LibDem Blogs - Archived!

The Austrian Minister compared e-Government to a Viennese waltz ..... I still haven't worked out what that means. He was one of the speakers at the EU Ministerial Conference on e-Government. This happens every two years, and as it fell in the middle of the UK's presidency it was seen as an opportunity to showcase British achievements. I was very privileged to have been invited to the event in Manchester last week. The 52 finalists in the e-Europe Awards each had an exhibition stand, so instead of being sweet-talked by commercial suppliers we were able to ...

I've just finished reading "Century Rain" by Alastair Reynolds, and it's a cracking read if you like SF. I was surprised and intrigued to find it's not connected to any of his earlier books. Don't read the blurb on the back cover, it would be more fun to plunge in without knowing exactly what happened to the Earth and exactly where some reproduction jazz 78s are coming from. I mentioned this book to a Tory Councilor yesterday and he siad he might buy it as a Xmas present for a certain Mr Davis. Is this a scoop - David Davies ...

Having seen some of the local party websites, I thought that I would give a Libby Masterclass. I personally use Paint Shop Pro to create my images, and this tutorial will be based on it. The first problem I come across are people using images which are resized using the height and width attributes, which leads to images like the two on the right. You should always resize your images in a

Having successfully assassinated another household gadget, this time the washing machine (made whirring noises, no sign of the drum moving), I spent a peaceful Sunday morning tidying the house, filing and generally pottering about whilst awaiting the delivery of a replacement from Comet (if you're reading, gentlemen, your website is actually pretty good - and a home cinema system would be a nice

A few minutes ago Charles Dance was simultaneously playing Ralph Nickleby on ITV and Mr Tulkinghorn on BBC1. Is this a record?

With Tim Worstall busy promoting his book, this week's Britblog roundup can be found on Philobiblon.

The planning application from Asda for a 'neighbourhood centre' was turned down at our planning meeting last Thursday . In fact I moved refusal, my ward colleague Ron seconded it , and we won the vote by 12 votes to 9 with 5 abstentions. As you can see, it was a tight vote. Why did we go for refusal? It's a long story. Afterwards, the guy from Asda apparently said to the guy from the local chamber of trade. "Round One to you, but we'll see you at the appeal...."

This winter seems to building into a winter of discontent. The health service is facing substantial problems. The government's solution seems to be to reorganise it. We in Birmingham face either 1 PCT or 3 PCTs. In essence we are going back to a single health authority for the city - a situation much like it used to be about 10 years ago. The withdrawals from storage appear to have ebbed for

I have slated the media before for their tired attempts to polarise British politics into sterile 'left' or 'right' cliches. So it's been with escalating exasperation that I've followed the letters pages of Liberal Democrat News, in which various correspondents - over several monotonous weeks - have been knocking seven shades of shite out of each other over the party's future direction. Indeed,

Private Eye appear to have got themselves a source in the Welsh Assembly if the current edition's HP sauce is anything to go by. They report that the £278,000 tank trap designed to stop suicide bombers getting anywhere near the new building has a fatal flaw. No one seems to have noticed the flat, wide pavement to the side of the road - plenty of space for most vehicles, which would have no difficulty mounting the kerb, to nip around the trap. This is the problem with commenting on work-in-progress, as you never know what else is planned for the ...

Edis at MKNE Political Information has reported on his blog that a woman has been arrested in denver for refusing to show her ID on a cross-city bus. Will the introduction of ID cards in the UK to this level of scrutity of the documents? How long will it take to escalate to this level? Is this not a gross infringement of our civil liberties? If this can happen in the 'land of the free and the

Whilst reading a story about 3G on the BBC website I found this quoteWe have really good chances that the soccer championship next year will be the boom for this technologySoccer championship? What Christophe Caselitz from Siemens is actually talking about is the World Cup.

In the same week that a cover-story from ZDNet revealed that a major reason for not disclosing a migration from Microsoft to Open-Source products is the expectation of PR backlash, we see exactly what Ingrid Marson described in principle occuring in Boston. Peter J Quinn [...]