As Jeremy Paxman said in his intro to last night’s debate (RealPlayer) between the three main candidates, the Mayoralty of London is a very important job. The figures alone are worth repeating – a budget of nine billion pounds a year and a total spend of thirty-six billion pounds. I wish that the debate had [...]

I would like to draw attention to this post about Boris Johnson and astroturf by the Tory Troll. Astroturfing is a neologism to mean using people to pretend to be the grass roots.  Someone from the same IP address commented on this post of mine under two different names; while that is not proof anything, [...]

I’m thinking of putting a rotating strapline somewhere at the top of the sidebar. So far, I’ve come up with ‘I’m Dave Cole and I approve this message’ ‘Heavily medicated for public safety’ ‘There is a non-negligible chance he will end up ruling over us like a king – Matt Sinclair’ ‘Contains a source of [...]

Chris Bryant, Labour MP for the Rhondda, is running the London Marathon to raise funds for the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation, the people doing the ‘Give a Few Bob‘ campaign. You can sponsor him here. The PCRF is a fairly small charity that does specialist work on one of the cancers that kills a lot [...]

There has been some discussion of late about who has the most visitors to their blog. I’m sure that I don’t compare to some of the participants in the discussion who, Priapus-like, wave their impressive statistics for all to see. Google Analytics, Statcounter and the like are, ultimately, hobbyist tools. A website seeking to make [...]

Sunder Katwala, general secretary of the Fabian Society, has written an open letter to Lib Dem MPs in London asking them to give their second preference. I hope that they do make public statements in support of Ken. The race is close and Ken’s prediction from a while back when people were treating Johnson as [...]

“Vote for London”, Ken’s election broadcast, was on the BBC yesterday evening at 1855. You can, through the miracle of the internet, watch it here and now. xD.

Without the full facts and familiarity of a situation, it is generally hard to comment on a medical case. However, a quick look at the diagnostic criteria for bipolar disorder and guessing that it takes time for symptoms to show themselves and, for a meaningful diagnosis, you need to be able to talk. This quote, [...]

Let us say that you bought a tube of toothpaste. You’d probably be pretty annoyed if the toothpaste company insisted that you used their toothbrushes. Equally, if you bought a toothbrush only to find that you were only allowed to use the toothbrush company’s toothpaste, you’d be a bit peeved. That’s one of the objections [...]

A problem with the computer (does anyone have any experience of making ATI video cards work with Linux?) means that blogging has been light of late. Anyhow, here are some interesting posts. Beer diversity and why it’s under threat Vote Match – London elections If you don’t know who to vote for, this might help [...]