Light aircraft crash in Farnborough, Kent
This is horrible - a light aircraft has crashed in a residential area while taking off or landing at Biggin Hill airport. The crash site is less than a mile from my little brother’s old school, and about a mile from my parents’ house:
(click to enlarge)
I don’t think there have been any aircraft crashes in the area in several years, the last - if I remember correctly - being associated with the Biggin Hill airshow, and eyewitness descriptions at the moment seem to suggest the plane was in some kind of mechanical difficulty.
It’s horrible when something like this happens; it’s worse when it’s practically in your “back yard”, and my thoughts go out to everyone affected by the incident.
More news coverage is online at the BBC and Sky News.
Posted by Alex on Sun 30th March 2008
How (not) to make an impression with the Secretary of State…
Just a quick footnote: I had the pleasure of meeting not only the University Vice-Chancellor (i.e. University top bod) John Craven yesterday - and for once it wasn't to receive what amounts to a bollocking for printing articles of questionable veracity in Pugwash News - but also the Secretary of State, John Denham.
News editor Jacob Leverett was given the potentially career-defining opportunity of interviewing the minister, with a clean-slate interview (i.e. we weren't proscribed any questions), and Jacob, after the inevitable nervousness, handled the task with aplomb. At one point I thought there was going to be a punch-up - you'll be able to see what I mean in the video - but overall, the interview, which we video'd and recorded - went very well indeed.
Throughout the interview, I was sat off behind camera and, as the grilling drew to a close, and realising the need to get a photo of the occasion, I grabbed the only camera to hand: Jacob's Nikon D-something-or-other (D40 perhaps? I dunno…). I managed to turn it on and ask, in my best “meeja-related-person” voice, “ehhm, could I ask you gents to pose for a very quick photo please?”.
Both Mr Denham and Mr Leverett agreed and, putting on their best grins/grimaces, turned to the camera. Yes, I managed to take a photo… But no, I hadn't got as far as figuring out how Jacob's damned flash worked.
Bugger.
Of course, I bravely soldiered on and did my best to give the impression that I knew exactly what I was doing, and that my command of the camera's manual configuration meant I didn't need such paltry technological aids as a flashgun… Until Jacob shattered my carefully-crafted illusion with “You have no idea how to operate my camera, do you Alex?”
“Err, no… Not exactly” I replied.
Bugger. Again.
Still, I think you'll agree the photo below is singularly one of the most impressive pieces of photography this year:
… ahem. You can read the University's more coherent take on the visit here, or read our teaser article-thing here. Or you could check back on Monday to see the video of the MP's interview, in our news section.
Posted by Alex on Sun 30th March 2008
Pugwash, monkeys, brass monkeys, stupidity, bitchin’, geekery, and guilt-free holiday
Apologies for the 50-in-1 update, but I've got loads of equally important (or, if you're a normal human being, equally boring) things to ramble on about…
Posted by Alex on Wed 26th March 2008
Banksywatch: the double yellow line flower on Pollard Street
Just found this shot of Banksy's double yellow line flower (you can find the original here on Flickr). Nice work :o)
Image (c) Dave Gorman
Posted by Alex on Mon 24th March 2008
Schadenfreude
Going through my cameraphone photos - almost a year's worth - I found this pic of a rare OS X “kernel panic” on my laptop, which is the computer's way of saying “that's it, something's gone massively wrong and I've had enough. If you're stupid enough to want to keep going, be my guest, but you're going to have to reboot me first”…
Not having experienced this on a Mac before, I guess that's one of the
warning signs a more experienced (or geeky?) owner might have attributed to what was about to happen next. Unfortunately for me - but brilliantly for you if
schadenfreude is the only thing that gets you through the day - I took
no notice of this warning sign.
The photo was taken on February 14th. A few days later, my laptop's hard disk karked it in spectacular style.
Ah well, you live and learn… There's another 82 random photos in the set including a couple of excellent bits of graffiti that made I chuckle (which I'll write a separate post about shortly). Bored or suffering insomnia? You can find the rest of the pics here on Flickr :o)
Posted by Alex on Sat 22nd March 2008
Recommended student media: Palatinate
Thanks to the NUS's Media Mailing list thingbob (one of their best-kept secrets), I've just found out about Palatinate, the online version of Durham University SU's fortnightly student newspaper.
Their website comes across much like I imagine UPSU.net does - a rapidly-evolving work of love by one or two hard-working HTML-geeks, and the results show (I admit I'm guessing about the webteam here, but the site feels a lot like someone's put a lot of work into it, and is perhaps still tweaking things as they go along…).
More importantly, the content is rich and diverse, ranging from features on the Union's clubs and societies (complete with pictures of Beautiful People™, of course ;o) through to the not-too-Geek-orientated weekly online news roundup (Facebook doing instant messaging? Srsly?!). In fact, revisiting the website to get the link to the Facebook article, I notice that they have a whole “online” section - not an entirely crazy idea, I suspect.
The content is also easily accessible (although the online front page appears to have a heavy bias towards comment which might just be down to layout tweaking than a lack of news-based content, it seems) and - yey! - they're using JonDesign's Smoothgallery (which I've gushed about previously) to rotate the top three news stories.
Very nice, and definitely worth subscribing to their RSS feed.
/al
Posted by Alex on Fri 21st March 2008
Avoiding work by doing work (or, “ideas for the UPSU’s online media strategy”…)
Hello everyone! I'm currently bashing this out on one of the two massively popular open-access laptops provided at the NUSSL convention
Posted by Alex on Tue 18th March 2008
That’s all folks!
That's the end of elections for another year, and the last year I'll be involved in the Union. It's been a helluva fortnight, with a larger UPSU Media presence than ever before.
For the first year ever, we've had photographers and videographers (is that the right term?) running around at pretty much every elections-related event, a massive amount of visual media, a great deal of coverage in Pugwash News, not to mention Pure FM's involvement in interviewing the candidates live on air and broadcasting the hustings candidates' question time events in the evenings last week.
I'm amazingly proud and grateful to all of our student volunteers for all their work in the last few weeks - we have, for the first time, a lot of video footage (and there's more to come, which will be used as teaser-material for next year I hope), and there's been an almost constant stream of photos and updates going online from elections-related events.
(You can check out the elections photos, videos, and Pure FM podcasts, and our elections minisite - the largest ever at 75 pages - here).
This year, we've seen roughly a 15% rise in voter turnout despite the poor weather and the end of term (who doesn't know at least one friend who went home half way through this week suffering from parental withdrawal symptoms? ;o) and, although candidate numbers were the same as last year (fourteen candidates), the distribution among positions has been almost diametrically opposed, with last year's least-contested positions seeing the largest numbers of candidates this year.
A couple of people have observed that this year's line-up has been a very marked “pitched battle” between sports clubs and societies and, while I can't comment on how accurate that statement is - it is, after all, a pretty narrow-focused assessment of a candidate to say that they're a “sporto” or “society person” (or “soco”?) - the figures do seem to show that the candidates who received the most votes in each position are all well-known faces around the Union.
Last month, I made a conscious decision not to choose who I wanted to support during the elections process. To have done so would have been to make my life as a trustee of the UPSU charity and editor-in-chief of a lot of the Union's media much harder, and I have no doubt that at some point or other I would have found myself second-guessing any editorial decisions I made to reassure myself that I hadn't unintentionally biased myself for or against a particular candidate. It's a decision I definitely don't regret, although explaining to candidates that I wasn't planning to vote was a difficult process (although, in my defence, I also didn't realise I could vote until yesterday!).
The hardest part of the elections process, for anyone involved with the Union, is the thought that a candidate who you count as a friend might not be elected. Unfortunately, that's a position I found myself in this year, and it's never nice to see a friend's election bid failing to be successful but, that said, there's a small amount of comfort to be gained in knowing that everyone who was elected this year have, so far, shown a great deal of promise and ability, and a willingness to go out of their way for the positions they all campaigned for which will hopefully translate into rampant enthusiasm for their new jobs when they come into office.
So, here's to the new Sabb team. The old Sabb team have a short four-and-a-half months left in office, and the last few weeks are going to be spent working closely with the new team members, so in no time at all, last night's successful candidates will be sitting at their desks in the Sabb office learning the ropes of the new jobs.
Good luck! :o)
/al
Posted by Alex on Sat 15th March 2008
Videotastic question time fun
This evening was the first of the four candidates' question times, with video being recorded (I think?) for the first time. Tallie Kane (reviews editor), Jacob (news editor), Luke (web editor) and Hannah (Pure FM sec) came along and helped out, broadcasting the evening's events to literally billions* of listeners, and videoing the night's proceedings - hopefully the videos should be up on our YouTube stream soon (i.e. once I or another kind soul processes them).
The evening is always scary for the candidates, so a big pat on the back to the girls and guys for doing so well tonight. A few are going to need to be trained to talk louder into the microphone, but that's nothing a little adjustment of the mixing desk can't fix. Alternatively, the “sound engineer's limiting stick” can be used to similar effect…
Posted by Alex on Wed 5th March 2008