Day Two: The truck traverses Mill Street and is now at the bottom of my garden. While the apple tree will cover the Wall when it is built, to some extent, I need some advice on fast growing beautiful plants to shield the monstrosity once it’s erected. ♣
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Tagged colin cook, Jason Thacker, Meindl, mill street, newstrack, Oxford, wild life
Wilkommen! And hello to Meindl, delivering the first of nine pre-fabbed bits that will eventually form a Wall at the back of Mill Street. The Wall – which will be a corridor really – will be stuffed with unfortunate students who will feel the vibrations of high speed freight trains all day and all of the night.
What’s worse for the poor scraps, is they’ll have to be neighbours with the bohemian lot who live on the east side of Mill Street.
We apologise for the three white vans from the Immigration Enforcement division of the Home Office which completely ignored the message Jason Thacker of Exel distributed down our street the other week. We dunno what they were after. You can see one of the vans blocking the path of the truck on the far left of the photo.
We also apologise that as yet we haven’t prepared the dishes we hoped to provide – along with lashings of good Austrian beer. ♥
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Tagged Austria, colin cook, Exel, Immigration Enforcement, Jason Thacker, Meindl, mill street, Oxford
You know I’ve been on about the corridor at the bottom of my magic garden, yeah? You know, the prefabricated Austrian sections and the like.
I had to go to the Royal Mail depot today on Oxpens Road – to do that you need to cross the railway lines on a really really ugly footbridge. Network Rail has told us this bridge will have to go because when it electrifies the railway next year, the footbridge won’t be high enough.
Here’s a view from the current footbridge of the works going on. My garden is two to the left of the cherry blossom.
It’s already a footbridge too far at night time – there’s no lights and it’s difficult to see the steps in the dark. Network Rail is taking representations although us residents won’t really have a say, as far as I can tell.
I mean, what sense can you make of this Network Rail missive? ♦
<<Hi Susanna, [that’s Susanna Pressel, a councillor who reps our area, Ed.]
Next Tuesday 11th March Network Rail are having an internal meeting to co-ordinate the various projects in and around Oxford City.
As a representative of The GWMLe programme, I will be attending. The premise is to ensure a holistic approach is progressed with on a practical manner.
DCL 62.49 Osney Lane is on the agenda to debate and ensure synergy is identified between each of the separate projects.
While the project manager has to work to his time table which programmes in a ‘slot’ in the summer. If due process (consultation and planning submission) is disrupted, then that date will slip.
As soon as the meeting next week has identified who the lead engagement officers are from NR, I will let Yim know.
The get in contact with Oxford City, and request an urgent meeting to run through the issues.
You will be in the first tranche of consultee’s engaged with.
Kind Regards,
Andy.>>
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Tagged Network Rail, New Osney, Oxford, Oxford City Council, oxpens road, Royal Mail, susanna pressel
Jason Thacker, site manager of the “Osney Lane Development”, otherwise known as the Wall, has sent us a missive about the shape of things to come. Jason works for Exel Construction Ltd – motto: “Building a future”.
In March, the ground works will be finished, scaffolding starts on the 24th, and manufactured building assembly will start at the end of the month.
And there will be “lorry deliveries from Austria” with a lorry coming for nine days at 7AM. “We would appreciate no parking on the side of Mill Street that has double yellow lines during this period otherwise lorries will not be able to get through.”
Prefabbed stuff then. We’ll bring you pictures when the Wall begins to loom over the back garden.
And if we capture any video of Austrian truckers dressed in lederhosen and slapping their thighs, be sure that Volesoft will bring you that footage too… ♠
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Tagged Austria, Exel Construction Limited, Jason Thacker, mill street, New Osney, Oxford, prefabrication
I had two rather sweet replies to my most recent freedom of information requests to Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council.
I had asked them if they could tell me and the world+dog how much it cost to fulfil their legal obligations to provide info about stuff.
Oxford City Council said: “Dear Mr Magee
”Further to the acknowledgement below, I can respond to your FOI request received on 3rd January 2014 as follows :
”There is no specific budget for dealing with Freedom of Information Act requests. The Corporate Secretariat Manager acts as the Council’s Freedom of Information Officer – it is not a full-time role. He is supported by an administrative assistant who works 20 hours per week. In addition, individual departments have officers who provide information to the Freedom of Information Officer so that responses can be sent. It is very difficult to ascertain the costs involved.
”Yours sincerely
”Michael Newman
Corporate Secretariat Manager
Oxford City Council”
→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→
Oxfordshire County Council said much the same: “Dear Mr Magee,
”Thank you for your request of 3rd January 2014 in which you requested
information about the estimated annual cost of administering and
responding to Freedom of Information requests.
”Oxfordshire County Council does not hold information relating to your
request. This is because the role of administering freedom of information
requests is carried out as part of an officers wider role.
”In order to advise and assist, the Council has co-ordinators in each
Directorate of the Council who assist with FOI requests as well as other
administrative tasks. The Corporate Team has two members of staff who
advise on FOI legislation but they also have other roles, such as logging
corporate complaints which are made in writing or via the telephone as
well as responding to Information Commissioner and Local Government
Ombudsman investigations. Therefore it is not possible to provide you with
a figure, estimated or otherwise, as to the cost of administering FOI
requests in isolation.
“Please let me know if you have further enquiries. I would be grateful if
you could use the reference number given at the top of this email.
”Yours sincerely,
”Claire V Buller
Complaints and Freedom of Information Officer
Oxfordshire County Council
Law and Culture
County Hall”
You can make FOI requests of your own, at this excellent site, here. ♣
It’s been a while since I’ve Volesofted, I’ve been on Defacebook a lot, but it occurs to me that Volesoft is worth keeping going.
Now this picture, taken here this morning, is of the west side of Mill Street, and looming over Arthur Street is what once was the Oxford Electric Power Station – it brought light to Oxford and beyond it is the river, where the barges brought coal and the stokers worked day and night to keep the juice pumping.
Other elements in its existence include being a testing place for Concord engines – heck that must have made quite a racket. And, right now, it is a repository for books, books and more books and is under the stewardship of Oxford University.
But the thing that intrigues me more is the number of bricks that make up this imposing edifice. I wouldn’t know how to begin to count them or their weight.
And talking about bricks, if I find the vandal who has started demolishing my front garden’s brick wall, I can assure you you will be well treated to Mageek justice… ♥
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Tagged Arthur Street, books, bricks, concorde, mill street, Oxford, Oxford University
Another very interesting talk at the West Oxford Academy, just up the road from chez moi.
Mark Thakkar was talking about Oxford’s Dictionary of Mediaeval Latin which has just gone to the printers even though the project was started in 1913.
Mark said the project first started at 78 Banbury Road at a place called The Scriptorium. It was effectively crowd sourced, he said. The literati were invited to send in quotations and RJ Whitwell (1859-1928) only sent in 30,000 of them.
In 1913 the academics petitioned for “an adequate dictionary of mediaeval Latin”. The period in question was between 500AD to 1500AD and we’ve stuff about the former Osney Abbey, demolished by Henry VIII just down my street in a piece of privatisation called the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Were they dissolute? Certainly they were “dissolved”.
Mark pointed to Osney Abbey. One of the quotations said the pope sent his legate to the kirk and a group of scholars from Oxford University “started a terrible fight, with a cook pouring boiling oil”. 70 folk were arrested and imprisoned. Several clerics died.
The quotations only relate to English mediaval Latin, and Mark showed that English words were sort of dumped into the Latin.
We then came to the fabulously named Robert Grosseteste (1220) who obviously had the balls to mash up his Latin grammar with some choice, that is to say pithy Anglo-Saxon.
As far as we can tell, the dictionary ends with the letter “s” – funding is a problem, said Mark. But the Packard Foundation – we’re talking an HP heir here, funded the most recent project.
A source close to the Kite tells Volesoft that mediaeval Latin was a very bastardised form of the lingo. Mark started and finished his talk with this mediaeval picture which sort of tells its own story, doesn’t it? ♦
I took a trip last night to Oxford Hackspace – it’s only three minutes from here across the spooky bridge across the railway line*.
But Oxford Hackspace is a great place to hack – to make things, to break things up, to recreate and to mash things about. The bunch is really friendly, and have a social night on a Thursday in the Ovada space – you can fnd directions on its web site. Sewing machines, 3D printers, a fridge full of booze and fun people who are doing things – it’s a place to be if you’re a developer, a builder a techie and an inventor interested in stuff.
These Oxford Hackspace folk have some great things happening there if you’re a geek or even a Mageek. For example, Ben, Lauren and others are working on love-hz.com – connecting sensors – just check out the pilot project here. Pretty soon the internet of fangs will be with us. These folk are inventors – and if you’re of a similar bent, check these people out or join in.
* That bridge could do with a few additional lights, by the way. There’s something about a cemetery at a crossroads with a bridge that isn’t lit very well that gives you a weird feeling.
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Tagged 3d printers, Avado, geeks, inventions, love-hz.com, mageek, mill street, Osney Lane, Oxford, Oxford Hackspace, sewing machines, spooky bridge
I spent 20 minutes taking a digital camera to pieces last night. It played havoc with my fingernails, but they grow fast and they needed cutting anyway.
I was at Susan Hutchinson’s excellent West Oxford Academy, held at WOCA, and Iain Tullis gave a most interesting talk on the technology of digicams. He bought 16 broken Kodak cameras at a quid a pop and provided screwdrivers and tools to help us all pull the stuff apart.
Kodak, of course, lost the plot on digital cameras and is now selling off its patents as it is in Chapter 11 – not that that helps much the folk in Harrow and in Rochester NY who have lost their jobs.
Techies will know that the choice for manufacturers is between CCDs (charge coupled devices) and CMOS – silicon tech. Iain said that the choice these days is down to fashion and of course to pricing.
After I’d broken my thumb nail, I got down to the circuit board of the Kodak cam I was breaking up. A Zoran chip and Hynix stuff and apparently it’s the Zoran chip that held all the software algorithms and that. All that Zoran stuff is no more, of course, the IP is all over the place.
Iain showed some fab pictures of the first Kodak digicams – in 1986 we had the Steven Sasson 1.4 megapix baby, storing its stuff on an audio cassette. Then he showed the model Kodak tried to sell first – the Dycam model one at a cool $1,800. Kodak, of course, cobbled together the Apple QuickTake 100 – a 640 by 180 display and that.
So what went wrong with Kodak? Iain Tullis said: “This is MBA fodder.” We knew it had a problem in the tech industry and the infamous recall didn’t help its credibility in the 1990s. However, Iain Tullis said that Nikon, Canon and others managed to change.
So which digital camera is the best to buy, one of the audience asked. The more you spend, apparently, the better the camera, it seems. The 16 corpsed Kodak digicams were collected at the end, for their uncertain fate on a container ship to China. ♦
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Tagged Apple QuickTake100, CCD, CMOS, digital cameras, giant badger of mill street, Harrow, iain tullis, kodak, Oxford, rochester NY, susan hutchinson, west oxford academy, woca
Like many another part of Blighty South, the Quality Care Commission (QCC) reported on the state of the Oxford University Hospital Trust a few days back.
The PDF is here. We’re not quite sure why the Care Quality Commissars bung the Care up to the Quality without a space. Marketing, we guess.
It all seems sort of OK until you get to the staffing section in the PDF. There’s an elevated risk related to staff registration. There’s an elevated risk of whistleblowing, whatever that means. Is something wrong, then?
If you’re thinking of dying, it appears that the Oxford University Hospital Trust passes on all points. There’s no “elevated risk”. ♣
Dūrgā Devī
