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Carefully, Correctly Wrong
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| Paradox |
[Dec. 11th, 2009|03:08 pm] |
Oh yeah, and while I'm not caught up in the geeking... does anybody fancy popping round to watch Paradox sometime? I've seen the first episode and it seems pretty good so far. |
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| Activism Offsetting |
[Dec. 10th, 2009|02:53 pm] |
A throwaway comment on #manlug has just got me thinking a bit.
For all the activism I do, there are a lot of campaigns that I support in principle, but don't do anything practical to support. The main reason for this is that I have a day-job and enjoy time with my loved ones and sleeping occasionally. I know many activists who feel obliged to turn up to every meeting and read every e-mail of every campaign group whose objectives they agree with, and end up spreading themselves too thinly to be effective in achieving the aims of any.
When discussing my absence from an environmental protest last night, I flippantly suggested that I was engaging in activism offsetting - I have a friend who does environmental campaigning, and is sympathetic to the identity activism cause; I am sympathetic to the former but tend to dedicate my energies to the latter.
It occurs to me that this is actually a fairly good way of optimising effort - it reduces the amount of effort which all members of each campaign group replicate, meaning that the time we invest in our respective causes is more efficient. I can feel reasonably certain that I have to worry less about my concern for campaign A because another person has got my back, and they have to worry less about their concern for campaign B because I'm on the case.
Of course, there are some things where I definitely want to be directly 100% involved, and there are limits to this optimisation where a group drops below critical mass. But given that there are so many disparate separate-issue campaign groups attended by the usual suspects , I'm wondering if it makes sense to set up a website (or Facebook app or something) wherein people can list their activism interests, see where they have multiple overlaps with a friend, and agree to divide out the personal responsibilities mutually... |
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| London Calling |
[Dec. 2nd, 2009|12:13 pm] |
I'm making plans to head down to London this weekend. I've got a moderately busy itinerary planned - Bruce Schneier talking to the Open Rights Group on Friday night, marching against climate change on Saturday with the Liberal Democrats, attending No2ID's AGM on Sunday, and having a job interview on Monday.
Everything's a bit up in the air at the moment, but is there anything else going on this weekend that I shouldn't miss, or does anybody fancy meeting up while I'm in the land of gold and poison? |
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| Weekend Plans |
[Jul. 3rd, 2009|03:13 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | organisation | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  rushed | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Earth Loop Recall - "Elevator Music" | ] |
It's been a long and busy week, and not a little frustrating. I've been on the early shift at work and made my 8:30am start every morning... until today, when I slept in a little. I've done some identity activism radio appearances, and lots of Lib Dem politicking. OTOH, I've also had a night round at ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) tartful_dodger's place, and spent a pleasant few hours down the pub with co-workers last night.
Tonight I will be skipping my customary Currybeer in favour of catching up on a few things; tomorrow I'll be heading to FAB Caffor a munch with greyeyedeve, and perhaps Wagamama and the cinema afterwards. On Sunday I'll be out campaigning. |
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| London Ho! |
[May. 10th, 2009|12:45 am] |
Off to London with tartful_dodger for a week. Not sure how much I'll be around, but drop me a comment, e-mail or text if you fancy meeting up, probably on Sunday evening with Olly or Monday evening solo.
Back in Manchester on Friday. |
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| FAO still-resident MancGoff People |
[Mar. 8th, 2009|02:37 pm] |
I will be joining nasrat, formerly of this parish, for a pint or two from 7pm in the Bull's Head at Piccadilly Station. Do feel free to join us.
Update: On Wednesday, that is. Not this evening. I am a muppet. Thanks to tartful_dodger for pointing out my incompetence. |
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| "My Name Is Bruce", FAB Café, Sunday 7:30pm |
[Mar. 4th, 2009|10:09 pm] |
The FAB Café on Portland Street holds film screenings every Sunday. It's no cinema, but it's a fun place to go and see films.
Particularly when the film in question is My Name is Bruce, the Bruce Campbell-on-Bruce Campbell self-referential comedy starring everybody's favourite lead actor from the Evil Dead trilogy.
The film screening starts at 7:30pm; I should have gotten rid of my parents by then and am intending to be at the FAB with greyeyedeve, tartful_dodger and a few others. See you there? |
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| Next Week |
[Dec. 14th, 2008|01:14 pm] |
Next week is very busy. On Monday I've got a friend's birthday party; on Tuesday there's both the Manchester Free Software Christmas party, and the Bisociality trip around the Xmas markets. I might go to the markets, then try to drag the bisexuals to FAB where the freedom-lovers will have ended up.
Wednesday is my work Christmas party, and Thursday is my identity activism December social - we got kicked out of our regular pub due to a Christmas party booking, which is fair enough.
I think I might actually have Friday night off; there's a chance that wehmuth will be around for the weekend if he can secure alternative accomodation, but I'm not sure it'll happen. Next weekend is looking clear for some last-minute Xmas shopping... |
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| Weekend Plans |
[Dec. 5th, 2008|12:00 pm] |
Tonight is Currybeer, yay. I'm going to Neil Trafford's memorial service this afternoon, and will need to make up a couple of hours this weekend (probably Saturday evening) to compensate.
I should probably do some Christmas shopping *shudder* on Saturday afternoon; on Sunday I may be dyeing my hair blue, or going to see Burn After Reading at the FAB Caf. I'd like to try to fix my bike, and I have some Manchester Free Software things to attend to, as well as the usual Delga and identity activism.
Still, I should have some time just to relax and snuggle with greyeyedeve, and maybe catch up on some Sarah Connor Chronicles together. Perhaps I'll pick up an S-Video lead and try to wire up my laptop to the TV... |
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| Unhectic Weekend |
[Nov. 21st, 2008|10:06 pm] |
This weekend's plans were terribly busy. I had intended to attend John Leech MP's dinner on Friday night, an identity activism day in London on Saturday, followed by visiting ms_saffie on Saturday night, back to London on Sunday to see the 22SGI and then returning to Manchester on Sunday night.
Three things put a stop to this - my failing to get much sleep this week (I didn't get to bed before 1am any night this week, and slept really badly), engineering works on the Manchester-London line at Milton Keynes, and the identity activism being on Sunday, not Saturday.
So instead, I'm having a nice night in with greyeyedeve and v15u4l_3rr0r watching The Chronicles of Riddick, admiring my bookshelves which are now attached to the wall and plentifully-loaded, and drinking some Jameson in Tal's memory.
Tomorrow, I will buy a ticket from Manchester to Oxford, travel down to see Saffie, head to London on Sunday, and take the long way home via Leeds on Sunday night. It'll mean skipping a dinner, and not seeing the 22SGI; but also it'll mean getting more sleep, being in less of a rush and generally enjoying my weekend more. |
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| Busy As Ever |
[Nov. 7th, 2008|12:05 pm] |
Phew, life is exhausting at the moment. I've picked up greyeyedeve's lurgy which has made things harder - I had to take Monday and Tuesday off work. On Wednesday night I went to the Platt Fields fireworks with minnesattva and andrewhickey. The display was pretty awesome and I'm glad I went, despite tiredness. I was a bit over-excited, particularly when the bonfire was lit. It burned down a bit too quickly though which was a shame.
Yesterday lunchtime I did some identity activism on local TV; I'll upload the video for that soon. Last night, I went to the town hall for the hustings for the Liberal Democrat candidate for Gorton Constituency in the next General Election. I may make a longer, friendslocked entry about this, but there were a lot of factors at play and it was a very hard choice. I think my first choice was right, but in retrospect should have cast my second preference differently. On the way to the town hall, I also caught the last post for my ballot paper for the President of the Federal Party (first preference Chandila, second Lembit), so it might actually get delivered in time to be counted.
When I got home, my Ikea stash had arrived. Eve's been up at night with her cough, and v15u4l_3rr0r is using the front room at the moment, so I put together the table and a chair to give her somewhere to sit if necessary. I managed to give myself an injury while screwing vigorously - blisters on the palm of my hand. Fnarr. O2 / Be was being a pain, refusing access to mostly US-based websites. This turned out to be a DNS rather than a routing problem, so I installed dnsmasq on my colo box, firewalled it from anywhere other than my broadband IP, and told my laptop and desktop to ignore the DNS server given to them by the ADSL router and use my colo box instead. This isn't an ideal long-term solution, but is good enough for now.
Tonight I'm off for #manlug Currybeer. Tomorrow I'm doing an identity activism stall in town, and then meeting up with sprezzatoura and thirstypixel before their gig. I should find time to get to B&Q to buy a drill and a few other bits and bobs, which will let me finish off the table assembly. On Sunday, I might be Lib Demming in Old Moat ward. |
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| Social Life |
[Oct. 21st, 2008|12:45 pm] |
Last weekend was pretty busy; I spent Saturday daytime at an activist skills conference organised by the Campaigns Collective, focussing on non-violent direct action. I did some bi-activist hobnobbing and introduced the Uni's LGBT Soc bi rep to softfruit, which should be a fruitful partnership. Then I headed off to the Lass O'Gowrie to meet up with greyeyedeve and hang out with _tonylee_ and belle_fille1982 which was great fun.
I basically spent all of Sunday at the Marbella Café with Manchester Free Software, setting up a new LTSP server which we'd scrounged. This turned into a bit of an epic quest - I'd taken along my PATA DVD drive and a Debian installer DVD, only to find that the box had no PATA connectors, only SCSI; so we detoured via my office to borrow a CD-R, and chris' flat to download and burn a Debian installer image. The server itself is Dell, from the days when Dell made decent server kit, and was enormously heavy. After lugging it up two flights of stairs, we learned that the SCSI CD drive in the machine wasn't being seen by the BIOS and couldn't be used to boot the installer. Eventually we borrowed tdobson's laptop and set it up as a TFTP server to netboot the installer; this failed with the soon-to-be-released Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (Lenny ), but succeeded with the old release, aka Etch. Once we had a minimal Etch install up and running, we upgraded it to Lenny and rebooted. This screwed the entire box as it hadn't finished synching its RAID-5 array and couldn't tell which bits were what. So we had to start over from scratch, which was exciting. We ended up leaving the machine to synch overnight, and I got home at about 10pm. Last night I was back at the cafe to set up the LTSP cluster; this was not quite as smooth as hoped due to the switch from LTSP 4 to LTSP 5 involving a bit of retraining. But we left with 2 machines netbooting and running, which is much better than where we were before Sunday.
Now, I'd woken up in a foul mood on Sunday, and couldn't work out why; I'd spent most of the day at Marbella being vaguely manic and overexcited, bouncing and dancing around while we waited for the machine to reboot. I figured that missing out on weeks of cycling had left me over-energetic, so made the effort to lug the leather sofa into the front room when I got home. This is the next step on the way to sorting out the flat and its furniture, so I was very happy to get it done at last - we can now actually vaguely entertain people, though we're not quite ready for a party yet. I ended up collapsing with a well-earned chinese takeout and beer.
Tonight I get to go home, though I've got a reasonable amount of e-mail to play catchup with. Tomorrow I'm off to the cinema after work with greyeyedeve and what seems by now to be a cast of thousands, to see the Final Cut of Blade Runner at the Cornerhouse - I'll grab tickets after work today to make sure it doesn't sell out.
On Thursday I have wehmuth arriving for a few days, which should be cool; unfortunately I'm busy Lib Demming on Saturday afternoon, but should have plenty of time to hang out otherwise. Sunday I'm doing an all-day training course. |
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| Forward Planning |
[Oct. 5th, 2008|11:34 pm] |
Last week at work sucked. After two weeks off, doing the kind of political activism stuff I'd love to do for a living, I could barely stand my return to sitting at my desk for 8 hours a day making money for venture capitalists. It didn't help that work bullshit meant that I didn't actually make any progress all week, just spent it firefighting and trying to deal with office politics.
By the end of the week I was starting to re-adjust; Currybeer on Friday night and fluffle's party on Saturday have helped cheer me up a bit. Next week might be easier, but perhaps not since my deadlines are looming tighter and my boss is back.
Today's mostly been spent feeling a bit rubbish. Despite sleep, food, plenty of water etc. my hangover failed to go away until I nuked it with codeine. I managed to do a bit of furniture rearranging so greyeyedeve can do more unpacking next week; I need to
My evening movements for next week are BiPhoria! on Tuesday, a LGBT Lib Dems online meeting on Wednesday, and identity activism in Liverpool on Thursday. Eve's going down to Reading to see taimatsu for the weekend on Wednesday. Come the weekend, I'll be going out with thefalken and Rachael for a birthday celebration. |
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| Slowly Busy |
[Aug. 10th, 2008|01:21 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | organisation | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  crappy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Jane Jensen - "Superstar" | ] |
I've managed to catch up on sleep a bit this weekend, but as usual it's left me feeling lethargic when I can least afford it. My TODO list for today has 33 items (so far), about half of which are urgent. It's just taken me an hour to get round to boiling some pasta for lunch... |
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| Imperial War Museum North |
[Jul. 12th, 2008|08:27 pm] |
greyeyedeve and I will be heading to the Imperial War Museum North tomorrow for their Military Pride exhibition. We're planning on being at the IWMN for 1:30pm, and it'd be nice to see other people there.
You can get the 250 bus route from Piccadilly Gardens via the Phoenix (Manchester Uni) to the Trafford Centre, stopping at Elevator Road, or the Metrolink to Harbour City and longish walk past the Lowry Centre. |
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| Unexpected Writings |
[Jun. 3rd, 2008|05:17 pm] |
Not at BiPhoria! tonight; I've got a Liberal Democrat do in Levenshulme.
As seen popping around my friends list recently: Please invite me to post about an area of my life which I don't tend to mention here, which you might want to know more about. |
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| Bank Holiday Weekend |
[May. 24th, 2008|03:03 pm] |
So the Bank Holiday weekend is here. I'm a bit cheesed off really, since I'd like to have some kind of plan for what to do with it. I've been feeling pretty run-down of late - I got home last night, had some dinner, and went to bed at about 9pm. Didn't sleep much, or well, but the 13-hour quantity of bed-time seems to have made up for the poor quality and I'm feeling sufficiently well to be around other people today.
I need to take the opportunity to get some of the things achieved that I've not had a chance to in recent weeks - this should help me relax a little towards the back half of the weekend. taimatsu and minnesattva will be watching bloody Eurovision this evening, which is a fine opportunity to lock myself away and get on with stuff. I definitely need to catch up on a whole bunch of paperwork for politics and identity activism.
There's some DIY that needs doing - replacing a broken outlet pipe from the bath which is spraying water over the front drive, and doing something about the washing machine. The landlord seems unwilling to replace it, on the grounds that he's trying to sell the place. If he's definitely not going to do so, we do have greyeyedeve's machine in the shed which probably still works. I can probably fit that myself, but it may just postpone the problem until either we or flooks moves out. |
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