So as I do, I did a search and by a strange coincidence they do! As of today an EP with two songs from the series – Do You Didgeridoo? and Bhangra Beat – and the Zingzillas Theme Tune was released and is available from Amazon and other online music stores with a Zingzillas DVD available in time for Christmas. Suffice to say that the MP3′s are already downloaded and I’m sure someone will be getting a copy of the DVD in their stocking come Christmas!

Note, although you could buy it elsewhere, if you buy from the links below, Amazon make a little contribution towards paying our hosting costs for this site.

• DVD Review: The Ultimate Golf Learning Experience
• The Best Shopping Deals After Christmas
• How to Find Rare Acoustic Musical Instruments
• Works for Me Wednesday: Christmas Shopping BEFORE Thanksgiving
• Dirty Car Dealership Tactics

A hat – the latest must have breakfast time accessory!

No phone calls for a bit…

Testing @posterous again

Basically with the arrival of Sam, I’ve been keeping an eye on the finances, and thought that I should try and at least cover the hosting costs for our various sites. As a result I have been reading ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income along with the associated blog looking for tips on how to earn a little bit of money – the book is quite clear that most people don’t earn vast amounts from their blogs, but covering the hosting would be just fine!

One of the key points that the book drums home is that blogging in niches is better for building traffic and audience than the rather eclectic mix I’ve had up to now. With the arrival of WordPress 3.0 which unites the multi-blog and single blog versions of WordPress it’s now possible to switch across and host multiple blogs without too much problem, which is what I have done.

The family news/general type stuff, and anything that doesn’t fit into any other category will remain here, but I have now added Soap Box for all my opinion type stuff, Picture Book to highlight some of my photographs and Pomum Sermo for Apple related stuff. In the future there will probably be others, most likely for anything Church related once the Anglican Communion start taking chunks out of each other again, and maybe a programming related blog. Beth is also looking at hosting her blogs Et Uxor and Displaced Moose as child sites here as she can do some of the things she hasn’t been able to do on a hosted platform. I’ve also added some hopefully not too intrusive advertising bars showing Google Adsense adverts, Amazon links and iTunes affiliate links, which I hope will gain a few clicks to help cover the hosting costs. There is also an Amazon search box in several places which gives us credit if you use that to search rather than going direct to Amazon – any clicks and searches much appreciated.

So hopefully normal service will continue, indeed I’ve actually written rather more posts than I have of late to get the new blogs going, and if you’re interested in the subject areas of the niche blogs, please point your browser/RSS reader to the new sites!

• Does Your Google Page Rank Really Affect Your Corporate Blog?
• Site Promotion. Dispatch Of Advertisements.
• Find Out How To Obtain A High Ranking In Google For Your Lead Capture Page
• Changing Web Hosts
• How to Get Blog Traffic in Five Steps

I have heard it said often that whatever people tell pollsters, when they get into the polling booth they can do something totally different. The 1992 General Election is a good example of this effect where the polls were predicting a Labour victory, but the country returned the sitting, and apparently deeply unpopular Conservative government for another term. For decades the government of the UK has been flip-flopping from Labour to Conservative and back to Labour again, usually with a large pool of floating voters who are voting to get rid of something they don’t like, rather than voting for something they do.

This time around according to the polls Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats had made a big impression during the campaign, and according to the pollsters had historically high poll ratings, at times pushing Labour into third place. But on the day all these poll gains evaporated – across the country people were desperate to get rid of an unpopular government and saw voting for the Conservatives as a way to do it.

It was against this backdrop that we must look at the results for Wokingham. John Redwood our sitting Conservative MP was returned with a significant increase in majority. In the press this has been reported as a swing from the Liberal Democrats to the Conservatives, but when you look at the votes this is misleading. There was a significant increase in turnout over 2005 – in actual fact of the three main parties only Labour had less votes – the Liberal Democrat candidate received more votes. However most of the additional turnout went to the sitting Conservative candidate. Mark Ashwell the independent candidate polled a couple of thousand votes, noticeable, but not enough to really impact the vote.

Locally, there was a big jump in turnout – the last time this ward was elected it wasn’t on the day of a General Election. Occurring on the same day it is rare for people to vote differently in the two elections, so again the local councillor was returned with a sizeable majority. Indeed across the whole of the borough only one ward changed hands, passing from the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats. In the run up to the vote I had been swapping e-mails with our local councillor who had been defeatist right from the off, saying that our Resident Action Group website was going to lose him the election, that he knew his time was up, and during the course of the campaign we had more than double the number of flyers through from him. In my e-mails I’d repeatedly said that I wouldn’t be surprised if he was still the village councillor on May 7th, and I’m not – this is a staunchly Conservative area, and whilst there is a good deal of anger amongst some of the residents it is a big step for many from being angry about what is going on to actively voting for someone else. The big disappointment is that his insecurity in his electorate led him to produce election literature with some truly ludicrous and unfounded claims that do nothing for the reputation of politicians. I have much more respect for someone who has run a clean and honest campaign and lost than someone who has run a dishonest campaign and won.

Reflecting on the local situation, we now have a very interesting situation developing nationally, as the two parties who on a local level here seem to truly loathe one another find themselves thrust together as the Cameron led Conservatives find themselves with no option but to ask the Clegg led Liberal Democrats to support them to allow them to form a government. Thanks to the British constitution the incumbent Prime Minister stays in the job if nobody gets an overall majority. The Conservatives need the Liberal Democrats. More ironically any decision to support them needs a positive vote from 75% of the parliamentary party and 75% of the Liberal Democrat Federal Executive, and if they can’t agree it needs a ballot of the members. Suddenly in order to have any chance of forming a government the Conservatives need the support of the self same people who in our area they have been making ludicrous accusations about just days before.

The situation is also causing people to reflect on the absurdity and perverse nature of our venerable first-past-the-post voting system. The whole system favours parties with dominant pockets of support, as a result of the system country wide it took the vote of 35,021 Conservative supporters to elect one MP, and 33,338 Labour supporters to elect one MP for them. However it took the vote of 119,397 to elect on Liberal Democrat MP – the final seats in the Commons fail to reflect the votes cast nationally. Other perverse results include the City of Oxford, which is split into two constituencies. Across the whole city 41,087 people voted Liberal Democrat, 33,633 voted Conservative and 27,937 voted Labour, however because of the distribution of the voters the city is now represented by one Conservative and one Labour MP. Similarly in Wokingham Borough across ward after ward the Liberal Democrats come a strong second, but they have vastly fewer seats on council because the same unfair voting system operates in local council elections.

However thanks to the failure of the Conservatives to win a majority they now need the help of the Liberal Democrats to govern, and whilst elements of the press seem to think that they should quietly trot along and just prop up a minority Conservative government who only gained the support of 36% of the electorate, there are other groups who see this as a golden opportunity to properly reform our voting system. Today a fair votes demonstration that was going on largely unnoticed in Trafalgar Square, decided to go and visit the building where Nick Clegg was discussing the offer made by the Conservatives to try and get Liberal Democrat support – an offer that doesn’t include the promise of a change in voting system, this was the result:

Could this be the dawn of a new age in terms of British democracy – or will it just go back to business as usual?

• Obama chooses Kagan for Supreme Court
• Senate healthcare bill set to pass by Christmas
• Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
• Wrong video of health protest spurs N-word feud
• Elections : ST Stand and Predictions

In Arborfield the vote is pretty well a straight rerun of the vote four years ago with the incumbent Tory, Gary Cowan, running against a Liberal Democrat, Steve Bacon, who was the local councillor beaten by Cowan thirteen years ago. As last time the only other candidate is from UKIP, Labour don’t even bother to field a candidate.

Sadly the campaign is also a rerun of the previous efforts with the sitting Tory producing leaflets spouting the most ludicrous claims about Liberal Democrat policy locally – this years gem being that the Liberal Democrats want to put 12,000 houses into the Garrison SDL. Bear in mind that taking the average household size of 2.36 that would be a population almost as big as Wokingham itself crammed into the Garrison SDL, at a density equivalent to some of our major inner city areas. The reality is that the Liberal Democrats have much the same policy towards Arborfield as the Tories – as one of the biggest potential brownfield areas in the borough it is a much more attractive location for houses than the other much more greenfield SDL’s, so even if a new government drops housing targets it’s more than likely that Arborfield would still be a prime site – and a careful reading of our Tories flyers show that he doesn’t say that housing won’t come to the Garrison site even if the numbers are scaled back across the borough. Sadly our one and only local councillor is also executive member for local and regional planning, so whilst his campaign leaflets bang on about him putting Arborfield first, second and third, he has a Wokingham wide view through his executive role, hence on occasions he can’t answer questions from his voters because they might compromise his executive position, and repeatedly he turns up in the press highlighting the next stage of the plan, only to object to the same plan in his role as local councillor.

Whilst there is a good deal of anger across the village, especially after the meeting earlier in the year where Gary refused to answer questions, Arborfield is one of the safer parts of one of the safest Tory councils in the country (Tories hold over 75% of the council, and even if they lost every ward today they would still be in control) I’m doubtful whether even that level of anger could swing the ward. Ironically though from e-mails I’ve swapped with our local councillor he seems a lot more pessimistic – indeed when his fifth flyer of the campaign popped through the door, following on from Redwood himself going door to door earlier in the week, he does seem increasingly desperate and unsure of his core vote. The count starts at 2pm tomorrow, so we’ll have to wait until then to find out if he was right.

By far the more interesting campaign though is for the constituency.

The Wokingham area was one of only thirty in the whole country that have been continuously represented by one party since the 1850’s. Our current MP is the well known John Redwood. Considering how safe the local council is people often assume that the constituency would be equally safe but it isn’t. The fact is that Redwood isn’t nearly as popular locally as he should be given the area, indeed his share has been steadily falling, and at the last election he could have been beaten had that Labour and Liberal Democrat vote combined. Into this mix comes Mark Ashwell, a local businessman standing as an independent. Traditionally independents don’t do well, but being well known locally, on the ground at least he seems to be making headway. Travelling around Wokingham you see vastly more Vote Ashwell boards than for any other party. He has also managed to grab a lot of good headlines in the local paper, and the various polls the local paper has run give him surprisingly high totals. Indeed the online bookmakers have cut his odds over the course of the campaign indicating that a good few people think he might win.

Considering the comparatively low majority that Redwood has, even a modest showing from Ashwell could cause a major upset, especially if a goodly number of disgruntled Labour voters swap to the Liberal Democrats. Whilst realistically the most likely outcome is still for Redwood to take the seat, albeit with a reduced majority, Ashwell has the possibility to either cause a major upset by taking enough of the Tory vote to let Prue Bray, the second placed Liberal Democrat candidate last time, and Liberal Democrat PPC this time in, or even more spectacularly by taking the seat himself.

There is the potential for things looking rather different tomorrow morning. Could Wokingham become a lone Liberal Democrat seat in Berkshire? Or might we be one of the few constituencies in the country to return a true independent? Now we wait to find out…

• Britain's David Cameron becomes PM; Brown out
• Stimulus 2009: Our Tax Dollars are "Chump Change"?
• Roddick wins Brisbane International
• Woods Presents to Singh Trophy
• MTSU Poll's Spring 2007 Findings Released

Not that everybody was happy. I know a good few long term fans who were less than pleased with the almost soap opera-ish aspects that RTD brought in, and thought that his plots were less than stellar. There were some good stories, the ones written by Steven Moffat being particularly noteworthy, but despite the detractors from within the existing fanbase it was a success.

Last year with David Tennant the incumbent and incredibly popular Doctor having decided to move on, the production team saw it as a good time to move on also. For the fans, especially the RTD detractors there was much rejoicing when Steven Moffat was handed the lead writer role – hopefully that will bring a much better standard of plotting, and back to something more akin to the old Who the old fans were craving – but at the same time the RTD Who had proved massively popular with legions of new fans. Moffat then threw a total curve ball by picking an almost totally unknown actor, Matt Smith to play the title role.

So as the UK sat down to watch, how was the first outing for Moffat Who?

I’ll try and not give away too many spoilers, however in our household it was generally well received. The well plotted and entertaining Moffat style from his previous episodes has certainly survived his promotion. The episode kicked off with a great post regeneration sequence, including a sequence with food that was vaguely reminiscent of trying to find food for our daughter Lucy.

Like RTD who there is still a good deal of backstory – whether it will annoy the fans in quite the same way as it did previously remains to be seen. However whilst RTD seemed keen at times to distance himself from so called classic Who, all ten previous Doctors do make an appearance. There are also references to the TARDIS library and pool, and a clothes scene that harks back to the one TV outing for the eighth Doctor. The other thing that appears is the Doctor who knows more than he is letting on, most prominent during the seventh Doctor era. At the very end, after leaving, the Doctor comes back and really pushes Amy to come with him. When she asks why, he makes a comment about being lonely – but take a look at what is on the screen that he hurriedly turns off before she sees…

Matt Smith is different from his predecessors, but still has elements of them. As Beth points out on a couple of occasions he delivers lines in a way that is much the same as David Tennant. Certainly his age doesn’t seem to matter. Like any actor taking on the role he’ll need probably the whole series to find his feet in the role properly, but he certainly seems to have made a good start. Karen Gillan also makes an impressive debut as the new companion, her frustration with the inability of the Doctor to keep time harking back to another companion who once famously said “A broken clock keeps better time than you, at least it’s right twice a day!”.

Taking a look on Twitter after the show, whilst there are a few people who aren’t happy, the overwhelming majority seem to have enjoyed the show. Moffat does seem to have pulled it off, and the show has transformed once again. New music, new production team, new stars, new TARDIS even – but still Doctor Who.

• China's Final Frontier
• Phil Mickelson Wins 3rd Masters Title
• Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix directed by David Yates
• John Wayne Movies
• My favorite Canadians: #1 Michael J. Fox

I’m sure I don’t need to highlight the massive housing plans that are currently being touted by our council, with the sitting Conservative administration having voted to buldoze swathes of the land around Three Mile Cross and Shinfield, both north and south of Wokingham, and development primarily in outlying areas of Finchampstead and Barkham around Arborfield Garrison. What is interesting from the point of view of a resident of Arborfield such as myself is that the last time our elected representative, Gary Cowan stood for re-election three years ago, he did so promising to try to minimise the housing that would be built – now he is standing for re-election again with his name on the planning documents that bring over ten thousand homes across the district, and three thousand five hundred on his own doorstep – although his election materials repeatedly highlight that the majority of the houses are to be built in Finchampstead and Barkham, not Arborfield.

It doesn’t take much digging around to find the flaws in the current housing proposals. Going through all the glossy pictures and grand plans, and talk of build dates, you’d think that there was a definite departure date for REME and the Arborfield Garrison. If you thought that you’d be wrong.

REME have been “about to move” for years, and the move keeps being pushed back. The original defence training review was over a decade ago and it still hasn’t been implemented. There are local protests against the scale of the new training site in Wales, and recently the government yet again has pushed back a definite decision on the move, now waiting on making the controversial decision until the summer, after the General Election. With tightening defence budgets concern is continuing to be expressed about the £13 billion price tag for the project, with some politicians already highlighting the plan as an ideal candidate to be cut. David Cameron has spoken out about the uncertainty for the people of Wales, but has noticeably refused to commit a possible incoming Conservative administration to the move, instead mentioning just the kind of defence review that could cut an expensive plan such as this. With the need to save billions from national budgets, why waste so much money on a move like this?

Whilst all of this is going on, the Arborfield SDL is still being pushed as a brownfield development by our unitary authority. However in order to make a “viable community” many homes need to be built on greenfield sites – sites that would still be available if the Garrison moves or not. If the plan goes ahead and is adopted but the Garrison fails to move, without the brownfield areas the developers will only have the greenfield sites – the adopted plan is tantamount to outline planning permission. Even building on all the planned greenfield areas there will be so many fewer houses such that key trigger levels for the desperately needed infrastructure improvements such as additional schools, the district centre and a bypass for Arborfield will not be met – the whole reason for focusing on strategic development locations in the first place.

But then what of the extra houses that then could not be put on the site at Arborfield? The council is committed to build over twelve thousand over the next fifteen years, and as many people may know, the SDL’s do not meet the total housing allocation for Wokingham anyway. Several thousand are going to be in unspecified small scale developments scattered across the borough – if the Garrison fails to move that will be several thousand more that will end up as infill and backyard development, just the kind of thing that is regularly rejected when the residents of the area are consulted on what development they would like because it doesn’t give the significant funds needed for the infrastructure we as a borough desperately need.

What was needed from the council were clear and realistic plans as to where new development was able to go, what we’ve got is our unitary authority taking a massive gamble on Arborfield Garrison moving to Wales and the brownfield site being able to take the largest proportion of the new housing in the borough. If that doesn’t happen – and concerns were being expressed in the national press in 2008 that it wouldn’t – all we’ll get is more piecemeal development, more lack of investment in infrastructure and more unsustainable communities.

So where was the opposition on our council when this was going ahead, plans that are obviously gambling on the future of our communities across the whole borough by picking a site that is increasingly unlikely to be available? Were they calling the governing body to account for potentially dooming Wokingham Borough to many more backyard developments? No. It seems the Liberal Democrat group abstained en-masse from the key vote.

Never has there been so much need for a “none of the above” option.

Whilst I’m sure what I’ve written above will be seen as NIMBYism, it is worth saying that as any resident of the Garrison area, we moved here in the full knowledge that the future of the Garrison was uncertain, whatever was said at elections, a look at proposals going back years always finds Arborfield touted as a potential development site. However what we have always been promised is a sustainable community, one that can accommodate the extra people the redevelopment of the base will bring. Sadly with the ongoing unrealistic attitude to the floundering plans for the move from our council, and with the planned locations of two of the three schools and the district centre sitting squarely on the Army owned land, that in such a scenario would not be released, it seems we will instead be left with hundreds of extra houses and none of the infrastructure such a new development would need, and a consequential impact that will be felt across the whole of the rest of the borough.

• Nonprofits To Receive Grants From Walmart Foundation (NYSE: WMT)
• Mortgage Protection Using Life Insurance on the Rise?
• Transcript: Obama takes questions on economy
• Enhancing your Business with Blogging
• Lake House Living in Winter