Political Penguin

Couldn’t resist using that title as time seems to have slipped by so fast that a week has passed (almost) since I last posted something.

There is of course a very good excuse for my dereliction of duty where my blog is concerned, I’ve been horribly busy so I thought it best to do a bit of a round-up of things.

Last Friday I did a radio show o Wolverhampton Community Radio. It was the first in a series run by Matthew Revell who also appears to be very busy as he hasn’t blogged in nearly a week either but I can understand with all the radio show thing. Matthew’s a Tory but he doesn’t seem that bad apart from a strange propensity to get digs in about the BBC whenever he can. I have no idea why but we’ll see if anything drops into Friday night’s show. (Only kidding to Matthew).

The show went well apart from a few hiccups and lost bits and bobs but hey, it was the first ever show so you’re always going to expect a few of those. Turned out quite well humoured and certainly none of the yar-boo discourse that one gets at PMQ’s. Personally I like quite in-depth discussion but we managed to get round a fair number of issues in the hour we had and apart from having to get rather cosy with Paul Uppal due to there only being one microphone working at the start I quite enjoyed it.

On to why I haven’t been blogging ala Saturday onwards. Well, it’s the weather. I think it’s fair to say that this Summer, whatever one might call it has been abysmal. I am trying to remember a period of three days going by without it raining but simply can’t for the last few months and not even contemplating that any break in the rain has been sunny.

This has posed a real problem for me as I’ve had a number of jobs/projects lined up for this year of which only one has been completed (painting the door to the passageway). Renovating the windows hasn’t been completed, digging that big hole in the back garden hasn’t been completed, painting the house hasn’t been completed or any of the other stuff that requires a good few days of sunshine for things to dry out.

So without hesitation I’ve been taking advantage of the almost uninterrupted sun since Saturday (yes, it did rain a little early Sunday morning) but apart from that I’ve actually managed to at least start on a few things with the hope it stays dry or at least dryer for a while so I can complete them. I have no illusions that all the jobs I’d planned will be completed this year because they won’t, save for a very late ‘Summer’ extending into October but you never know.

I’m going to go off on a few little tangents so bear with me.

David Cameron. I’m not going to say anything about the problems he’s been having lately, there’s enough coverage of that and I don’t have anything insightful to add to the discourse but what has happened to tabloid headline writers these days? Come on, “It never rains but it pours for Cameron” was just begging to be pulled out but nope, didn’t spot it anywhere. (happy to be proven wrong).

Does anyone know where I can get a downpipe diverter? There’s plenty online but I’d like to have a look at one first. For information, these are connectors that can be fitted to a downpipe that can divert rainfall away to a separate source. I’ve also noticed that most seem to divert to a pipe about the same diameter as a hosepipe and I wanted one a bit more substantial but might have to compromise if I can’t find one.

I’ve been working on a lot of techie relating things as well in the evenings when I’m not in the garden. I mentioned before that the old Laptop PIII, 128Mb RAM was struggling with Windows and I wanted to put Linux on it. More specifically Xubuntu which is a stripped down version of Ubuntu running the X desktop for lets say, more senior citizen computers. I could never get it to boot with the disc which annoyed me considerably. However on a whim I installed DSL (Damn Small Linux) which I’ve known about for ages but never seemed to get round to experimenting with. It is great for older machines. After I’d installed the system, as opposed to running it from a LiveCD it was faster than the other two, considerably better spec computers in the house. A bit fiddly at times to get things working but on the whole a nice distribution in particular the ability to put it on a USB memory stick and with newer machines being able to boot from USB, giving you the possibility of carrying around your whole operating system on a keyring.

I did however feel like having one last go at Xubuntu and for some strange reason, since I stripped Windows XP off the machine it booted fine and installed with no problems at all so the little lappy now has Xubuntu on, which keeps Mrs Penguin happy as it’s easier to use than DSL.

I think that pretty much brings things up-to-date. Obviously the Summer recess period has struck, politics in general has shifted to downtime and I’ll probably be doing likewise so unless something really interesting pops up between now and September I’ll probably be doing a few more personal/light-hearted postings.