Tag: libdem

never say "yes"

yesterday, I rushed out to Nailsea at 3.30 to go to a seminar for school governors on financing. Then I rushed home to eat supper (which perlmonger had kindly cooked) before rushing out again to a Rural Branch Meeting of the LibDems. This one was about a mile away, so walking distance, although the rain rained and the wind blew. My new walking shoes are proving useful.

tonight, perlmonger is very kindly cooking again as I have to rush out, to Portishead this time, for an Exec meeting of Woodspring LibDems (or are we North Somerset now?).

tomorrow morning, I’m going to see the Clerk to the Parish Council, to demonstrate the web data entry system we have developed (free of charge, of course) for the entry of the Parish Plan Questionnaires returned. 101 questions, 1600 copies, plus all the Young Persons’ Questionnaires.

looking at my diary for the next week or two, I have a School Governors’ Meeting (Full), a Footpath Committee Meeting, the LibDem Sossidge and Mash supper, the Introduction to Parish Councillors’ meeting, a Nailsea Arts Festival Meeting, a Parliamentary Working Party meeting, and two data entry evenings for the aforementioned Questionnaire. That takes me through to 26 March – I daren’t look further ahead.

inevitably, some of these clash, so Pete and I will have to bifurcate; this will be painful, I’m sure.

oh, and on Sunday we did the Pub Quiz at the Legion (our team is called The Aliens, and consists of us, plus Pat&Dave (WANOLJ, but are known to many of you)) – after a couple of dismal evenings, we got our eye in this week, and came third. Onwards and Upwards. However, this means that by tomorrow, I will have been out for three evenings on the trot – I am so looking forward to a Quiet Night In.

LibDem meeting last night

was interesting. We have started discussing budgets and strategies, not only for the elections next May, but for the forthcoming General Election in, presumably, 2009; and now, somehow, I feel a part of it all, rather than a bystander.

one might think it quite flattering to be asked to consider standing as a local councillor in 2007. Except that they want me to consider standing here in the village, where there is no hope of us winning 🙂

still, if I do want to be involved, it would be good practice, and being a school governor will get my name out there in a small way in a few months time. I shall have to ponder. My biggest fear is Stephen Twiggery – I don’t want to stand and then find that – inexplicably – I win, unless I can be utterly sure that I want to do it, and b) can find the time to do it. Still, I have a few months (but not many) to think about it.

there's always a way

I stepped out of the house for just 15 minutes yesterday (there was a crisis in the wine rack, so I popped up to the wonderful local offy to replenish the white wine stocks at about 7 p.m.).

and when I returned, there was a copy of PagePlus 11 pushed through the letterbox. This has presumably been delivered by Geoff, the head honcho of the local bit of the local party organisation; he said he would drop it off, and I said I didn’t run Windows, and would do what they needed in something else. I suspect desperation set in – he probably lurked outside the door until he saw me go out …

except of course, I do run Windows, sort of – I have to, because so many other people do. I run:

  • an RDC connection to our W2KAS server, which only gives me 256 colours, but as all I want it for is Ameol (for CIX, which is text only), and a quick CSS sanity check on IE6, it’s perfectly adequate, and quite quick
  • and a couple of Virtual PCs on this dual 2.5Ghz G5, one for the accounts and IE6, and one for IE7. But quick they ain’t – roll on a) the decent Mac Intel desktops, and b) the money to buy one. The latter will be the delaying factor, I fear.

still, one must look on these things as a challenge. So PagePlus is now installed on an XP Pro running in a VMWare virtual machine on detritus, our Linux server, and I am accessing it via RDC.

and even better than that, I found a little gadget from www.Xutils.com/ which allows me to run multiple instances of RDC, which is Simply Fab.

perhaps I’ll tell them all this at the meeting on Monday – that should make their brains implode, don’t you think?