My Mate

Crossposted and originally mentioned by gothick_matt on Twitter, the BNP rather unwisely tried to do a parody of a Marmite advert as a party political broadcast. Unfortunately for them Unilever have rather better lawyers and they’ve just agreed to pay somewhere between £70K – £170K for copyright infringement. Because of the BNP’s parlous finances it means the party is likely to go bust. Oopsie.

Don’t spend a lot of time blogging on LJ because of the time it takes to sit down and write stuff, but I entered my first grappling tournament a few weeks ago where these kind of things happened:
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and
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and
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I was just behind on points until I got submitted like this:
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(I’m in the white shorts and black rash guard)
I’m doing another one on Sunday. Because I’ve been doing BJJ and grappling for a while I entered the first at intermediate level and I’ll be doing the next one at advanced level. Now I’ve got a bit of experience I find I like the competitive nature of trying to get your opponent to submit before you do.

Also coming up is the Leeds Hacks & Hackers day. For preparation I’ve been playing about with some location data from the Ordnance Survey including coordinates for streets and postcodes. These have to be in separate tables as the main source for having them combined is the Postcode Access File available from the Post Office and which costs money. What I do have now is something that uses geolocation (usually a mobile phone GPS but Wifi with Google Gears works as well) to display a small Google map with your location along with the top 5 nearest streets and postcodes and links to find the nearest bus stop on the Metro next bus service. I’ve got postcodes for the BD, HD, HX, LS, M, OL, S, and WF areas, and SYPTE and Metro use the same service so it should be pretty easy to do one for them. GMPTE uses a different system that needs further investigation. I do have other postcodes as well but they need a bit of processing before they’re usable. I’ve done this in C#, ASP.Net and SQL Server but it should be pretty straightforward to do it in PHP and MySQL for something that works on most Linux hosting services.

Some of the other people signed up to the hack day should be familiar about these parts, including myfirstkitchen, John Eland from Exposure Leeds and Neil Owen from Test Space. Apart from the web content manager from Leeds City Council it looks like I’m the most “corporate” person there but I daresay I’m probably not the most conventional person around. Should be a good day for networking and doing things with people that doesn’t involve punching or strangling them, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we decamp off to the pub afterwards.