Dave

My Thoughts on Flickr

Flickr is brilliant. A really great service, easy to use and full of features.

It’s basically a place to store digital photos online. You upload the ones you want and Flickr automatically makes them available in a few different web friendly sizes, so you don’t need to bother resizing them yourself.

You can then make them available to people to see through Flickr itself, or produce HTML code to display them on another site – this could be a really way handy for Palimpsesters to display images in their posts on the forums. I might look into it and get a little guide written.

The other cool thing, as I demonstrated below, is that it can post photos direct to a blog. If you are using one of the big services, like LiveJournal, Blogger or TypePad, this works with ease. With a system like WordPress, like I use, it is a little trickier. For some reason, when I post photos through Flickr, it comes up with an error saying that it hasn’t worked…even though it has! Never mind, I can live with that. Also, it puts the posts in the ‘Life’ category, rather than in ‘Photos’ and it doesn’t add a title to a post. These things I have to do manually, but it is easy enought to pick up on the next time I am blogging.

Flickr is a cool site, and no mistake.

Scrutiny Best Practice Guide outline

Have been putting some more thought into my idea for a Scrutiny Best Practice booklet.

Here’s a draft outline plan:

Introduction

  • Preparation, Participation, Partnership
  • A Note on Structures

Part One: Preparation

  • Objectives and Outcomes
  • Research
  • Agendas and Reports
  • The Meeting
  • Post Meeting

Part Two: Participation

  • Scrutiny and Overview Members
  • Backbench Members
  • The Executive
  • The Public
  • Officers
  • Expert Witnesses
  • Methods of Participation

Part Three: Partnership

  • Scrutiny and the Executive
  • Scrutiny and ‘Backbenh’ Councillors
  • Scrutiny and the Public
  • Scrutiny and the Media

Conclusion

  • Using Preparation, Participation and Partnership to create sucessful outcomes

The aim would be to put together case studies each chapter showing how things can be done – and how they might have been done better.

MS updates: real Windows users only need apply

The Register reports that Microsoft are planning to

stop providing updates to non-genuine versions of its Windows XP operating system as part of its anti-piracy campaign.

I’m flagging this up not because I disagree – it seems quite reasonable, really – but because I wanted to download an update, using my (I should point out) legitimate copy of Windows XP, a week or so ago, and it wouldn’t accept my verification code. I was irritated, and I must have another look into it and contact the MS support bods.

John Sutherland

As John Self rightly pointed out in an earlier comment, John Sutherland writes well for The Guardian on books, despite being an apparently controversial choice for Chair of the Booker panel this year. Here’s his article in today’s paper.

There was a sad news item last week about 130,00 penguins doomed to die because of the havoc wrought on their environment by climate-warming. Damn George Bush and his SUVs.

It’s been a disastrous year for the other Penguin as well. Last spring the imprint’s super-agglomerated parent group, Pearson, brought on-stream its new, airport-sized warehouse at Rugby. The computer operating system, predictably, crashed. They always do. From April to June the system stayed obstinately down. Penguin books were scarcer than Penguin’s teeth. Delivery, almost a year later, is still constipated and hiccupy.

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