Ulla’s Amazing Wee Blog

[ from the dept. ]

Anyway, the last days were a bit unexciting as mostly glued in front of my computer. Trying to work with GIMP instead of Photoshop, but in a way it is quite difficult to untrain habits… With GIMP I really like that it is so easy to do screenshots, and to change the colours into black and white, but what i find more difficult is cropping and working with different layers, which I haven’t figured out yet. But, in my opinion, GIMP is also very much better in compressing for web. The filesize seems to be smaller.
I also did the pictures and audio editing of Stallmans talk, as well as transcribing the interview. Just cutting out breaks and coughs. It can be downloaded via bit torrent, e.g. from a server. I liked his anti McDonalds jokes as well as anti coca cola jokes. Anyway, the some reactions following on the edlug list – the Edinburgh Linux Users Group, seemed to be quite disappointing, especially as one person described the organisers of the talk as “Stallman’s lickers”.
And then the discussion goes onto why windows is so much easier. Unfortunately the political discussions on this email list are really really bad. At the moment Microsoft seems to have started an anti – GNU/Linux campaign, they are expected to roll into Edinburgh start of June for a talk which is basically focussed around slagging of the GNU/linux system and community. I really feel like going there and kicking off a fuss, and causing trouble by standing up against them and giving them shit (rhetorically of course). I have no clue about technology, but am sure I find some hard hitting words – even in the bloody soft english language!!! for them to never forget this moment in their lives as one of their lowest points ever. I really want them to sweat because of all the windoze crashes causing me a lot of lost time and work I was suffering under for at least the last 10 years! Ctr + Alt + Del !!! Microsoft employees, go into hiding, cause here I come with a different three fingers salute! (need another hand though). However, still unsure if I don’t have something else to do that day as embarrasing myself in front of some thousand people or so and if there might be a better reason to avoid that bitching from the Microsoft employees. And. also, the invitation is particularly for “technical decision makers”. So, anybody talking about anything slightly ethical and moral will probably be discredited from the start. Also they put it in the Hilton Hotel, as to have of course an oppressive and respectfull atmosphere in there, especially for all the people who don’t make so much money as they do. Am very tempted to go there in my tracksuit trousers I use for painting and very punky and unwashed for several weeks- global day of action camping style.
The program says, “Microsoft would like to invite you to an open and honest technology seminar about the pros and cons of Microsoft’s technology platform in relation to Linux and Open Source.” .
Hah! I wonder how it can be open and honest if there are only Microsoft payed employees around! Say something wrong and you’ll be loosing your job! Anyway have been looking at their invitation form and am very tempted … at least to fill it with slight exaggeration of my current position.

[ from the dept. ]

Richard Stallman has been in Edinburgh yesterday, for a talk at the Informatics Colloquium. I had the honour to interview him. Reading the review on Ireland Indymedia about Richard Stallmans talk in Dublin, I have the impression that it seemed to work out quite well in Edinburgh in general.
Pictures are up now on Indymedia Scotland. Alongside with an article, which has by now 73 comments (more to be expected)… Not bad for a website which has just started about a month ago.

The interview unfortunately is only 15 minutes long, as RMS was late for the interview. So couldn’t ask all the questions. Anyway he first was quite grumpy, but he brightened up later. My god I was very nervous, my hands were shaking! It did not help much that he was putting another guy down because “he doesn’t want to talk about anything unimportant”. Or similar. I should have asked about his definition of insignificance.
It seems that politeness is also regarded as waste of time in many cases by him. Anyway, I can’t remember the exact words. I am sure RMS can, because he seems to be very focussed and concentrated and exact, and able to keep this focus up for a very long time, also in his selection of words, and he seems to expect it from other people, too. As a foreign language speaker I was particularly frightened of not phrasing the questions precisely and formulating them well enough and getting told off if I didn’t. Anyway, luckily enough I had some questions prepared and some more forwarded from different people, so, i had some paper to keep hold onto.
Once Stallman got talking though, it was much better, and his mood seemed to brighten up when talking.
Well, I am glad I did this interview, because I learnt a lot. And that was the main aim for me. He even seemed to have been a little bit inspired by the questions, because some of the answers were repeated in the talk afterwards.
Unfortunately I did not get around to ask the more political questions about WTO and domination of corporations, as time ran out.
Richard Stallman is not an anti-capitalist, as he states, and so I would have been interested in his perception on reformism and how to achieve his aims of limiting/decreasing the power of multinational corporations.
Also I couldn’t ask the more personal questions, but he seemed to want to avoid these anyway.

[ from the dept. ]

It seems more and more likely that the G8 really comes to Scotland in 2005 – up to now it’s all media information, but just yesterday the Edinburgh Evening News on its Saturday frontpage had the article: “Pushed to the limit”- about police holidays being cancelled for 1.-14.Juli 2005 next year, when the G8 comes to Scotland. [report].

Apart from that Richard Stallman, the founder of GNU , Emacs and particularly the GNU General Public License will be in Edinburgh, and has kind of agreed to do an interview with me. Well not really particularly with me, but with “somebody from Indymedia Scotland who is knowledgable about free software”. Since then I am reading his biography and essays like mad, so the questions will hopefully not sound too stupid and hopefully I am knowledgable till tuesday. He is here to do a talk at Edinburgh University, specifically
the Informatics Colloquium.

Today I got my brain fried in the Scottish Parliament. Scheduled was a debate on “Major Events in Scotland”. As a critical natured politica I considered of course the possibility and rumours of the G8 coming to Scotland (report in the Scotsman) as a worthy subject for this parliamentary discussion.
Unfortunately the reality was disappointing: The discussion was more focussed around the Glasgow Garden Festival, the Highland and Island Music contest, the World Bowling Championship and the Robert Burns poetry featival as well as the Young people’s rugby championship and the British Open Golfing Championship to be held in Fife, than around anything vaguely important. The only interesting note was an intervention of a Green Party person when the “Military Tattoo” was discussed, and why the “Red Army of China\” got invited. Anyway at least Mark Ballard said some notes about the possibility of the G8 coming to Scotland, alongside with insisting that it is people’s legitimate right to protest and that demonstrators from everywhere should be welcomed and supported, as well as the infrastructure for them should be provided. He also tried to promote and support the Beltane festival, with the Beltane Fire Society having a really hard time this and last year to organise it, whilst Colin Fox promoted the people’s festival, but in total the discussion was totally crap. Any autonomous meeting is usually better than this. Also apparantly the decision about the location of the G8 lies solely at Westminster which is – or should be a bit worrying to the Scottish Parliament as they have no influence on the decision if it might be held in Scotland or not.

On the way back my bicycle tyre exploded with a superloud bang. Am curious to disect it and see what is wrong this time. I had just finished repairing it last weekend.

[ from the dept. ]

The German government has published its new intelligence report. The secret service has to publish its activities every year to be accountable to the public. Unfortunately it rarely is; most of the time its exagerating left wing activities to get more funds and resources and minimalising right wing and neo nazis violence so to not give any foundation for embarrasment, such as when several years ago american travel guides warned any black people not to travel to East Germany because of the threat of violent and rascist neonazis.

Anyway, they mention Indymedia Germany alongside with the antirassist noborder camp in Cologne in this “monitoring report of anti-constitutional activites”. It seems that by mentioning these 2 examples in the report,it is tried to justify repression attempts against both initiatives, particularly the repression of the noborder camp last summer which is still legally challenged by protesters in court.

Other news:
In Columbia there is a wide-spread and mass distribution of poisenous and mutagenous chemicals prepared over national parks and indigenous land.[spanish]
Also interesting enough LaPais reports that 2 participants in the terrorist attack on the trains in Madrid were actually police agents. Apparantly they bought big piles of drugs from the terrorists, who used the money to fund their attacks. The report has been written by Ralf Streck, who usually writes very well researched and detailled news reports, translated from Spanish sources, and is usually regarded as trustworthy by most activists.


Anyway tonight there will be the “illegal art symposium” on. Unfortunately it collides with the Indymedia Scotland meeting. Anyway this event sounds like good fun. I wonder if the “sub-sub-sub-sub(…) contra bass blaster” mentioned- is this soundsystem which is put in front of police lines to make them collectively vomit? Wonder if and how it works though? Better not eat tonight before going to this event!

[ from the dept. ]

“I don’t like Burger King.
I don’t like anything.
And I am against it.”
(Ramones)

Nobody seems to be interested in what I write. Last entry got 6 hits, so says my admin interface, the majority – or maybe all of them being myself.
Sometimes I dream to be able to do something similar to indymedia as a *real profession*, but guess capitalism would take out all the fun of it.
The style of this blog and the indymedia reporting is quite different, as I found out when trying to convert a blog entry as an indymedia report, the one on the wireless network workshop.
It sounds odd reading it on indymedia.

Maybe I could get back to writing for myself. Like a zine writer.
It is quite interesting for people, to complain about the quality of blog entries. Well, they don’t have to read it if they don’t want it. And then to complain about the moaning tone- when the moaning articles are the ones with the most hits.
So in a way it’s like Big Brother: the more conflict, the better it sells.

Well, at least I managed to finally translate the Bolivian feature. And one from Brasil Indymedia. The Bolivian was quite hard to translate, but the one from Brasil went really really well. I started off translating one from Mexico Indymedia, but this is written quite misunderstandable. At the moment I am not quite sure what the intended meaning of some sentences is, so I have given up for today, basically.

And by the way, both the features which I was quite involved with – the Tlalnatepotla, the attack on the Zapatistas and the massacre in Falludja – although that one was a big collaborative effort – got into the top ten of the most viewed sites on Indymedia UK last month. So it makes sense to translate these features. Am wondering if I should promote the translations for the world wide indymedia page. Unfortunately both the fatures are quite old, not sure if people are still keen to have these as features, now that the news are not update any more.

I am still a bit unsure on how to read the stats, as e.g. the stylesheet is also included so are the region pages and the topic pages and sometimes the pure articles and the static pages.

[ from the dept. ]

Saturday was a day for Dinosaurs, see pics – it was the “international climate action day”. Dunno why I went to the demo, but I did and was very welcome, because it was only a very small group at first. The whole demo stopped for me and posed for pictures whilst I was still trying to lock my bicyckle and find the camera! It was amazing and I wonder if this ever happened to any other indymedia volunteer – it was lovely The pictures turned out very well.

But it wasn’t really an anticapitalist march as such, especially with slogans like “What do we want? – Sign Kyoto! – When do we want to do it? Now!”. It was very good mooded get together and party like, and had some furry and fluffy dinosaurs walking along. Even the US consul’s daughter and husband came out to see us and took some leaflets. The daughter particularly was very intigued by the dinosaur street theatre, singing and drumming . However, in a way I found it quite odd as there was absolutely no police present and still the protesters did not want to take the street but kept on the footpath. Which is really odd and weird here to have such a mass of obedient protesters in Britain in general. I tried to persuade them to take the streets, but nobody seemed to be keen on it. But at least walking from one point to the other is still better than walking in a circle. Have never really found out what the aim of a protest is which consists of walking in a circle on a footpath.

Anyway still have to translate a lot of stuff which I promised and did some cycling with the repaired bicycles, which are still faulty but at least now able to transport from one point to the other, even the brakes work which is more than happened at the Strasbourg noborder camp, where they borrowed out bicycles with no saddle, nobrakes and a loose bicycle handle bar, and of course no light. It was very thrilling, particularly when you are drunk too, and just cycling to the next petrol station in the night to get some more booze. I loosely remember some police car following us at our sides for about 5 minutes and me waving to them untill i fell off the bike, which apparantly solved their problem and they zoomed away.

—-

Community media: just got an email which basically says: it looks like the Commercial Radio Companies Association [CRCA] have been dead busy and have got 20-30 MP’s to write to the regulators to support their very harmful line on banning our stations from having commercial revenue. Their proposal goes as far as barring ANY community radio from operating in the areas of small commercial stations – just outrageous...
In Britain, community media radio stations are basically just developping since the new Access Radio Scheme was started.

[ from the dept. ]

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. ” George Orwell on Why I write.

An bit of discussion at the moment about the Daily Mirrors fake pictures is – unfortunately also not too far away to what is at the moment discussed in small on the Indymedia Scotland email list about a feature with some inaccurate facts in it: “How much truth is there in reporting? And does it help to cling to the facts? What about if (some) of the facts turn out to be wrong? How much does it matter? Is this a general or a singular occurence which comes with writing, pictures, films, reporting? And why do people write if they don’t want to tell the truth? What is the truth – and how much manipultation is there in (mass) media – and even in Indymedia?” .

Anyway George Orwell also wrote the amazing “why people write” observation, which I found on blog whilst googling, a bit changed in the regards of “why people blog”. There is also an entry of the first Microsoft employee, who got fired because of a comment on his blog. Read it. Unfortunately the links don’t seem to get through on the rss feed for the indybloggers. But try to read it, its interesting: Apparantly he was unlucky enough to reveal on a side remark that they also use Macs in Microsoft, especially for graphics.

Why people write:
1. Sheer egoism
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm
3. Historical impulse.
4. Political purpose.

As for me I am definitely not writing because of 2, aestethic enthusiasm. My primary purpose is definitely 4, at the moment; political purpose, followed closely by historical impulse, and yes, 1 – sheer egoism is present, too, especially when moaning about conflicts.. and trying to sell my ideas and believes. Will discuss these questions more in the content.

However, nobody can possibly say it as well as Orwell:
“I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”

[ from the dept. ]

Actually nothing exiting has happened here today. As in here I mean Edinburgh,in Scotland, UK. It hasn’t been raining, which is unusual. My monitor has given up working, but hopes are still high its only temporarily. This one works only under Windows, unfortunately. So my whole Linux partition is on holidays in the depths of cyberspace.
The Edinburgh Chiapas Solidairty event was pleasant as ever, with lots of self-made food like Guacamole, Salsa, Nachos and Tacos, and Beans and Bread and Cheese and potatoes pancakes – whatever these are called in Mexico. And lots of cake and cream , too. Also I watched “The Sixth Sun” for the first time, it is a brilliant film, unfortunately it has been made when the technology was worse and so looks a bit blurry- probably on High8 or Beta SP, anyway it is about the Zapatistas – but mainly before 1994!!! Which is very unusual. It goes till about 1996, and the editing is fantastic, the narrative sympathetic and gripping.
Also the Zapatista group sell fairtrade organic coffee from the Zapatista collectives and books from AK Press, which is also situated in Edinburgh.
There was some DJing with a little bit of punk and later on a lot of swinging goodmoody latinamerican world music for the swinging hippies who then had to squeeze themselves onto the dance floor.
Unfortunately there is not much Punk in Scotland anymore after the TAP was closed and Diek from Oi Polloi moved apparantly up north.

What I was a bit annoyed was the red flag behind the stall of the Zapatista group. Another slow take-over or parasiting of the Socialists? Anyway I am only occasionally participating in the group, and if the hard working anarchist and autonomous members of the group don’t object, then its not my task, as I trust their judgement.

By the way: the next Radical Bookfair in Edinburgh will be shortly after the G8 in the US and the euro elections start of june. It will be opened by James Kelman, presenting his new book: “you have to be carefull in the land of the free”, and he also is a longterm friend of ACE, the Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh, and he send us a brand new pre-published copy to proofread.

Have talked to my sister, she has got a new maybe-boy friend, and maybe she’ll help in translating the new Imc Bolivia feature into english. My sister speaks and writes german, english, spanish and portuguese, all fluently, and I am very jealous of her language skills. Unfortunately she doesn’t yet throw her language skills in the collective indymedia skill pot, but maybe she’ll be helping out from time to time for her social conscience
Sure, she is reading this blog, welcome Sister!

Anyway, for anybody who is interested:

Gods new website is online: It just came through on an indymedia list, and sounded quite funny, so here it is:

Hello,

God.

[ from the dept. ]

Tonight there is an Edinburgh Chiapas Social event planned. Luckily, i am only roped in for transport – o no, just forgot to organise the film I am supposed to bring….need to arrange that now. The Group will be showing “Zapatista” from Big Noise Tactical and some short films made by the Chiapas Media Project and by Kiptik.
Unfortunately the venue used tonight and otherwise quite frequently is being sold – offers sought for about 800 000 english pounds.

Otherwise the new Indymedia Scotland website seems to be taking off slowly. We had at least 5 new features in the last 3 days! That still outnumbers the amount of ordinary contributions to the site, but good to see people getting enthusiastic about it.
Otherwise I am reading an Introduction to Rousseau at the moment, as well as a pamphlet about permaculture, which is short for “PERMAnent agriCULTURE”.It is all about sustainablity. There are occasionally courses offered in Edinburgh about permaculture, but they are actually quite expensive, so that’s how I got curious to read about it.

And just to recommend reading this: Workers Without Bosses – a website for solidarity with the selforganised (formerly occupied) factory Brukman in Argentina. Also there seems to be a project developping in organising spare and replacement parts for the sewing machines to the collectively run project. The webmaster is still building up the site, and feedback is appreciated.

On another note: according to June Welt there is a general strike in Bolivia on for about 2 weeks and it seems the president’s seat is wobbly again, still the same issue with Bolivias natural gas resources and the neoliberal sell-out policy of the IMF/WB imposed on them. Also there is another feature about Indigenas blockading multinational corporations because of the gas war, this feature is by Imc Bolivia which waits to be translated.
Also Indymedia Austria is offline at the moment – pretty sad actually, they seem to want to switch to a 2 wires editorial policy similar to Indymedia Germany.