that your Labour opposition has done, and the Labour government in general has had either no or negative impact on my way of life. To summarise some of these failures:

I drive 35 miles to work every day — Road Tax and Fuel duty going up all the time doesn’t help. We bought our first house after we got married. We played it safe and got a fixed 5 year mortgage at a reasonable rate — then because of the recession the base rate went through the floor and we are paying 5 or 6 times what we could have been! Tied in to this, we are in an obscene amount of negative equity with our house, so we will not be able to look at moving for a considerable amount of time. My wife and I have quite well paid jobs, and as such do not benefit from the ludicrous benefits system that most of the people in our town seem to get the most out of by not being in work and staying at home. During my wife’s pregnancy, I was astounded by the lack of midwives (although I couldn’t fault their dedication), ward nurses and doctors with a grasp of English that meant I could understand what they were telling us. I have friends in the RAF, who are on deployment fighting in two seemingly pointless conflicts. Most recently, our current MP did not bother turn up for the second reading, or place a vote in a bill that was very important to me — the Digital Economy Bill

As you can probably tell, I am dissatisfied with the way things are. I want things to change. Currently, we have been canvassed by the Labour Candidate (or rather, some people canvassing on his behalf), but not by any other party. we received a pamphlet through the post yesterday from your campaign, but it seems the same as all the others we have received to be honest!

I am quite fortunate in that one of our employees has actually worked with you (On David Davis’ by-election campaign) and he assures me that you are a hard worker, and that the Conservatives manifesto addresses what my key issues are. I wanted to write to you personally to see if I could solicit a response from you that will sway me in your direction. I was very impressed (as was a good proportion of the country, by all accounts) with Nick Clegg’s performance in the TV debate, but I am not sure that a Lib Dem vote is right for me, or a valid choice in our constituency (looking at http://www.voterpower.org.uk/brigg-goole would suggest not).

So, here is your opportunity to win one, possibly 2 if you include my wife, votes — convince us!

Steve Garton http://blog.sheepeatingtaz.co.uk

It will be interesting to see if I get a reply, and what that reply contains. I have no interest in sending anything to the Labour candidate, and the Lib Dem candidate (if they exist) have not seen fit to let us know who they are! If and when they do, I will contact them in the same way.

British Road Network

I’ve always known that our road network was a bit shoddy. My daily commute takes 40 minutes (each way) on a weekend, or nearly 90 minutes on a week day, but I have always just accepted it.

I’ve just come back from holiday in Florida, where I have driven abroad for the first time. I was dreading it before we went: No lane discipline, slow speed limits, no roundabouts, traffic lights everywhere. Now that I’ve experienced it though it is So Much Better than the way we do things here!

Traffic is always moving. The only time the traffic slowed down noticeably was when a sinkhole appeared on the motorway and they had to close 2 lanes for repairs. The fact that the speed limits are 5 or 10 mph slower than in this country (for similar routes) means that traffic just keeps moving. Traffic lights work how they are supposed to — keeping traffic flowing. I especially like the fact that if you are turning right at an intersection, a red light essentially means give way rather than stop. The no lane discipline works too, if you want to go around someone, you go around them. You make your own decision about where and when you are going to move, and as a result you are more vigilant to what you are doing. Even the way traffic queues is better — when they closed 2 lanes of the motorway people didn’t bunch into the open lane and refuse to let anyone in, people spread out over the 3 lanes of motorway and where the lanes merged they went in like a zipper, one by one. All very fair, and much more civilised in my opinion.

Compare that to my drive to work this morning, where the motorway invariably stops for no reason whatsoever. If it does this because of “volume of traffic” (as the news reports on the radio like to call it) then there aren’t enough lanes on the road to cope. It is not fit for purpose. They either need to build more lanes, or whole new roads to supplement the motorways. I also really like the idea that all roads barring the smaller residential streets should have a minimum of 2 lanes per direction. I do however understand that this would be difficult to implement in hindsight, with building either side.

I think drivers are as much to blame. To steal a phrase from the radio this morning where they are talking about binge drinking — we need a culture change, and I think the american driving culture is the way to go.

Note To Self

Things I want to get done when I get back off holiday:

  • Update byteflow to the latest version
  • Upload new theme
  • Change Django deployment method (wsgi) to The Dreamhost recommended method
  • either implement the lifestream app or write my own to show my latest tweets either in the sidebar or in the main site (not decided which yet)

Edit:

Progress!

I have decided (thanks to the CSS course I am currently on) to once again rejuvenate my blogging. This should be the last post on http://sheepeatingtaz.co.uk/blog as I’m fed up of cross posting to my own site! The new django-powered blog is at http://blog.sheepeatingtaz.co.uk

This means I can focus on learning more about django, and also implement all the CSS-goodness I have been learning rather than relying on Wordpress and it’s abundance of tools to do it for me.

If you subscribe to a planet where you get this post — I’m trying to contact the planet admins to switch my feed over, but not having much luck at the moment — I will continue to persevere!

Programming desktop apps in python and glade

I have started having a play around with quickly today. I have always wanted to have a go at GUI programming — I’m OK at scripting and ‘web’ programming, but the only desktop GUI work I have done has been on windows in Access/VBA :S

Doing the basics seems fine, but I’m jumping straight in at the deep end! The situation I have at the moment is I have my Main window, and on opening it it opens a login window. What I am struggling with is passing data back to the main window from the login window.

So… does anyone know of any tutorials for python with glade? Everything google throws at me seems to be different to the way that quickly sets up the project, and makes them hard to follow. Is the quickly way standard? Should I abandon quickly, and go with one of the tutorials and start again from scratch?

Daddy’s Little Girl
(16:55:18) Lisa Garton: lolkm, gggggg
(16:55:41) Lisa Garton: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(16:55:42) Lisa Garton: x
(16:55:48) Lisa Garton: ;0rd
(16:55:50) Lisa Garton: z\
(16:55:53) Steve Garton: cat or baby?
(16:55:58) Lisa Garton: /;09
(16:56:09) Lisa Garton: h baby
(16:56:28) Lisa Garton: 000]]]]]]]]]]]]]]===========
MySQL Help

I need some help with a query in MySQL. I can’t believe that no one has ever needed it before, but google is failing me.

I have a table with the following columns: ID | User | ...few more in here... | Timestamp

I need a query that returns data in the following way

User | Date1 | Date2 | Date3 | ... | Total User1| 4 | 5 | 4 | ... | 13

i.e. There needs to be a total for each Date, with that date as the column header.

In case it helps make it any clearer, I have a similar query that takes entries from the last week and groups them by weekday:


select
       User as name,
       sum(if(dayofweek(Timestamp) = 1, 1, 0)) as sun,
       sum(if(dayofweek(Timestamp) = 2, 1, 0)) as mon,
       sum(if(dayofweek(Timestamp) = 3, 1, 0)) as tue,
       sum(if(dayofweek(Timestamp) = 4, 1, 0)) as wed,
       sum(if(dayofweek(Timestamp) = 5, 1, 0)) as thr,
       sum(if(dayofweek(Timestamp) = 6, 1, 0)) as fri,
       sum(if(dayofweek(Timestamp) = 7, 1, 0)) as sat,
       count(ID) as total
     from
       Table
     where
       date(Timestamp) >= date_sub(now(), INTERVAL 8 DAY) and
       Timestamp < date_format(now(), '%Y-%m-%d')
     group by
       User
     order by
       User

Now, this method is fine when you have a finite number of columns (days of the week), but I need it to be dynamic and take a couple of parameter (it's used in a php script) as the date range.

HELP?!?!

Holiday

So, I’m currently on holiday in a static caravan on Mablethorpe. It’s sort of an appetizer of a holiday before we go to Florida for a fortnight to see Lisa’s brother. There’s a couple of reasons for this holiday, one is to see how Hannah behaves staying away from home (early results are very promising — she doesn’t appear where she goes to sleep, as long as she gets fed!) The seond reason is that we really, really needed a break! We normally go to Spain, or the balearics, or somewhere equally sunny for a week at the beginning of September but this year we (specifically me) didn’t fancy flying with Hannah being only 3 months at the time.

So, initial impressions of the caravan are that it is nice. We’ve got a Gold level caravan, which is the highest this park offers (others in the chain off platinum) . To be honest, it’s just the right size. It’s like staying in a detached self catering apartment, which is brilliant when you have a nearly 5 month old how may cry at any point!

We had a nice day out in skegness yesterday, despite me having to run about 8 miles to put some more money in the car park, and then forgetting to take the car keys with me! Today we are going out for breakfast, then a walk to the bombing range/beach before making use of the free swimming pool before meeting my mum and dad in cleethorpes, Nd maybe all going out for tea. We have to check out by 10 in the morning, so not sure what we’ll do for the rest of the day.

I also need to take more photos, we haven’t really taken many of Hannah recently, and we forget how quickly she’s changing.

new (school) years resolution

It’s been 10 years since I last went back to school, but I couldn’t think of a better title! I have, however, decided to start blogging more again. I only really stopped due to a combination of lack of time and lack of interesting things to write about. In hind site, I have had lots of interesting things happen, but didn’t feel that I could do so at the time.

So, here’s a new leaf, as I can see lots of things in the not to distant future that I will want to write about :-)

Twitter Updates for 2009-07-04
  • Feeling better today, and good job too cos it's going to be a busy one! #
  • Has read his twitter, facebook and Google reader feeds. C'mon mobile web, bring me something good. #

Powered by Twitter Tools.