David Kreps Blog

The right to be bigoted?

I have signed a petition this evening.
Islington Council it seems will appeal against the victory of this bigot in her tribunal, where the judge decided she had a right to be bigoted.
I think this is one of those crucial little battles in the longer term defence of our recent freedoms against the bigots' claim that they have a right to discriminate against us, and would encourage anyone interested in the protetion of minority rights to add their name to this protest at the granting of freedom to disciminate dressed up as religious freedom. Prejudice we know is rife amongst the major religions, and needs must tolerate. But their legal right to translate that prejudice into discimination against those against whom they are prejudiced - this, in a secular society, we must not allow.

I urge you to sign the petition. http://www.gopetition.co.uk/online/20471.html

18 07 08 - 22:33 - da5idk - default| No comments - § ¶ Share on Facebook

Orange and the new personalisation market

I like the new Orange advert http://www.i-am-everyone.co.uk/. There are others in this vein – The Sunday Times for example. It is about personalisation. It aims to speak directly to ‘real’ people. Advertisers, it seems, are beginning to realise - no doubt through the reports of sociologists - that there is no 'Public'.... ...to realise that there are many diverse groups of people who all need variously to be catered for in targeted and unique ways. This is in contrast to the formerly popular general attempt to rationalise and generalise for 'the Public' from a 'sample' of a few, which many have begun now to see is fraught with a sociomyopia that oversimplifies and alienates badly enough to work counter to its primary, if piecemeal, aims. We are more complex than we used to think, and efficiency requires less bluntness in our implementation strategies - whatever project it may be that we pursue. Fundamentally, the efficiency of today’s socio-micromanagement is something we must all grasp - across all disciplines and walks of life - as we stand up to the collective social task of environmental behaviour change. This seems to be one story in the multiple narratives we are exposed to that really does seem to carry weight. This is an eco-social, collective responsibility moment for the species, in that it is global, and requires consensus on a geographical and population scale unprecedented in human history –at a moment when we realise how diverse we truly are. The Orange advert speaks to an understanding (within the arts community that informs these marketing tactics) of the unfolding zeitgeist of a humanity at a crisis moment in both its self-realisation and its survival potential, and how the answer to that crisis seems to us all to lie somehow within our understanding of the self, of who each one of us is, and how each one of us in our moment by moment unfolding as persons can contribute, through our self awareness and our actions, to the eco-social behaviour change required of us all to prevent the destruction of our planet. (more)

09 07 08 - 21:03 - da5idk - default| No comments - § ¶ Share on Facebook

Glastonbury Festival 08

So here is my first blog post actually from the Glastonbury Festival. Not because I haven't been coming for some years, or because I haven't had a blog for some years, nor even, because there hasn't been broadband in my portacabin before, but this is the second year there has been broadband for me, and today I am sufficiently bored and short of work to do on my Saturday afternoon shift that this virtual scribbling should help to pass the time.

I have been attending Glastonbury Festival on a regular basis since, at the age of 21, I came to see the Smiths, in 1984, and discovered much more than just good music. By 1987 I was living in Glastonbury, working for Arabella Churchill's Children's World Charity as a Drama Team member, doing Theatre-in-Education with Special Needs children around the South West. Living in Glastonbury involved a good deal of community arts work, too, and of course performing in the Theatre-Circus fields at the Festival over the next several years in various capacities. In 1991 I even went on holiday with Bella, swimming with the Dolphin in Dingle Bay on the south-west coast of Ireland, and gathering many fond memories. But '91 was also the year I left Glastonbury, moving to Totnes to do my BA in Theatre at Dartington. I still worked at the Festival in 92 and 93, but stopped in my final year at Dartington, missing the Festivals of 94 and then again 95, busying myself with Tamworth. However, dragged into the curry house in Glastonbury one evening in the Spring of 97 by Sean Bridges, I found myself sitting at a table with Bella for the first time in two or three years and she encouraged me to come back, and I have been coming every year since. Details about my theatrical escapades at Glastonbury Assembly Rooms, Dartington, Tamworth, and Glastonbury Festival are all elsewhere on this site. This year is, however, particularly poignant, because this year is the first Festival without Bella. (more)

28 06 08 - 13:09 - da5idk - default| No comments - § ¶ Share on Facebook

Hope for the World?

Buried in the half hour victory speech Barack Obama made in St Paul, Minnsota in which he expertly moves his ecstatic crowd, are some VERY potent promises about energy policy and addressing climate change. I confess I am quite excited about the possibility that this man might really make a change, not just to America, but thereby the whole world. After the failed years of the Bush administration and its backward looking policies the world so desperately needs the change this man seems to promise. I only hope he can deliver - and that he lives to do so....


-- (more)

06 06 08 - 21:18 - da5idk - default| No comments - § ¶ Share on Facebook

Sync Hell

I am finally defeated. I have tried to make a PC at University, a Windows Mobile 5 phone-pda, a home office desktop PC, and my MacBook Pro keep a synchronised calendar, for all the appointments and plans in the many walks of my life, each being a place where changes might be made. The synchonisation problems across these platforms seem insurmountable.

Missing Sync for Windows Mobile on the Mac plays at being Active Sync quite well, but changes events by one hour (yes I have installed the released patch but it made it worse!) Events are routinely duplicated during synchronisation, as if Entourage simply cannot see the exact same event on the PDA, although the PDA happily writes the details into Entourage. Delete the duplicate and it will be removed by Windows XP when the PDA synchronises with the Desktop. [And yes I've exported the lot out of Outlook as a CSV, reimported it into Outlook, and then synchronised that across to empty WinMobile PDA and from there into empty Entourage. It still fucks up.]

I am so fed up with spending up to an hour a day pissing about trying to keep my calendar in order, when the synchronisation is supposed to make my life easier, not more complex. Keeping one calendar, say on my PDA, is not good enough because the PDA is a poorer interface than a full screen where I can plan more effectively.

Unfortunately, the present solution is to stop using Entourage, and launch Parallels on my Mac with Outlook installed on a Virtual WinXP, and use that to synchronise with my PDA. But do I then have to use Outlook on virtual PC on my Mac to hold all my contacts, email, etc etc. This is sad. It could be worse to being running both! The only other thing to do is to get an iPhone and begin to use iTunes on the PC. Try synchronising from that to Outlook! Maybe it will be better - on WinXP. Not sure to be honest.

When Orange offered me a £6.50 monthly deal worth £35 a month, with a free LG Viewty, it had to be better than £35 a month plus £270 outlay to have an iPhone on 02.

So for the next 18months I am still with Orange. So do I try an unlocked iPhone, with all the extra expenses that it may entail in decent patching software etc etc.... Doesn't seem like a reliable alternative to me.

Oh and as for getting the LG Viewty to talk to ANYTHING at all.... well forget it.

And yes of course I have tried to put the whole lot on Plaxo, and synchronise everything to that. THe LG Viewty couldn't talk to it at all. Entourage and Outlook and the PDA all managed to talk and sychronize with it and deleted more than half of all my calendar events in the process!!!! So I dumped out of Plaxo pronto, restored my calendars from backup (all important appointments with times and locations as well as dates) and thanked God for archiving.

Yep = go with one operating system and software company. that's the message. and because of that I really would rather go mac. but keeping the WM-PDA instead of going for the iPhone means, unfortunately, that MS have won. Outlook on parallels-virtual-winxp here I should go! But I tried it and it sucks.

Perhaps I just have to keep everything online - access it from the PDA over GPRS - and not use either Outlook OR Entourage. Perhaps this is the real change. Yep. This, though needing some research, is most likely the way forward.

11 03 08 - 22:56 - da5idk - default| two comments - § ¶ Share on Facebook

US Presidential Process

OK, I've been watching this, because the UK media has been full of it, and considering how much global impact the result is likely to have it is rather captivating at times - like when you slow down on the motorway to gawp at the accident on the other carriageway, something in you really wants to look, despite how distasteful it all is.

So I have been a Hillary supporter for a while, because I quite liked Bill and thought it would be good to see a Clinton dynasty to rival the Bush dynasty. I had even felt that although Obama was saying some quite interesting things, Americans probably weren't ready for a black president, but might be ready for a woman.

Tonight I have changed my mind. Tonight I think Americans ARE more ready for a black president than I thought - SO LONG AS HE"S A MALE - and SO LONG AS IT ISN"T HILLARY CLINTON. Tonight I changed my mind - and the thing that changed my mind was this: 90% of Obama's fundraising is made up of individual donations of under $100.

This is what a Democratic strategist interviewed on Channel 4 News said. I'll repeat it if you like. 90% of Obama's fundraising is made up of individual donations of under $100. He has raised more millions of dollars than McCain, more even than the most formidable fundraising machine in Democratic history (until now) - Bill Clinton. 90% of Obama's fundraising is made up of individual donations of under $100.

This is completely unprecedented. This means, I think, that the US really IS ready for change.

Roll on Obama. I can't vote for you, but I sincerely hope you win - more importantly - I sincerely hope you really do make a change, and that you don't get yourself shot.

20 02 08 - 21:32 - - default| No comments - § ¶ Share on Facebook

VideoPoetry

Do you know what the problem with television is? There's too much of it. There are no limits. Too many possibilities. So what happens? All the resources already dedicated to quantity, few - or at least not enough - are dedicated to quality. This is not to eulogise a heyday of four - three - or even two national channels when the competition between 'venue' brought the very best out of the pioneers. But who would deny that most TV these days is awful?

The best paintings/stills are simple: portrait, stil life, landcape.
The best music obeys the strictest of accepted forms: concerto, symphony, song, 12bar..... even jingle.
All the very best in literature - the art of the written word - is in carefully crafted poetic form: the haiku, the sonnet.

The moving image combined with music and the spoken word has given us some of the greatest works of history: the shamanic dance; the transubstantiation mass; jacobean tragedy. That its launch onto the celluloid stage has struggled at times with form, born as it has been in a time of play with form, is perhaps not to be wondered at, in such early days.

The very best in film, right now, is the short : sometimes driven by a commercial intent that funds it, yet from which constraints its liberating parameters are born, the advert is the haiku of film; at its very best mimicking the style but with something different to sell.....

Here's an example of the best........ (more)

14 02 08 - 21:26 - da5idk - default| one comment - § ¶ Share on Facebook