A little place of calm

Today, Nick Clegg has set the date for the UK voting referendum, giving us a chance to reform the badly flawed voting system.

If you're not convinced that the system is unfair, compare these charts: How we voted in the 2010 election vs what we got.

Unfortunately some backbench Conservative MPs are trying to propose a 40% threshold, meaning that at least 40% of all registered voters would need to support the reform. This is totally unrealistic and unprecedented: it's not the way we elect MPs, in fact only 35 out of our 650 MPs got support from 40% of their electorate.

Their fear is understandable: under a fairer voting system the Conservative party would probably not get an overall majority. But it is not right to use an unfair voting system to save another very unfair voting system.

The most important thing right now is to urge your MP not to support the threshold and to give the referendum a fair chance. You can do so here:

http://takebackparliament.com/stitchup

Follow the instructions to write a letter to your MP. A suggested letter will be provided for you; all you need to do is add in your MP's name (the site will tell you) and sign it with your name. If you personalise the letter more, so much the better.

For reference, here's the letter i wrote to my MP for Winchester, Steve Brine.

Dear Steve,

My first opportunity to write to you! :) This is about the Alternative Vote system referendum.

I really welcome a fairer system than the one we have currently. I led a debate at The Roebuck Inn recently proposing that First Past The Post is undemocratic. I did not vote for you, and my vote was discarded. It bothers me that 28,800 votes in Winchester counted for nothing. I won the debate, by the way!

Now that we have a real chance to get a fairer system I'm concerned that some backbench Conservative MPs are already trying to fight against it by trying to argue for a 40% threshold rule — that's 40% support from all available voters, even those who choose not to vote.

This doesn't sound at all fair to me, and sounds like a sign of fear. By the way, Steve, you only got 36.79% of the total available electorate in Winchester, so you should be able to see why this proposal doesn't make sense!

You may not be the representative i voted for, but you are now my representative in Parliament, and therefore i hope i can count on you to oppose this suggestion and give the referendum a fair chance.

Yours sincerely,

aimee daniells
twitter: @sermoa

After one afternoon already 1,873 letters have been sent to 548 of our MPs. It is important that we get the message to all 650 MPs, so please do your bit and support true democracy.

See also:
http://www.takebackparliament.com/
http://www.unlockdemocracy.org.uk/
http://www.power2010.org.uk/

I enjoyed geocaching so much yesterday, i was keen to go and find another one today!

My first try was GC1NAE3 – Time At The Bar – The Market Inn. I think i know approximately where it is, but i couldn't find it without attracting unwanted attention from the many passers by. I think i'll have to go back in the middle of the night to check whether my suspicions are correct on that hiding place!

Next i tried for GC1P23E – Close Cathedral Close and succeeded! It took me a while to find it, mainly because of nerves. Anyone who finds this one will understand what i mean when i say you have to be a bit brave! But i did find it, and i took it to the nearby bookstall of the cathedral to have a look at the contents:

There was recently a geocoin in this one, but although i found a few foreign coins, the geocoin was not there. It must have already moved on. I added my name to the visitor log (with some difficulty due to the tiny pencils!) and added a little Kinder egg toy:

If i go again i'll probably take a pencil and a pencil sharpener. Actually, that could be a good thing to take to all geocaches; they would often be useful.

It was quite fun to put it back in its hiding place and walk on knowing that i'd found something that not many people know about!

Already i am immensely enjoying geocaching. Unlike geohashing, it's something you can do at any time, and it's equally enjoyable by yourself as it is with friends. There are some geocaches on St Catherine's Hill and the Hockley Viaduct which i'm really looking forward to finding. I've been saying for a long time that i'd like to see those places … and the added possibility of finding a geocache gives me just enough reason to make it soon!

I'm going to want to create my own geocache at some point. I'm just trying to think of a good hiding place! :)

Many readers will know that i enjoy geohashing (geohashing.org): locating a geographic point detemined daily by randomly generated coordinates. For a long time i've been wanting to try the sport that inspired geohashing, which is geocaching.

Geocaching (geocaching.com) is another GPS game where you have to find a 'cache' which has been hidden by someone else. The cache stays there indefinitely and over the course of time several people will follow clues to find it. The cache may be large or small, and may contain various items. People sometimes take an item out and replace it with another item for the next visitor to find.

Today i got my chance to go geocaching for the first time. All the geohash locations were uninteresting or hard to reach this weekend, so my geohashing friend Mike came to Winchester for the afternoon. We initially planned to spend an afternoon juggling, but it was a bit wet and the ground too dirty for that. We went for lunch in the Bridge Patisserie and then decided to look whether there were any geocaches nearby.

It turned out there was one just around the corner! GC1N2M9 – Winchester Chesil Station which is part of a series of geocaches along the route of the former Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway. I became interested in this railway line since my geohash in Bar End where i noticed the railway line going past St Catherine's Hill on a map from 50 years ago. So i was curious to go anyway, to see whether i could spot any clues of the former railway and the station.

The first clue made me laugh to myself that i'd never noticed it before!

Old Station Approach. The clue is in the name!

The second clue is even bigger! This is the entrance to the tunnel that went straight through St Giles' Hill and out the other side in Winnall before it carried on towards Kings Worthy. I wonder whether the tunnel is still intact?

This is a contribution to the Flickr group Guess Where Winchester? so [shhh] on the location! ;)

The footbridge near the multi-storey car park has a definite 'railway feel' about it, don't you think?

That car park is built exactly where the old station used to be. It was called Winchester Cheesehill, the old name for the area we now call Chesil.

The view from the bridge:

The silver car driving away is following the route of the old railway line. There is no sign of it now, but a photo on wikipedia proves the history. Winchester Chesil Station

We looked for a long time before we found the geocache. It was very small and very well hidden. I don't believe anyone would find it unless they were specifically looking for it. Eventually Mike pulled it up. It was really nicely labelled:

The barrel reads: GEOCACHE – CONTENTS SAFE – DO NOT MOVE – GEOCACHING.ORG

Look what was inside!

A list of people and dates when they have found the cache. The list was actually full: somebody needs to go back and put in a new sheet of paper.

I really enjoyed my first geocaching experience. There are loads of geocaches all over Winchester so i'll definitely be going to find more. There are another 4 in this series on the Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway which i am keen to find, whilst learning more about the old railway line.

Sometimes it's excellent fun to work with somebody to produce a website in a day. With no requirement for ongoing support, just get it up and running, instant gratification. In a way, it says, "Look what we can do when we set our minds to it!"

winchesterwebscene.co.uk

Yesterday, @sydlawrence phoned me to ask if i'd like to help make a new site for the Winchester Web Scene. Without a second thought, i said, "DEFINITELY!" We got together at 3pm today at the Bridge Patisserie. We drank lots of coffee, went on to the Bishop on the Bridge, then went back to Syd's house and ate pizza. We got the whole site designed, coded, integrating with Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, Gravatar and Campaign Monitor for email subscriptions, with a blog plus comments, events list and RSS feeds … in about 5 hours.

It was nice that two Winchester web companies, Marmalade on Toast and Eden Development were able to combine talent to work on a fun social project together. The two of us had a great time making it!

The site gives a far greater prominence to the Winchester Web Scene than the old Ning site did. Still in its first few hours of existence, the site has already had 71 unique visitors. The future of the Winchester Web Scene is looking very bright!

The next event is a barbeque at the Hyde Tavern on the 6th July from 7pm. If you live near Winchester and are interested in anything to do with the web, you're very welcome to come along! :)

I managed to drag myself away from my computers this afternoon and have a lovely time outside.

First i went to visit this space of land that the WinACC local food group are hoping to renovate and turn into a city farm. I got these two lovely ducks on camera … they thought i had food for them. No such luck, heh!

I'll go back again soon and take some more photos of the area of land. If we go ahead with the transformation, it'll be really good to keep a photo blog! But today i didn't stay long because i was off to visit some friends and see the Christmas market. It was the first weekend, so it was predictably extremely busy, but again such a lovely atmosphere. The bells of the cathedral were ringing, there was carol singing, the crafts on offer were so beautiful and creative. We had mince pies and mulled wine! :)

This is without a doubt my favourite picture of the day:

Is that not just beautiful? Here are some other pictures of gorgeous lovely Winchester today …

There's more on Flickr.

I am waiting for some inspiration to occur to me about what to do for the rest of the afternoon. I know i have some chores to do (don't i always?!) but not too many today. I might watch The Bill which my sweetie kindly recorded for me in the week. I might work on the MyChores API a little bit … or i might just continue lying in bed. Blogging from my bed is the best thing, haha!

I went to church again this morning. It was perfectly fine. I met a few more people, including many of the musicians. I keep dropping hints that i'd like to join their band, but i haven't yet spoken to the people i would need to in order to join! I felt very content this week, and happy to be at the church. I love it that there are so many South Africans at the church. They are friendly and kind … and i love their accents! I'm probably going to pick up a bit of Afrikaans if i keep on going!

Work was good this week. I did a good job and i knew it. There's no doubt that the work i'm doing now is the hardest i've ever had to do. I'm not used to finding my job difficult. But hey, it's so rewarding to overcome a challenge and know i did it really well. I feel proud of myself. It's tiring, though. I had a lovely relaxing day yesterday, but i still feel like i need a bit more time to relax before going into another busy week of hard work.

Yesterday afternoon was spent with nyecamden who came to Winchester to meet me. We had a good time together. Visited the library to have a go on their wifi with our netbooks! :) Went to my favourite cafe, The Sanctuary for a delicious hot chocolate. We walked down to the cathedral green to idly pass the time. On the way we found several messages written in chalk on the pavement of The Square. I don't know who started it, but they were interesting to read. Many of them began with "This is …" and contained recollections of Winchester and happy memories.

I added to the messages, with "This is my favourite place to live". It's true, i love Winchester. Such a beautiful city, steeped in history and culture. I am very happy to live here.

Thank you Nye for the picture! :)

Today i went to a training session to become a 'low carbon champion' for Winchester Action on Climate Change. It was a good session, there was a lot to take in, but i certainly feel more confident about talking to other people and encourage people to do their bit. I met some nice people, including someone who is eager to work with me in promoting the benefits of low carbon living to our local neighbours. We'll probably set up some talks in our homes and get some discussion points going.

I have just done the Act on CO2 calculator and it came up with a total of 1.46 tonnes per year of CO2 emmisions for home, appliances and travel. They're missing something – the copy/paste code to publish into your blog. They should do that.

My personal action points from today are to get a wormery!! I've been thinking about it for a long time, and i hate the way that food scraps go mouldy in the bin. May as well get some pet worms to enjoy it and make some useful compost for us. I also want to grow some runner beans. We don't have a garden, but runner beans can be grown on the balcony. Maybe some other things too.

I feel i have settled in extremely well at my first week of my new job. I love the people, the environment, the work we do … it's fun and enjoyable, challenging, inspiring, makes me feel worthwhile. Most of the week i have been learning and paring with others, watching what they do, asking questions and making suggestions. Today we switched around and i was doing the typing, with help from one of the others.

They are very opinionated about how to do things – what works and what doesn't. We follow test-driven development rigidly: before we start any task we write a story about it. We run the story to see that it fails which means we need to write code. But before we do we write specs for the code. We run those to see them fail, then we write just enough code to make it pass. We keep iterating in small steps until we have it working, then we go back to the story which tells us what is to be done next. It sounds long-winded but it really works well. I am embarrassed at how haphazardly i wrote the code for MyChores … but i didn't know any better! MyChores is going to become so much more reliable, i can tell!

The other great thing is we are using Git and, now that i understand the power of branching, merging and rebasing, i realise what an awesome tool it is to use! It's so exciting when we're all working on the same project, Git allows us some very fast simultaneous development … and gitk makes it very exciting to be able to visualise what is going on! :)

Anyway, this is not interesting for the vast majority of my readers, so i will stop now!! Instead i will give you some pictures!

Here is a nice picture i took of the poppy fields near where i work. I love the accidental over-exposure of the sky!

This evening, inspired by the iMacs we use at work, i made a Leopard-style wallpaper!

Good, good. That's all for now. I'm going to go watch someone get evicted from Big Brother! :)

Resumo: Mi diskutas la problemon de la eksponenciala kreskado de la mondloĝantaro. Mi estis hodiaŭ matene ĉe la kunveno por agado sur klimatŝanĝo.

This morning i went to the Winchester Action on Climate Change meeting. It was really very good; well-attended, with exciting ideas and news about greening projects in Winchester. One idea which particularly intrigued me is the plan to buy a farm in Winchester and get volunteers to help work on the farm, produce food and sell it. It sounds really exciting, especially as it is so difficult to get an allotment around here.

Later on i went to look at the Facebook I Am Green application, and was delighted that i can now tick "I do not commute; I live close to work/school" – hooray! :D

There is an item that has generated a bit of discussion: "I (will) have no more than 1 child, or I will adopt additional children".

Someone called Júlia Babos made a comment:

What?! Having more than one child would be a green crime? I highly disagree.

Gray Little also disagreed:

Ya I'm with Julia I'd like to think that I'm living a pretty green lifestyle but i want a large family when I'm older, this in contrast I's basically saying that having more than one child is a crime against the earth, I disagree completely to such a statement, and would appreciate if someone sent me information pertaining to its reasoning.

Well, i happen to know a little bit about this, so i made a comment in reply:

@Júlia – it doesn't say you can't have more than one child – but it is asking us to consider adopting children. The world's population is growing exponentially, unsustainably.

Until the 1800s there were always under a billion people on the planet. It took 130 years to get to 2 billion, 30 years to get to 3 billion in 1960.

1974 (14 years later) 4 billion.
1987 (13 years later) 5 billion.
1999 (12 years later) 6 billion.

I believe it's around about 6.7 billion now, and this massive growth is due to our dependence upon oil to fuel mass production of food. The amount of sunlight that falls on the ground in a typical year is enough to support about 1 billion people. Therefore the impending oil crisis is also going to be a population crisis.

Read "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" by Thom Hartmann. And to anyone who is thinking about having a child, consider adopting an orphan instead.

I realise that my argument is completely one-sided and i am sure there are many more sides to this debate. I would like to hear more opinions. What are the advantages of having more children and continuing to expand the world's population? Is the oil argument soon going to be moot because nuclear fusion will provide a clean, limitless source of energy for us? What are your views?

Resumo: Hodiaŭ mi aplikis por laboro en mia urbo, kaj mi promenis en la kampojn, farinta fotojn.

So i didn't really know what to do with myself today after my London plans were scuppered by South West Trains. For one reason or another i followed a few links and discovered a Ruby on Rails job in Winchester! I'm not even looking for a job, but somehow i ended up applying for it! I just thought, "Well, why not! Give it a try, hey!"

This afternoon i went for a lovely walk through the fields of oil seed rape, taking lots of pictures. I think i felt my Flickr account was somewhat tainted by the nemews and i wanted to counterbalance it with some real beauty. I took some shots which i am quite proud of, particularly this one:

I can't say what it is i like about it. I'm not a photographer so i don't know. I suppose i like the angles, and the perspective, and the colour. Pffft what am i talking about?! I'm no pro. Although …

My Flickr has gone over 200 pictures and i have now lost the oldest ones. I am wondering whether to upgrade to 'pro'. I do like having them all recorded online. Is it beneficial to upgrade? I was going to say £24.95 is a lot, but now i notice that's dollars, so only £12.75 which is not so bad for a year. Hmm. I'll think about it.

Just cos i love to whore my photos out on here, have a few more …