Good friends of mine
left their puppy with The Pet Connection NI while they were on holiday and came back to a dog with a broken leg, a vet bill of over £400 and The Pet Connection NI refusing to accept liability.
Obviously I don't know the details of what transpired, but common sense suggests that places like The Pet Connection NI should have insurance to cover injuries sustained by pets on their premises and accept responsibility for the pets under their care. It's like a child minder letting your kid fall down the stairs and then claiming it's the child's fault.
Of course, social media means that now (literally) thousands of people know about the story and will make sure to avoid The Pet Connection NI, including myself.
Original post about Hopalong Teddy and The Pet Connection NI
So, I moved the blog over to Posterous. Couldn't be arsed faffing around with Wordpress when this does more than what I need. Old posts imported, domain redirected, easier posting achieved. One more thing to look after out of my hair.
As before, I'd love to take a few questions from the riff-raff to ask the politicians I get a chance to speak with. Remember all the devolved stuff is no longer the concern of Westminster, though I'm not sure what *is* the concern of Westminster regarding NI.
Pop any questions you want me to ask in the comments.
OK, the emails have been sent, going to try and get 20 minutes with each of the North Down candidates standing for Westminster.
So far, my impressions come from the candidates websites.
Steven Agnew (Green) - Nice website, easy to find a direct email for Steven. I have previously spoken to him prior to the European elections so expect this one to be easy to get.
Stephen Farry (Alliance Party) - Website looks like it's from 1997, but it was easy to get a direct email address for Stephen
Sylvia Hermon (Independent) - I got her email address from her canvassing flyer. It's a Hotmail one, which never fills one with hope.
Kaye Kilpatrick (Traditional Unionist Voice) - No email addresses on website, only a contact form (and a very poor one at that). I didn't fill in all the fields (nothing to indicate some were mandatory) and I got a completely blank page with "All the fields are required, please go back and submit the form again…". Thanks for that. Filled in the missing field with a n/a and got another blank page "Your request is being processed". It was still like that ten minutes later, so no idea if it actually went through. They refused to talk to me last time, so I don't hold out much hope now.
Liam Logan (SDLP) - Easy to find a direct email address. Which bounced. Emailed the general address complaining about them putting duff email addresses up for their candidates.
Ian Parsley (Ulster Conservatives and Unionists - New Force) - No direct email address and the generic ones weren't clickable to send email. Sent one to their contact@ address, which bounced. Tried again with the info@ and it hasn't bounced yet. Complained in the second email.
So, let's see how things go. If someone wants to lend me a better mic this time, that would be awesome.
So,
Sylvia Hermon was out on the campaign trail in Groomsport this evening, looking re-election for her seat in Westminster. I actually missed her as I was getting Sakura from Rainbows, but went for a quick walk to hunt her down to ask why she didn't even show up for the vote on the Digital Economy Bill.
Nothing I write below has any intent to add weasel words to her intentions, so when I say "time better spent", I am not implying she didn't think the DEBill was irrelevant or a waste of her time.
Essentially, she decided that, in the three days before parliament was dissolved and she was still able to act as an MP, her time would be better spent in her constituency, dealing face to face with with people with "emergency" problems. This seemed to include things such as OAPs who have hoods disrupting their lives, that sort of thing. I'm not sure exactly what an MP does to help that situation, but I guess that's something that's important. Her argument was that, since both Conservative and Labour were in support of the bill, it was going to get through anyway. Now, would it have been nice for my representative to show up, vote no as an act of defiance, make a stand, ineffectual though it would have been? Yes, of course. But in the three days of the wash up, should my representative do that instead of dealing directly with constituents where she feels she can actually make a difference? Well, I guess it's a moral call. She thinks that these unusual circumstances (washup, likelihood of a hung parliament etc) meant that she spent those three days in the place where she felt she could make the most real world difference.
It's disappointing, but understandable. We are all hung up on the DEBill because it's the space we live in, it's something that genuinely affects our lives, so we want our representative to stand in parliament, reflect our wishes. Should we want them to do that in the face of impossible to influence party whips? It's a difficult decision.
For the European election I tried to get an interview with someone from all the parties, to ask them why I should vote for them. Lady Sylvia has promised that I can do the same with her, sit down and get, on the record, her reasons I should vote for her and why, in a hung parliament, her single vote would actually make a difference.
I've been thinking about what I want to use my iPad for when it finally gets it's launch in the UK at the end of April. Casual browsing? Sure. Twitter. Yep. Email? Why not. But the thing I'm really excited about is as a magazine platform. I can't wait for Wired to launch and I would love if my other regular magazine, EVO, became available on the platform. I think this is where the iPad will really come into its own.
So, why not background tasks? Lets face it, almost everything I will do on the iPad will be possible on my MacBook Pro. It would be almost trivial to bring out a magazine reading app on a desktop OS, but I don't think it works. When I'm on a multitasking OS I am constantly distracted by Twitter, email and the ease to go and look at something else. Where magazines triumph is in having an exclusive grasp on my attention. I could sit and read an issue of Wired for an hour, but only if other things aren't vying for my attention. By not having these distraction, I will be able to sit and use my iPad like a magazine, but without all that unnecessary dead tree detritus.
My iPad will fill a different niche to both my iPhone and my MBP. I expect that, if the publishing companies do it right, my magazine (and maybe even newspaper) consumption will go way up and that this, along with ebooks, will be my primary use of the iPad. Can't wait. It's 2010 and finally it feels like the future is here.
Apple have posted their new
iTunes 12 Days of Christmas app, which will let you know when their now traditional Christmas freebies are available. Something very interesting in the description of the app is this:
Allow you to download a free gift from iTunes direct from your iPhone or iPod Touch
Now, this could just mean that the app will open the link to the iTunes app to give you your free song, music video, TV episode, or movie. But much more intriguing would be if the app downloaded these directly into your iTunes library. Could we see Apple opening access to third party apps that can start to interact with iTunes library on the phone to add content? Imagine a band app that could add music directly to the phone's music library, or a YouTube downloader? Maybe a game that allows you to save replays to your video library? Sure, they would need to get through the approval process first, but opening this up to third party apps would be a great move forward.
The free downloads start from the 26th of December, but the app is available now and will send you push notifications when each download is available.
