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.

6 December Full Council meeting

Copyright

This video is the property of Thanet District Council and is subject to their copyright statement

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