Ulla’s Amazing Wee Blog

When I came back it seemed the builders were here and put up an anti-pigeon net on the balcony. What a surprise.
Last week, some activists from Leeds were in Edinburgh, conducting interviews for a book about Autonomy. This book is initiated by the Trapese collective and is said to be published by Pluto Books later this year.

Yesterday I was rung up and asked if I am interested in a position as a “community counsillor”. Which brings me a bit in a odd conflict. I haven’t yet followed the discussion about the whole new restructuring and development of decision-making in local communities. Also not sure if it is an (un)accountable, unelected position, if it is a representative position of power, which we anarchists would reject, as we don’t want to claim to represent anybody other than ourselves. Also I might not be British enough. Also not sure if it is worth doing it, if it is just a consulting post.
I do think it is a voluntary position, too.

Fluffy the hamster has now built himself a summer residence out of hay and hamster bedding. He has rejected his little wooden hamster villa and after falling asleep in his wheel, decided he would build himself his own favorite extension, which looks a bit like a hamster garage now. Me and my boyfriend had big but funny discussions this week if it is unethical to deprive the hamster of his wheel during the day.

On Thursday, it seemed like everybody had a bit of a tough day at uni, although some of the conflicts I did not really understand. There is a bit of trouble with the magazine looming, as it is very much organised from the top down to the bottom and time pressures. Unlike alternative media, where you first have the content and then everything else is organised around how to publish it, in this more professional organisation now, the advertising and therefore the target audience dominates all the content – the length of articles, the point of view, the issues and layout. This drives me slightly crazy, as I am not used to it.
However, it is good to get to know how it works.
This week I also found out I passed my law exam – just about. It was coinciding with the Dalkeith Park eviction, which I would have much more prefered to make a video or report about and spend more time there supporting the protesters.
There is a discussion going on if the marking and teaching of law would have been unfair and it probably was to some extend. The question now is, if complaining would actually help either the students who failed and/or the students next year. Micah thinks it is better to keep out of it, as it would not affect me anymore, and as he rightly points out, it would be unsatisfactory to persue an initiative, when most collegues look down on grassroot and students’ struggles anyway.
This week I also have seen the first vacancy ever for podcasting. Never considered it a possible career path before.

I also try to preserve the newspaper articles about the G8 by laminating them. Unfortunatley most newspaper pages are much too big to squeeze them into DinA4.

Listened to Democracy Now! and it included a brilliant interview with John Perkins, the author of the book “Confession of an Economic Hitman”.
The On the Media podcast is brilliant as ever, this week it focussed on the government trying to substitute access of the press to governmental events by supplying them with press release and their own approved photographs.

Another important topic is the “Trusted Computing” initiative, which will see at worst chips implanted in every computer, making not only pirate programmes but most likely even free software and GNU/Linux programmes impossible, or harder to work with or basically economically boycotted. Apparantly it is advertised under the pretense that it will stop computer viruses affecting the computer system at all. Here is the statement of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And a brilliant animation movie is out, too.

We are trying to produce a magazine for postgraduates at uni, and today my lovely Micah and me have set up a picture gallery for me to show my photography on the web.

Unfortunately it is not as good as I would like it to be, firstly as money to use for new funky photography equipment is limited, and so because of the delay I still can not take snapshots or picture expressions unless somebody holds the same expression for more than 10 seconds. Secondly because my experiences are still limited, maybe I should try to get into some of the professional courses at Telford.
Anyways, we seem to have a slight problem with supplying good quality photography for our writing, so hopefully one or some of the pics would make it nevertheless, despite the strong competition from other professional photographers.

Will post the URL when it is finished, as there is still so much work to be done.
And we got the application form in, in the end with a quarter of an hour to go at the end, and I had this horrible headache and started to get grumpy and adding all these repetitions and spelling mistakes, and had this idea that i should have actually done a slight consultation about the application and how to phrase everything best, but did not occur to me.

And although I am feeling better, and got today the parcel with “The last days of Salvador Allende” documentary film, I am still not feeling too well and should go to bed soon. I even lost 2,5 kilos just by loosing the appetite whilst being ill.
Not that this is an advisable diet, but seems to work better than many others.

I am ill today with headache, cold, period and so on.

Anyways the Guardian has deleted my job application today, one day before the deadline, with already most of the forms filled in, only some questions about reviewing the newspapers and website remained.
When my auntie worked at another less known newspaper, she already then said that only the offspring of the editors really has a change to get the internships and workexperience, and that chances are bad and relationships all.
Here in Britain some usefull Cambridge-Oxford connection would be helpfull, too. Please mail me if you can provide some!
The Guardian left me already hangin with my first application for workexperience, when they suddenly closed the offer, and all my filled in forms collapsed. At least, the content could just be rescued, but already spent several hours again filling in the forms and I am really not feeling too well, snorting away with a dripping nose.
The Guardian now functions over the internet only, so there are no contact details, nobody to complain to, nobody responsible and apparantly nobody intrested, which makes me even more furious.

I probably also miss out on the Social Action Research project and the interviews, and it seems highly unlikely I make it to the screening and video distribution workshop for activists in Manchester this weekend.

Am also most likely not able to go to court tomorrow to observe a particular interesting NVDA action G8 court case.
Hopefully I can make at least the other appointments tomorrow.
Podcasting is off till I am actually able to speak, not squeek, and less snorty.

Leith FM has received from Ofcom today the announcement they will get a community radio license. Which makes me happy and angry at the same time, because of their fear of any left-wing content with which we had a bit of a fall out about a year ago or so. Though I hope that the last broadcast worked well with the charming, approachable, patient and friendly Lindsey in charge and with Tom teaching “how to make radio features out of interviews” and “audio editing”.
However, Ofcom also gave a license to the Army Radio: Garrison Radio in Edinburgh, so I would wonder if right-wing bias is more acceptable and if there is a discrimination against left-wing stuff. But in the end it probably does not matter that much anyway anymore, now that the internet and podcasting rulez.
However, one of my dreams would still be to have something like Radio Z here. But then we don’t have something like Pilton Video in Nuremberg. What a pity. It basically just depends what has locally grown out of the grassroots movement and what opportunities were given at the time, it seems.

I wish I could build up more, but then, already our hacklab is heading into deep financial troubles.

In my community I try to participate at the Community Psychology Project which tries at the moment to conduct a Social Action Research. Now, the first interviews are conducted and hopefully we will have some exceptional truthfull conclusions soon on the issues of unemployment and training, education, careers advice and work agencies and how all these government strategies fail because of ignoring the actual practical needs of the jobseekers in the council estates.
However, sometimes it seems we are actually too disorganised to achieve what we want.

I could not yet do my audio editing for the podcasting experiment as busy with other things over the weekend.

The discussions about the Muhammad caricatures is going on my nerves. Not only The Left is split. The Jungle World, especially Ivo Bozic, seem to be rather pleased they discovered a point of view to attack muslims and put them in the wrong, as to in some weird consequence try to increase support for Israel, and trying to reinforce the anti-national, pro-israeli point of view. This German-only political sect’s argumentation works in weird ways and can actually not be understood internationally at all. Usually it is easiest to say that these people feel guilty for the Holocaust and thereby legitimise Israel’s human rights abuses towards the Palestinians with it, and even support Bush and the US foreign policy because the most powerful status of Israel is their main priority as they are afraid that the existance of the state of Israel would be threatened by basically everbody else. It is a pretty lonely ideology. Originally this political sect came out of the internationalist wing of the Left, and they are used to overtheorizing everything a bit, many have been writing for left wing publications for years before 9/11, such as for Jungle World and others. In my opinion it is one of the main reasons, why fewer and fewer people read and buy this weekly newspaper. So they seemed to hold back a bit on that particular topic, but with the cartoons, they now splashed their “Freedom Of Speech” (but only for us) argument over four pages.

Now on Radio Z, in an interview with Dritte Welt Saar, the interviewee seems to enforce the view that only the fundamentalist extremists would be against the caricatures, and the rest “should be convinced and dialogue should be sought.”

Anyways I asked my boyfriend what he thinks, and he made a good statement (he always does):
“The protests are not just driven by the cartoons. Multiple grievances exist which this issue has drawn together in a general feeling that powerful forces of the West are attacking the worldwide community of Muslims (Ummah).”
“Unless people have free access to the media, then there can not be true open dialogue which undermines the defence of “freedom of speech” argument.”

That is exactly what I meant when trying to discuss the topic, but I never can express it as well as he does. I have more or less said, that it is discriminatory to not respect people’s belief of not depicting the prophet, especially if the publication does it with the full knowledge and purpose of inciting muslims. And that the whole affair has been more a misunderstanding on the part of the then following Western media, than a culture war, which it is now made out to be. And that if media is really keen to show some of the “real” cartoons for the purpose of discussion, then they should put it on the website only and take these off after the discussion is finished or too many complaints received.

Anyways, as usual I am a bit shocked of my collegues at uni, if they do not research the issue and facts before discussing and writing news about it. But at least it is better than at the Royal Dick, where nobody seemed to have any other opinion than the one stated by the lecturer. About the cartton discussion: I had been badly informed, too, as I did not know when, where and how the riots started breaking out and with what consequenses and no idea about the different countries and timetable of the protest. But I found it even worse that such background research is not encouraged either, just the rewriting of a press release, and use of other sources is discouraged. That makes me pretty fed up, even though it seems the whole mainstream media here in the UK works like that.
For example at the Dalkeith Park, the whole media were crowded together, nobody really said anything to anybody else and the whole journalist crowd were waiting for people to go to them to tell them their opinion, rather than them having a bit of self-initiative to go and find interviewees on their own. At one point I had to shuffle an MSP right under their noses as they refused to leave their priviledged press compound.
Even then, can you imagine, the cameraman of ITV said:
“I can not do anything unless my reporter is back. ” (He was gone shopping.)
Arrrgh! What kind of attitude is that! No indymedia person would ever say and do that! We are always ready for action!
On another day I tried to convince the ITV reporter, who has produced the previous days quite sympathetic, but repetative coverage, to actually not just stand there and get bored, but to interview the person who is actually responsible for the destruction of the park and to give this politician a hard time and hold him to account.
But he would not do it as he seeemed to lazy, and it involved phoning up this person, arranging another interview, then putting some more work into background research and maybe then even missing one of the protesters getting carried down from a tree. The BBC was even less intrested in anything which involved actually some hard-hitting, arse-kicking interviews via the help of in-depth background research.
They are so much more comfortable standing around for several hours in one spot, not talking to each other out of competativeness and seem to have as much passion to fight injustice as a cup of cold coffee or warm beer.

Yesterday, I found out that I can record audio with Odeo.com if I use Windows. On Linux however, the microphone is still silent. I don’t know if that is connected with the sudden unusability of Audacity under Linux as well. But I can listen to Radio Z.

Today i made a logo for my podcast Channel Kickin’Europe News. However it is still under contruction. But we have found out what we actually would need to construct: in fact there is even a plug-in to podcast with this WordPress CMS solution.
However it also works just by creating a new category! It is so simple and I was worried it would be so complicated.
Tomorrow I will try to do an intro and my first podcast for Kickin’ Europe News.
Yesterday I also had a talk over several hours with an indymedia volunteer who now writes an academic publication about alternative media with the alt.media project. It has the advantage that it is interactive and also gives something back to the projects it researches. Anyways, it has something to do with sociology. Simultaneously we got send our first dissertation questionnaire to Indymedia Uk. It is this time of the year again where we get inundated with research requests.
However, the talk yesterday seemed more as if someone would have wanted to write my biography. ….I felt VERY famous!

My visitor has gone now as well and uni has started. New visitors are already on their way though. Uni has started again and I already appeared in several wrong courses and lectures as I got my timetable wrong. I wish they would just write down what courses there exactly are rather than who is teaching it, as some of the profs are multi-tasking. However, what I wonder most is that apart from me everybody seems so sorted…. well, maybe they are just better at hiding it.
This trimester we are supposed to produce a magazine in a bit of a hurry. There are some surprising catches in that we are marked for our contribution to the magazine – not only by the profs but also our collegues. This seems to be rather odd, but I have decided not to spend any more thoughts on structure and organisation as there is not enough time really to change anything in these few weeks and also that would have bad delays in actually getting this thingy out. Also it is good now that the postgraduates have their own project as the undergraduates seem much more involved with the other  university’s newspaper and so it will be good hopefully to solve the conflict of intrests between the two age groups maybe even for forever.

I want to start podcasting now, without having an i-pod though. Maybe I should wait till the cheap nano i-pod comes out.
Odeo is very recommendable and seems to be the easiest solution to start podcasting. I hope i find out how to use it best and add my old audio reports and also add and mix some musical intro and some good music.

I would like to create a new channel called “KEN” or “Kickin’ Europe News“.
And have mainly radical and alternative news translated from community media outlets in Europe, like especially Germany and Britain, because of language knowledge.

This morning I got a visit by police. I was still in my pjamas and confused the policeman with the postman bringing me new exciting documentary films, as both wear dark blue uniforms. How very embarrasing. Anyways, apparantly they are looking for someone who would have to appear in court in relation with something more or less G8-y or something like that and who gave my address as a bail address.

My reaction was very “Haeh?”, till I actually found out what the person there wanted, but I am actually still not clear what exactly was going on. Luckily enough I had a visitor then who helped me out a bit, because all these “No comment” and legal guide thingy’s actually don’t really tell you what to do in such situation where you might get somebody else in trouble or yourself in trouble by being just stupid. And in Britain the policing is different from mainland Europe and America in that the police is usually so polite and especially if you say the correct answer at once out of a choice of several possible they don’t hassle you ever again with that problem. Now if you say “no comment” they are bound to make a small problem into a superb big one.

In Britain it is like, if you are stopped and questioned you might be able by just smilingly and politely suggesting:

“Would you mind me prefering to rather not giving you my name and adress”

And then that is acceptable in most cases and they bugger off or let you bugger off. Now, you would not always think of such answer especially if you come from the continent and the US where you are more likely to be prosecuted for making fun of the police in case of such an answer.

Anyways, I am pissed off with some online casino poker adverts spamming the scotland indymedia site. Every day there are about 50 of them or so. It was suggested that the forms actually are automatically filled in with this spam to increase google ranking, but it is still annoying. Damn I wish there would be a way to block this.

Another nuisance is that our media gallery seems to be abused for maybe even commercial music file-sharing of Sudanese and Arabic music nobody of the editorial team can understand. To add on, it is in weird crappy file-formats always crashing my browser. There are about 10 uploads or more a day of these. It was suggested that the people posting it actually make money out of it by selling the URLs to others who want the music.
Otherwise it would be actually quite pleasant to have some multi-cultural super-international input into Indymedia Scotland, but now it was decided to be rigourous with them to discourage them from abusing the Indymedia site, but that takes quite a bit of time.

The Knowledgelab in Lancaster was fantastic. The organisation was perfect. The food and accomodation was free and the facilities flawless. There was lots of entertainment offered from a gig of the anarcho-folk band “Seize the Day” to more arty-groovy-techno VJing on Friday, and for the non-party people it was possible to stay and chat in the pub, which would have also offered fantastic food, too. There were quite a lot of Indymedia people and in some sense we probably took over the alternative media, although other workshops were also running in the media space, such as about Creative Commons and Licences, and Salsaman (one of the creators of Dynebolic , the multimedia Linux distro) presented his new software programm LiVES, a video editing program, Mick his Clearer Channel grassroots video distribution project, and some artists from Chicago their 60ies video archiving art project.
Other initiatives also included practical workshops in the improvised hacklab such as about Scribus, the free desktop publishing program with a new version just launched working on windows, too and gpg = secure encoded email. Blogmail is a Spanish project which allows you to send emails from a webinterface and cc them to your blog as well, e.g. such as if you are travelling and writing a report or answering questionnaires or whatever. We were discussing a little bit if it is actually usefull and in what ways.
There were also a lot of discussions, such as about Feminism and Technology and other stuff.
I did some notes which will be posted up on the Wiki soon .

Also this blog only rss feeds the first 100 words or characters or whatever. Has the advantage that I don’t spam the blog syndication site, but also means I would need maybe to split up postings in topics and not in days, like treat it less than a diary. So this is one disadvantage of wordpress, that it does not have both, an abstract and content box.