Wednesday 12 December 2012

Midweek ramble


First of all congratulations to the council as they have put their webcast up in a way that it is both possible to expand it to full screen view (click on the wosisname bottom right of the videio) and I was able to embed it in the press release blog. I have also embedded it below and if any other local bloggers have difficulty doing this, feel free to email me and I will send them the instructions.



It is a shame the picture quality isn’t very good, but hopefully it will improve, perhaps if the council put on youtube like everyone else it would help, I guess as they are spending our money and not theirs, the cost of hosting it themselves isn’t a factor but the quality could be. On to the content of the video, Royal Sands starts about 30 mins in with Cllr Driver starting to speak at around 38 mins, the council have removed the sound until about 45.5 mins and the chair stops him from speaking at 46 mins. It says the removal of the sound is for legal reasons, but watching the video does leave the impression that they may have been a bit heavy handed with the censorship of what after all was a public meeting.


After this Cllr Pool explains that what we didn’t hear Cllr Driver is likely to incur legal action from Mr Painter.

In a general sense councillors have what is called “qualified privilege” when speaking at council meetings, to protect them against legal proceedings for deformation, how this would translate in to the webcasting of a council meeting I don’t really know. 



As for the rest of the meeting I will download the video file webcast and watch bits of it when I have time.

If you want to download the video file right click on this link and select save target as or save file http://www.thanet.gov.uk/files/webcastDec.flv 
 
It will take anything from about 2 to 10 mins to download and then can be opened in various media players VLC probably being the most versatile free one without advertising problems and is available from http://download.cnet.com/VLC-Media-Player-Portable/3001-13632_4-10526524.html?spi=b478319891e042f4506ef4d4bf4ce399
The advantage of downloading it is that otherwise you have to wait until all of the part you have already seen has progressed up the bar at the bottom of the video before you can carry on watching it, I am afraid that watching council webcasts is a bit like watching paint dry, bu my guess is if the council consider they haven't been watched enough they will see it as an excuse to withdraw the facility.

One issue I don’t quite understand is the one of independents, I understood particularly with TIG that they had to go along with the Labour group, vote with them and so on, to retain their positions on committees or whatever.

And yet Cllr Driver doesn’t seem to be doing this, is becoming perceived by many as the best and most proactive councillor we have, he voted with the opposition and the opposition voted with him and yet no one seems to be trying to remove him as head of scrutiny.


The prints illustrating this post I would guess are about 1855, anyone with a better guess? The originals are a little smaller than they appear in the post and if clicked on should enlarge to much bigger than they would apper, even under a powerful magnifying glass.



They would have been made by scratching a sheet of metal, inking it, wiping it so the ink only remained in the scratches, and putting it through a press like an old fashioned clothes wringer with metal rollers, with paper that had been wetted to soften it.


At some time afterwards the colour was applied by hand. My guess is these were hand coloured a long time ago, later colourists tend to use a lot of different colours and often achieve an effect that is less pleasing.   

There are very few photographs of Ramsgate that predate 1860 but this one does and gives you some idea in term of comparison between a print of that period and a photograph. 


I have been playing about wiht online videos hrer is the preview of souteast today

8 comments:

  1. We all know that the TIGs hold power at the behest of Labour or rather Iris and her slaves. Cohen and Worrow haven't got the guts to dare criticise what Iris does. Not that she could do very much for fear of the TIG's voting against her. Driver on the other hand in the same knowledge that Iris could try and remove him, seems to hold higher principles. The constant praising up of the officers by Hart and Bayford was sickmaking.

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  2. I see John Worrow has posted a revealing twitter as his first public response to this crisis. I think it gives a revealing insight into his state of mind.

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  3. "wiht"? "hrer"? "souteast"?

    What's happened to your spelling and grammar lately Michael?!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I expect that many have seen this; but for those who have not:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2246901/Margate-voted-Rough-Guide-places-world-visit.html

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Only goes to show what a year of Labour leadership combined with having a very young mayor can do for a town. But how did the Rough guide miss Ramsgate and have they never been to Cannes and Nice?

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  5. Sorry about that Peter, what with trying to embed the video which I have since discovered won’t work on Internet Explorer and trying to watch the it I didn’t get a chance to read the post through.

    I did see it John it has been fairly extensively covered by Don and the newspapers website’s and I didn’t think my thoughts on the nature of adventure holidays and how they could apply to aspects of modern Margate would be either helpful or constructive.

    ReplyDelete
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    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.