The state of UK Athletics
Dwain Chambers was found guilty of using performance enhancing substances and was given a two year ban from athletic competition. Having now served his ban, he’s re-entered competition (his American football career having failed due to a change in the NFA) and has been selected for the World Indoor Championships.
There has been much said about this; people like Seb Coe and Kelly Holmes saying that he should not be allowed to compete, others like John Regis saying that he’s done his time, whilst UK Athletics themselves have stated that they’ve reluctantly allowed him back into the team.
But why all this controversy? He was given a two-year ban. He served that ban. He’s now back in competition, he’s not testing positive for any banned substances and has professed that he is clean and regrets what happened. So why shouldn’t he come back? The attitude of UK Athletics is what stinks though; they’ve basically said they were forced to take him back. Sorry, but he met all the criteria for selection – open and shut case.
My message to the selectors is this: if you don’t want people competing after being banned, then ban them for life so that they have no hope of rehabilitation or any chance to redeem themselves. If you’re not going to ban them for life, but you don’t want to be in a position where you might have to select them for the team, then change your selection criteria. Until that time, Dwain Chambers is one of the best athletes this country has ever produced and is one of our best hopes for medals.
BBC goes Fisher Price
The BBC website is one of the stalwarts of the Net for me; its been my homepage for absolutely ages because of its easy access to news, sport, TV and the myriad other things that the BBC has to offer.
Today, they’ve relaunched the homepage of the site. Apparently its been in beta development for quite some time and this final version is the result of lots of testing and tweaking. As you’ll see from the comments left on the blog announcing the change, it is not universally loved.
For myself, I’m not a fan so far. It may grow on me over time, but at the moment it very much seems a backward step; while the various modules can be turned on and off – so theoretically allowing you to create “your” BBC page – the design overwhelms the content and you’re left having to search for what you want. Yes, technically it’s very good (someone must be very proud of their coding skills) but it is not as usable as the old style homepage.
And it’s only the homepage that has been changed so far, which means that the rest of the site maintains the look it had before. It seems a little pointless just to be changing one page and not the rest but perhaps that’s a blessing in disguise; it will give the BBC a chance to re-think the new look and, even if they don’t go back to the old version, at least improve it considerably before it’s rolled out across the whole site.
ecto
When I blogged from Windows, I got used to using an offline editor to write and edit my posts; it makes keeping track of more than one blog much easier. I started with BlogDesk and then, when it was launched into beta, moved over to Windows Live Writer. Both are good pieces of software, and both are free.
Unfortunately, both are also Windows only so when I changed to blogging from OS X I was a little stuck. For some time, I just wrote everything using the online editors at Wordpress.com and BlogSpot while I looked around for an offline editor that suited me. For OS X users, the choice is not as wide as it is for Windows users, but most of what is available is still free. Unfortunately, having looked at quite a lot of them I found that they didn’t play well with the BlogSpot (or new Blogger) API – which meant I couldn’t use them as I wanted to.
Then a friend introduced me to Flock, “the social web browser”; as well as being an excellent browser, Flock also has a built-in blog editor. This does play well with the BlogSpot API and I’ve been using it for a number of months. It does have its limitations – doesn’t keep a list of tags and categories, doesn’t keep a list of all the posts, can’t edit pages – but is still a very usable offline editor.
A couple of weeks ago, though, I stopped using Flock as my browser (see this post for details) so was once again left without a good blog editor. So I returned to some of the ones I’d looked at previously; most still don’t play well with BlogSpot but the big ones in the field – MarsEdit and ecto – do. I tested MarsEdit when I first moved to OS X and liked it; I just didn’t want to pay for something which – at the time – I wasn’t going to be using very much. I hadn’t taken ecto for a spin for a while, so fired that up to see what was up.
At first I was a bit put off. There were two main reasons for this. First was that for the BlogSpot entries, it seemed to add lots of unneeded line-breaks, so the paragraphs ended up about a mile apart. This turned out to be something that was set at the BlogSpot end, and once fixed there have been no further problems.
The second issue was opening old posts. While ecto does this without problems, most were opening as one solid block of text – no paragraph spacing or line breaks at all. This turned out to be a limitation of the editors that I’d been using up to now; ecto relies on proper HTML tagging to create paragraphs, lists and so on. Once I realised this, it was easy enough to correct any old posts that I edited using ecto.
Setting up a blog is easy – just use the Assistant, and pretty much all you need to do is enter your username and password. ecto will automatically retrieve past posts, and for any new ones you write it will present you with a list of tags and categories (if your blogging system uses them) and let you create new ones. You can also publish one post to several blogs just by dragging and dropping. On top of that, ecto will also allow you to edit any static pages your blog might have. It includes a spell checker, word count, the ability to create summaries and lots more.
ecto – which is available for Windows as well as OS X – isn’t free, but only costs £9.77 (around $18) and is well worth the money if you spend a lot of time blogging.
Young @ Heart
I’ve written before about the Young @ Heart Chorus, the ensemble who sing songs by the likes of the Clash, Ramones, Coldplay and Sonic Youth even though their average age is somewhere around 80. (If you haven’t already checked out their version of “Fix You”, then now would be a perfect time to go and download it.)
This post is just to give you a heads-up that the Walker/George documentary about the Chorus gets a cinematic release in the US and Canada in April, thanks to Fox Searchlight. If you get the chance to see it, make sure you do because it is one of the best documentaries you will ever see – but be prepared to shed a few tears along the way. Even though it is tinged with sadness, this is real feel-good storytelling that will leave you feeling spiritually and emotionally uplifted.
You can currently watch the trailer over at the Apple site, or via Fox Searchlight.
Missing the point?
The BBC are today reporting on the latest experiment with biofuels – this time on a Virgin flight from Heathrow to Amsterdam. As you’re probably aware, biofuels are quite the thing at the moment, especially amongst those seeking to protect the environment from the harmful emissions of traditional, fossil-based fuels.
You’d have thought that the Green lobby would be in favour of airlines using biofuels, as they are often cited as being the biggest polluters on the planet. But you’d be wrong – the Green lobby are actually opposed to this move, saying that biofuels do not reduce emissions and that growing crops for fuel is wrong when there is not currently enough land given over to growing food.
I’m no scientist, so I can’t give you an argument about whether or not biofuels produce less emissions. I can give you an argument about not enough land given over to growing food, though. Yes, there are too many starving people in the world – but we produce more than enough food to feed the world already; it’s just that we don’t like to share. Even when large parts of the “civilised” world are dying of obesity-related illnesses, we’d still rather throw away food than give it to those that need it.
And the argument about emissions also misses the point, I think. We currently rely on fossil-based fuels for pretty much everything. Fossil-based fuels that are a finite resource which is fast running out. We either to need to change our fuel-burning ways, or we need to find alternatives. As no-one seems to want to give up their cars or their airplane trips, then we’re left looking for new sources and at the moment bio-fuels are it.
Wolfs Helpers
