Footpath Maintenance

In August last year this article appeared in the Herts Advertiser. A concerned resident had criticised the county council for not maintaining a rundown path alongside a busy road. The path is on the north side of Hatfield Road, about 100m east of the junction with Lyon Way. Apparently the HCC contractor, Ringway, inspected the footway and found no defects requiring immediate attention. Although it is only a footpath the issue came up for discussion at a CycleHerts meeting where we decided to follow it up. I don’t have the details to hand but it seems that someone from HCC then claimed that they had no duty to maintain the path because it is not tarmacked. In fact it is tarmacked but the section in question was completely covered in mud so you wouldn’t know it (though you could make a pretty good guess based on the fact that the tarmac is visible along much of the rest of the path).

On Deleting my Yahoo! Account

On October 4th a Reuters report by Joseph Menn revealed that last year Yahoo! secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials. As a result, Fight for the Future created a website urging people to Dump Yahoo. I might not have followed the advice but for the fact that Yahoo! has been regularly annoying me since I first created my account back in 2001.

IPv6 problem with macOS Sierra

When there were no new iMacs announced at Apple’s “Hello Again” event in October I decided to stop waiting and replace my ageing late 2009 model with an Apple refurbished late 2013 one (I had a friend who was eager to buy my old one). I had also held off installing Sierra so my old machine was running El Capitan.

Online Petitions

Over the years I have kept a pretty comprehensive record of all the online petitions I have signed, amounting to over 500. Of those signatures, 320 of them were on just 6 different petition sites:

• UK Government and Parliament(77)
• Change.org(65)
• Care2 petitions(57)
• 38 Degrees(53)
• Avaaz(38)
• SumOfUs(30)

Welwyn Hatfield Election Results 2

Last year I was a Green Party candidate for my ward in the Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council election. I am still a member of Welwyn Hatfield Green Party and in September I reluctantly (nobody else was putting their hand up) agreed to take over from Ian Nendick when he stood down as their election agent. So this year I had a bit more work to do.

Garden City Visioning Workshop

Last week I attended a Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council organised event called “Healthy Living in the 21st Century – Garden City Visioning Workshop”. The background to this is that Welwyn Garden City will be celebrating its centenary in 2020 and Welwyn Hatfield Council is developing a Local Plan which is expected to give the green light to a number of large new residential developments in the borough. The basic idea of the workshop was to address the question as to whether these new developments could be compatible with Garden City principles.

Cycle Camping on Mull

Early this year I was invited by my friend Denise to help celebrate her 50th birthday by joining a group on the ascent of her last Corbett followed by dinner at the George Hotel in Inveraray. I accepted the invitation and booked two nights at Inveraray Hostel for May 26th and 27th. It was a long way to travel so I was keen to extend my stay and decided to head up early with my bike on the train for a bit of cycle touring. I had never been across to Mull and came up with a plan to spend three nights camping on the island. I booked a train ticket to Glasgow (with bike space) arriving on Thursday evening and a room at Euro Hostel Glasgow for that night. I also booked another night at Inveraray Hostel for Friday, giving me three unplanned nights before having to get back there on Tuesday.

Sculpture by Andy Maclachlan, Dunoon.

Orbiting the World with George Galloway

A friend posted something on Facebook today with a link to the latest episode of a weekly show on RT called Sputnik, hosted by the renowned George Galloway. The bit my friend was referring to was the interview with Mark Watts of Exaro News about the Westminster pedophile network so I watched that first but then went back and watched the rest of the episode which was mainly an interview with Annas Altikrit of the Cordoba Foundation about the Henry Jackson Society, referring to a recent spinwatch report examining the history, activities and politics of this influential clique.

Welwyn Hatfield Election Results

Since joining the Green Party in November I have been going along to local meetings and when there was a call for candidates to stand in the local council elections I volunteered. The aim was to get a Green Party candidate on the ballot for all wards of Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council and I agreed to stand in my own ward, Hatfield West, where I have lived for over 20 years. Hatfield also has a Town Council and three seats were up for election in West Ward so I offered to put myself forward for that as well.

Silverlight, the other Flash

If you follow this blog then you may recall me railing against websites that require the use of the Adobe Flash browser plug-in, which I removed from my iMac in November 2010 and never reinstalled. I watch quite a lot of YouTube (too much to be honest) and lack of Flash was a challenge. For a long time my solution was to use Connor McKay’s YouTube5 Safari Extension but in September 2014, when I had turned off Extensions for some reason, I noticed that YouTube seemed to be working fine – presumably it had started serving HTML5 to browsers without Flash. A few days ago YouTube went further and announced that they are now serving HTML5 by default (at least in Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and beta versions of Firefox). They are also deprecating “old style” Flash <object> embeds and their Flash API.