Matt's Blog

It's been over a year since I posted any blog entries, but I've decided that I'll give it another go (again). But not here. Instead, I've installed WordPress onto my own website and I'll continue to blog there instead. I've also imported all the posts from here onto that blog. So the new location for my blog is: http://www.mattmarsh.net/blog/ So long, blogspot.com... thanks for everything.

Mark Shuttleworth really is one of the good guys with both great vision and ability to make things happen. Of course, he can afford to be a good guy - anyone who can afford to be one of the world's first space tourists is certainly not short of cash! The Shuttleworth Foundation that Mark has founded has some great aims, a lot of which is focused to South Africa (that being his country of birth). The belief that Africa in general can be aided by improving the education system so that they have many bright, talented people showing their full potential seems like a reasonable idea to me. Of course, one of the main reasons that I've found out about Mark is because of the good things that he is doing in the Free Open Source Software community. Mark is funding a number of projects such as Ubuntu Linux and the SchoolTool project. Naturally a lot of the projects that Mark funds are related to the aims of the Shuttleworth Foundation and it's just good to see someone helping to fund projects in the FOSS community. Another thing I noticed when browsing the Ubuntu website were that anyone can get "bounties" for implementing certain features. There are a few open source type projects that are now offering bounties for this sort of thing. If only I could make enough money from those things to make a living out of it! I'd really love to work full time on free/open source software...

Every day on my way to work I pass by a school and if I'm unlucky/disorganised enough then I get there just as the thousands of parents drop off their child in their 4x4. The school is situated right on a junction and the parents' cars just get parked everywhere. I take extreme care driving past, so worried that some small child could dart out from between two cars, it all seems so unresponsible to me. So I started thinking of some "creative" solutions to this problem... Perhaps they could stagger the start times for each class so that there wouldn't be so many parents turning up at one time? Or perhaps there could be an incentive for parents that car share, like their children get to be in a class with less pupils? But then I realised, there is a much better solution here. Why not have forced boarding school for all children Monday to Friday? This surely makes a lot of sense? Traffic would be reduced enormously, parents could go out to work, schools could give kids a healthier lifestyle by controling what the children eat/do after school, you know it all makes sense!

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Tommy Boyd has been back on the radio since January. He seems to have a regular weekly spot now on BBC Southern Counties Radio. I used to listen to Tommy's fabulous cult radio show "The Human Zoo" on Talk Sport radio station where he allowed callers straight to air with "no screening"... It certainly made for an eclectic set of characters that would call up with their rants, bits of prepared audio or general abuse of Tommy. If you've never heard the show, then you should listen to some of the clips from his shows. Unfortunately his format/attitude lead to his downfall when he failed to cut off a caller who, on the day of the Queen Mother's death, commented on the royal family that we should "shoot the f*cking lot of them". The Human Zoo was a bit of an acquired taste, but there has always been a bit of a hole in my Sunday evenings since its demise. I'll be tuning in to Tommy's latest show, though no doubt it will be nothing like The Human Zoo, especially as it's on the BBC. At least being on a Saturday evening from 9pm to 1am it may have some interesting content, we shall see.

If I vote Labour in this year's General Election, am I voting for Tony Blair, or Gordon Brown? I'm strongly of the opinion that should Labour win the election then it will only be a matter of months before we start hearing more and more about the Blair/Brown rift again and there will become more and more pressure for Blair to stand down... And if not then I'm sure a leadership challenge will take place forcing Blair out of office. I'd be amazed if Tony Blair is still in No. 10 at the end of 2006. So really, a Labour vote is a vote for Gordon Brown isn't it? I'm not sure if that makes me more or less likely to vote for them. I still have no idea who I will vote for, I'm a classic floating voter at this moment in time... Every day I change my mind. I hate all the lies that they all put through my letter box, they are all as bad as each other. I think the Lib Dems have the best policies relating to technology, best views on software patents etc. But I'm not sure that I could vote based on that one issue alone and I'm just not really convinced that they would make a good job of running the economy. I doubt I'll vote for the Conservatives, they just don't seem trustworthy at all to me... So am I going to be left with only Labour to vote for? Maybe I just don't like change. One thing is for sure, I wont vote for the Greens... Doubt they would approve of all the computers running 24 hours a day at home - would get taxed to oblivion!