slowfox | Entries tagged with dara

Last night was the Annual General Meeting of the Residents' Association - it kicked off at 7.15, which gave me just enough time to get home from work, walk Mali and pick up the meeting papers and head out the door. Oh, I fed Mali, too, but for the Residents' Association meetings, be they the Annual special one or the usual monthly ones, I don't have time to eat, hence the rushed nutrition after the event.

Anyway, 1,000 plus households in the Dukeries. 12 people on the Committee (including one alacrity-challenged fox as treasurer). Eight residents turned up. Four of those were on the Committee, which meant that we had four 'vanilla' residents present.

Nonetheless, since our Chairman had prepared his speech, he went on and gave it.

Ten typed A4 pages.

Given that eight of our own committee members can't actually make it to the AGM, given that of the four 'ordinary residents' who turned up, two were a couple from the same house, that effectively means that we had 7 households out of the 1000 plus represented, or a non-statistically significant sample of 0.7%.

It's hard not to draw the conclusion that people just DO NOT WANT.

Current Mood: disappointed
Current Location: work ii

It's the Residents' Association AGM this evening - for the 2008/2009 year; yes, it's a tad late, principally because the initial such was abandoned when hardly anybody turned up. My hopes for a significantly higher turnout today are not that great; once the one-way system had been implemented around the Dukeries, interest in the Residents' Association didn't so much dwindle as collapse.

Somewhat over-busy at work - I do find, though, that in general I'm more productive over here in Work II than in the former location, and that's no bad thing, for sure.

Have made a start on Haruki Murakami's After Dark, which seems pretty good, so far, and has the same feel as Hard Boiled Wonderland, A Wild Sheep Chase and some of the others.

Because I need to remote desktop into work machines from home, and work don't support doing so from within Linux, I've had to install Windows 7 on Ione, the home nettop/pc, which is basically a netbook masquerading as a desktop PC. Work only had the Windows 7 upgrade media - the trick with a clean install, then, is to do an initial clean install from the upgrade disc, but not to type in the product key.

Log into Win 7, then run the installation's Setup from the DVD, to 'upgrade' your Windows 7 installation to, er, Windows 7. And then you put in your product key. So far, this seems to have worked, but I haven't risked online activation yet - I want to see whether Ione actually has enough power to realistically run 7 before committing the product key to it.

ETA: props to

glittertine for the linkage, Top Gear S14 Trailer is AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D :D :D

Current Mood: rushed
Current Location: work ii

Well, I managed to get a mention on this weeks FlashForcast episode - 'Ralph from Hull' was indeed this fox of celebrated slowness.

I'd emailed in to expand upon my vague kernel of a theory that the FlashForward was transmitted back in time, at Lloyd's request, in order to save Mark. However, what the presenters chose to concentrate on was that the three men in masks after Mark in his FlashForward might not necessarily be involved in the FlashForwards themselves.

Still, that makes the Grauniad's Science Weekly and FlashForcast 'casts where I've warranted a mention, but lasting kudos seems to continue to elude me.

Ah well, fame is a fickle friend...

In other news, a new toner cartridge I collected yesterday during lunchtime turns out to be the wrong one - despite the shop specifically ordering it in for me. *sigh* I had wanted to get some printing done for tomorrow night's meeting of the Residents' Association, but it's looking like I'll have to pass on that, now.

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: work ii

The latest issue of the Residents' Association newsletter, hot off the presses, got hand delivered to the 100 or so houses in my half of the street last night by yours truly.

This is not a job I particularly enjoy, although I did at least have This Week in Tech on the phone to provide some accompaniment. As for 'how long can it take to deliver 100 newsletters?' Well, actually, longer than you'd think - especially since half the doors of my neighbours seem to have these special, super-sprung letterboxes designed to snap posties' fingers in half. Just like my door. Oops.

The other thing that makes this a task tremulously taken with trepidation (alliteration FTW) is that, given the high density of housing 'round these parts, we have a real problem with junk mail. Particularly takeaway menus, which land on the doormat at a rate of 4-5 glossy scraps of paper every day of every week. The waste is staggering.

As a consequence, a fair number of houses have 'no junk mail' stickers on their doors. The Chair of the Residents' Association, however, has instructed us to deliver the newsletter to houses so indicated, because 'it doesn't count as junk mail'. If you ask me, this is very much an eye of the beholder type thing, and I don't relish the inevitable confrontation that's bound to arise from this policy. Nonetheless, I delivered all mine without consequence, so live to fight another day...

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: castle fox

The Chair of the Residents' Association has emailed me the draft of the latest news letter, which is a good thing, because a few things have evidently slipped past the spell-chequer.

My particular favourite is the use of 'intimated' for 'intimidated' - it sort of changes the whole tone of the article about the brothel in one of the streets!

One of my new office colleagues (from an office of four, I'm now in an office of three) is something of a plant afficionado - we have a veritable wall of foliage around the desk, which is kinda awesome to behold. I do wonder how quickly he might notice if more plants were added on a surreptitious basis; have this vision of the entire floorspace ending up covered with a dense forest of yucca, ferns and cheese plants :-)

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: work ii

Yesterday was mad: Mali. Muesli bar. Work. Mali. Lunch. Mali. Farm. Mali. Residents' Association. Too tired to eat. Bed.

Fewer days like that, please. Ta.

All good preparation for today's one-on-one with the Auditors.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: work

Had another meeting of the Residents' Association yesterday - this always makes for a rushed day, since I have to walk Mali beforehand, and the meetings generally drag on somewhat.

Yesterday was no different, and even though the committee numbers ten, yet only four people managed to turn up, it ended up lasting 2¼ hours :-/

It's all a bit dispiriting, in many ways: it's clear that the residents as a whole don't have much enthusiasm for the concept, and I wonder whether my time might not be better served doing Other Things™.

Current Mood: blah
Current Location: Work
Current Music: Britney: Toxic

There are ten official members on the Residents' Association committee. Three of us turned up for the 7.15pm start last night - one shy of a quorum.

So, realising that it would be borderline insulting to the other two to have said, with obviously artfully concealed glee, 'right, inquorate, I'm off!' on the dot of 19:15:00 Zulu, I stayed to talk a little while about Association business in general. Nonetheless, I was thinking that my evening could've been spent so much more profitably (like, say, eating: I don't have time to eat before the meeting, and usually, by the time I get home (c9.30ish) I don't feel like so doing).

You can imagine my joy, then, when at 8pm, our magical fourth, quorum-constituting member turned up. And so it was that we ended up going through the agenda until 9.30. Joy. I do wonder if I was able to mask my growing cynicism, but as per yesterday's post, if even the committee members can't make the effort to attend a meeting once a month, and if there's already a representative body that sits between us and the Council proper, I can't help but wonder if there is any real point in maintaining our own Association.

* who still writes by hand these days? Just getting my idioms down with the 21st century...

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Home
Current Music: BBC World Service Book Club Podcast: Nawal El Sadaawi

Mali and I are back from the day's first walk - he's now curled up on the patio bench I have as a sofa-substitute in Castle Fox's living room whilst I sneak online over breakfast,sipping hot chocolate.

This evening I've got a Residents' Association meeting, which I'm not really looking forward to: a 7.15pm start means that Mali and I have an abbreviated second walk, and we probably won't make it out for walk 3 afterwards. Also, given the very real lack of ~~audience~~ residents' participation in the committee (of the 1,029 households bordering on this Fox's realm, less than a dozen individuals will turn up to public meetings/events. Even the committee's attendance record leaves a lot to be desired), there's a real question as to whether it's even worth pursuing the notion in the face of such forceful apathy.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: home
Current Music: The Guardian's Science Weekly Podcast

The Lair of the SlowFox

Entries tagged with dara

Can't do everything

A long day beckons, again

Another fifteen seconds of podcast fame

Postman for a night

Proofing, because proofing is needed

This week is all a bit of a whirl

DARA trudges on

The word-processing* is on the wall, surely?

A long day beckons

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