But as I said, this time I’ve been much more interested in politics, even though I’ve felt that my vote wouldn’t actually count. So not only have I kept up with the election and the various party policies, but I even went to the polling station for the first time with Julia, who was also voting for the first time.

I think it’s a measure of how disappointed we were with the current government and all of the mistakes the government has made that we actually felt that we needed to register our disgruntlement. I can’t comment on why Julia wanted to vote by from my point in my opinion in the last 10 years our personal freedoms have been eroded to the point of non-existence by the laws over which the Labour government has presided.

Personal Freedoms (Rant)
People taking photographs are now regularly stopped on the streets of London by zealous officials demanding that they delete their snaps, be they professional photographers or just tourists who are clearly on holiday. Even now there’s a general undercurrent of worry when I’m using my camera.

If the police want to search through my files and find that I’ve encrypted just about every piece of data I own, they have the right under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to compel me to reveal my encryption keys with the threat of Gaol if I refuse. I would of course refuse on principle. Even worse, even if I did capitulate and want to provide keys, there’s a couple of encrypted archives whose passwords I’ve forgotten but I keep around in case I suddenly remember the keys! I couldn’t reveal those if I wanted to. The only saving grace here is that the authorities have only sent one person to prison for this thus far.

Thanks to decency laws, some of the pornography which I downloaded in my youth is almost certainly illegal! I say almost certainly, there’s still a lack of guidance to police forces on what actually constitutes an ‘extreme image’ but rest assured that if you’ve even briefly browsed the darker side of the web you could have something nasty in your web cache. Personally, I’m reluctant to purge the gigs of pr0n I worked hard to download, even though I’ve only even looked at the tiniest percentage of it, just on the off chance that some parts of it may be ‘extreme’. I’m sure you could arrest most of the men in the country on this one!

And for Christ’s sake don’t get me started on the Digital Economy Act which was most recently rushed through the parliamentary wash-up.

You may think that none of this really applies unless the police kick my door in and confiscate all of my computers, but that’s not as unlikely as you may think.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine had all of his computer equipment confiscated and was arrested by the police based entirely on a false accusation by a former employer that he had stolen some hardware off of them when they fired him.

Totally untrue and in recent months it was thrown out by a court. But that didn’t stop the police from holding onto all of his computer equipment for two years and no doubt searching through everything they could find. Luckily he’d just rebuilt and formatted his main machine but that didn’t stop them trying to pin other charges on him based on what they’d found on his kit! Innocent until proven guilty indeed!

All it took was a petty minded company man and a burned bridge to kick things off, how many of us have stormed out of a job in the past with a two fingered salute? Probably more than one of two of us.

So welcome to the UK where now live, where the spectre of terrorism has criminalized most of us without any of us being the wiser. The only reason we haven’t all been carted away is because the police haven’t focused on us, yet.

The Election
So I voted, for all of the reasons above and more. Even though, I already knew that my vote would make very little difference. Thanks to all the great online tools I knew well in advance that Epsom was going to be Conservative in spite of my MP’s homophobic comments just before the election.

Here’s a list of those tools I’ve used recently :

• Vote Match
• Voter Power
• They Work for You
• Hear From Your MP
• Write to Them

When trying to work out who to vote for, I was actually torn between Conservative and Liberal Democrats. Conservative policies closely matched my own opinions but frankly I find it very difficult to trust them and I worry about the undercurrent of racism and homophobia that seems to rear it’s head every now and then.

Whereas I find the LibDems seemingly more trustworthy and some of their policies to be sensible, I was quite put off by large parts of of their policies, such as on Trident and the immigration amnesty to name a few.

What we’ve actually seen, play out with the Conservative/Liberal coalition to me seems the best of both worlds. The bulk of the Tory manifesto and some of the better ideas from the Liberals bound up with the integrity of the LibDems and the appeal of Nick Clegg.

Realistically I know they’re not going to repeal all of the laws mentioned above but I fervently hope they’ll start moderating them when they can, given the importance of all of the other problems we’re faced with.

Obviously we’ll see what actually happens, but I can’t help but be both pleased and optimistic. This is the first time I’ve ever given a shit and I hope it’s not all wasted effort.

This morning I had cause to chuckle, as I sat on the train to work. At Waddon the train stopped for a while and the driver announced that he wasn’t able to open the doors on the train and was seeking technical help. After a 10 minute pause, he announced that it was a problem with the on-board computers and that he was going to power down the train to reset it.

The lights went off and the persistent hum of the air conditioning rattled into silence for a few minutes. I sat there in gloom and wondered if that was really going to do the trick or whether we’d all be manually overriding the doors to escape. The train once again whirred into life and slowly we could see the various systems come back to life. The displays on the train train all announced that this was an Electrostar model then started displaying normal information.

So there you go, take a leaf out of my book, next time you have a problem, try turning it off and on again. You never know

Many years ago, I was a proselyte of Trillian. It was a fairly unique piece of software back then that through developer APIs and some slightly dubious channels, would wrap all of the different Instant Messenger protocols into one client which would jointly manage all of those protocols. After a year or two of use, I even bought it.

Over the years though, it proved to be heavy on resources and was actively disliked by people like Yahoo and Microsoft who would continually change (Upgrade!) their protocols breaking Trillian on a few occasions. The File transfers rarely worked properly, the Video was awful and it became pretty apparent after a while, that it was only going to be going downhill. So I stopped using it and switched to Pidgin and then later the portable version for my USB stick.

I was curious to see what the new Trillian would bring, unfortunately, it hasn’t been a revelation on any front. I’ve been using it to wrap MSN, AIM, GoogleTalk and Skype. Additionally there were plug-ins for my email and twitter so I’ve been using those too.

The basics are pretty simple to work out with the usual contact list, double-click to talk kind of options but the actual setting up was a bit of a struggle, I found a lot of the interface to be counter-intuitive and it took a good hour to get everything the way I wanted. Once I had it all setup, it seemed to run fine for the basics, chatting on different protocols works fine although the display options are a bit too much for my tastes so I had to switch everything to a minimum setting.

At first I was impressed with the fact that there was a Skype interface, Pidgin doesn’t offer Skype, nor does anyone else to my knowledge because of the way Skype works. However actually trying to use it was a joke, in order to use Skype, Trillian fires up a Skype client in the background and hooks all the messages, I wouldn’t mind this too much if it wasn’t for the fact that all of the sounds still play, and you can see the skype client sitting in your system tray. The final let down with this is that it crashes Trillian every single time it closes. Wonderful.

There are plenty of little bits of added value with trillian, although when you think about it these are just perks rather than good reasons to be using it. Things like setting an away status sets custom text like “Away since 16:34 (GMT)”, or chat windows which show you details and timings about when the other person responded last and how long they’ve been online for. There’s also little notification windows showing what the actual message is (like googletalk). But really whilst these are nice, they haven’t changed my life for the better.

The mail and twitter feeds are pretty pointless. The mail client has a slow rate of update and offers very little options once it has decided to recognize the new mail. With mail if you want to do anything other than preview your mail (Good for Plain-text only), it simply shells your client/browser. Although you do get a delete and mark as read option which is nice, but I still found that I had to open up a proper mail client if I wanted to do anything more.

The twitter feed is clunky and not a patch on even the most basic of browser clients, offering a poor list of the top N tweets and telling you when there are new tweets but the functionality is pretty restricted. It’s more useful than the mail client in that you can reply and even post your own tweets but the whole thing is very uninspired and I found myself using the twitter extension in googlemail more often than not.

All told Trillian Astra doesn’t offer anything on top of Pidgin other than a swishier interface and an attempt at Skype interfacing. It stretches for some big things but those are implemented badly or with such limited functionality that you’ll be opening a different tool to do the job within five frustrated minutes. It’s not portable requiring a number of runtimes to be installed alongside it and there’s a memory leak in it somewhere which was chewing up about 1mb a minute on my system.

In summary, I’ll be going back to Portable Pidgin all is forgiven!

Last week, there was an amazing full moon, which I’d had a go at snapping. Alas, like all of my attempts at photographing things in low light, it was crap. A mostly black image in which a tiny white blur could be seen. As it turned out, my mate James had also been snapping the moon so I was eager to see how a ‘professional’ did it (well, sort of professional!). I was both disappointed with myself and impressed with him, as I saw his photo which is quite stunning. I asked him how he did it only to hear the sound of my bank balance cringing in terror at the requirements, his camera uses 18m mega-pixels, can spot meter and was using a long lens.

So yeah, just goes to show what you can do when you have the right gear and some know-how. I’ll have to be content with taking crap photos in the meantime!

(Right) Some random gravestones that I’ve puzzled over since moving to Epsom. Again, this looks really dark in the Winter morning.

(Left) I’ve really enjoyed messing around with the digital macro mode on the camera, since starting this project I’ve come to realize that there’s not much beauty in my life, in terms of the big stuff, so I’ve been photographing a lot of the smaller stuff. Needless to say, this is my fingerprint. Who say’s there’s too much personal data on the web?

(Right) I spent a lot of time at home last week and a lot of time staring out of the window. This is one of the sunsets I watched. I really like the ruddy glow, but the view from my window isn’t exactly exciting.

(Left) Yesterday, we walked around Nonsuch Park, in the gardens we found a shady little grove at the centre of which stood this pine tree.

When we got there, at around 7:15 everything was disappointingly chaotic, all of the information boards were blank, nobody knew anything and people were milling around in confusion. Eventually I managed to collar an employee who said that there was a London Bridge train outside of the station, but he’d been trying to get into Epsom for 20mins without luck. The snow on the rails a clear testament to the truth of this statement.

Just as I’d convinced Julia to abandon all hope, and come to the greasy spoon, the train in question managed to pull into the station so in spite of my arguments, she got on the train and I headed to the cafe alone. After a warming full English breakfast, I was watching the world go by when Julia called to tell me that the train was stuck outside of Ewell … yup, in all of that time, her train had made it one stop.

I sauntered home snapping pictures of the snow-clad streets and sat down to read some LJ and other correspondence, another call from Julia, this time much less stalwart she admitted that it might have been better to stay at home, the train had stuck outside of Cheam and the power was off and they were all pretty cold. It seemed that the driver was considering evacuating the train at one point. By this point Julia admitted it wasn’t going to work and was trying to get home. I made a bet that she wouldn’t get here until 11:30am. The train eventually managed to get to the station and Julia caught a bus back home. As it turned out, I was wrong, but only by an hour.

Personally I would love to see the country shrouded in snow and mist for a good 3 months every year, but I imagine I’m in the minority. So I’ll be enjoying this week to the full. I might bust out my bike tomorrow and go for a little tour around.

I snapped plenty of pictures, which I’ve added to the gallery.