What you’re saying is that you have no problem at all manipulating photos by professional PA photographers to make them seem like they were sent in by readers, but when lifting photos of hospitalised crime victims from Bebo, you won’t even edit out the poor woman’s red-eye? Seriously?

Also, just because the Bebo logo is entirely in lowercase doesn’t mean you write the citation in lowercase. The company name is quite clear on their about page. Learn to read. Or at least, learn to copy & paste.

The problem here is firstly that the bill is far from uncontroversial – a 20,000 strong email campaign opposing it took place only this week, while industry bodies on both sides took out adverts in the national press to press their points. The BBC story about the “stitch-up” that allowed it to pass is currently the third most popular story in their Election 2010 section; no mean feat given that all eyes are now on the freshly-launched election campaigns.

Most damning however, is the lack of attendance in the Commons on the debate itself. As you can see from the BBC coverage, the House was hardly what one would call ‘bustling’. On a local note, here’s how MPs in my area performed:

• Rob Wilson (Conservative, Reading East): No show.
• John Redwood (Conservative, Wokingham): No show.
• Martin Salter (Labour, Reading West): Did actually attend, so some credit there, but voted in favour along party lines.

John Redwood did express his opposition to the Bill on his blog today, but it wasn’t until later in the comments that he explained he was in fact absent for both divisions of the debate, having given up any further opposition as a lost cause. He was present (and quite vocal) for the immediately preceding debate on the Finance Bill.

All of which reminds me of another Internet-related bill passed with very little fanfare almost a decade ago: The Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill, which passed with a mere 30 MPs present. Of course, the resulting law certainly hasn’t made headlines at all… has it?

Specifically, they are employed as actors.

Apparently someone at Grisoft forgot to check their TODO list before the product shipped.

Those of you playing along at home will know that R-MWC has been the centre of controversy the last few years, after they suddenly decided to switch from a woman’s college to co-ed (and change their name to Randolph College), cut staff and courses, and sell off prize pieces from the college museum’s permanent art collection to shore up long-running (and long-denied) financial problems. Lawsuits from alumnae groups resulted, but were lost in the circuit courts and last week were ultimately quashed at appeal.

All of this meant that there was a heightened sensitivity amongst the alums to any male involvement in reunion. There were a small number of snide remarks and people jumping to conclusions over the contribution made by male students at some of the events, and several times I was asked by older alums if I was a student. Very few of the older alums had brought their partners with them, but I think it was mainly my closeness in age to the actual students which led people to assume I was one of them. The first time I was asked “Are you a student?”, I simply quipped, “No, I’m a husband” without even thinking about it, and that became my standard response from then on. Later I realised that, in future, some form of branding might be in order:

I’m thinking of making it into a t-shirt.

Beneath the celebratory mood, there is a somewhat more gloomy outlook over the changes at the college. Overall the mood of alums seemed to be more accepting the older the alums were. The class of ’03 were still decidedly frosty, in particular when they pointedly refused to stand to applaud college President John Kline’s speech when every other class did. I can empathise with that; the memories of their woman’s college days are still very fresh, and to be honest Kline did labour over his defence of the college’s decisions in the last 2 years for far too long. I think it may have been a misguided attempt at openness in informing the older alums of what changes had gone on, but I don’t think it was the time or place for a detailed no-apologies stance, which is how it came across. It was also clear that Kline has lost patience with the still-dissenting students on campus, which frankly I can understand given that a minority of them even resorted to physical harassment of male students at one point.

Nonetheless, deep divisions remain in both the student body and faculty; seven faculty members retired this year, far more than usual in one year, and only two of them showed up to the Dean’s farewell speech for them. Several more have also had their jobs cut as part of the restructuring program. I have a somewhat unique position in that I contract for the college in a roundabout way as the IT Support for the Reading Program here in England, so I get snippets of the staff viewpoints as well as the students. I’m told that the division amongst the faculty has broken long-standing professional relationships on campus, with some former colleagues even refusing to attend the same functions because they don’t even wish to see each other. Some faculty are also privately admitting that the enrolment numbers for next year, which have become a yardstick on which the success of the changes are being measured, are looking considerably lower than the college is publicly saying, though nothing will be certain until later in the year. I’m told that there is an additional demographic problem that will be facing all US colleges in the coming years, in that there is a significant dip approaching in the number of college-age students which will put pressure on all institutions’ recruiting. If Randolph College starts to become less popular right as that dip comes over the horizon, the long-term outlook for the college is not especially rosy.

So… I’ve chosen Vista Business, and you think I should ‘upgrade’ to the previous version?

I’m sure all the Vista-haters will cynically cry, “Hah, XP is an upgrade, n00b, because Vista is teh suck”, to which I reply, “Eat my ass, you cynical, whingeing, amateurs.” I’ve been running Vista since July, and I wouldn’t go back to XP. Fact.

Then they put out adverts like this one (taken from the Barclays website today). How the hell is this ‘responsible lending’? A credit card is not a toy! It is not something you ‘treat’ yourself to like a goddamn pedicure. It’s this sort of attitude from banks that is the reason why personal debt in the UK exceeded the value of the country’s GDP in August. The real reason I had trouble getting a loan 2 years ago was because I was nothing to do with them acting responsibly, but with covering their own backsides; I was 23, and therefore, in their eyes, likely to blow the money and never repay it. It’s not an unreasonable suspicion since this often happens, but it’s an attitude that the banks themselves are nurturing in their customers with adverts like this.

It’s funny how while they wouldn’t lend me money at a reasonable rate, Barclaycard were quite happy to raise my credit card limit to more than 3 times my monthly salary at 25%+ interest. Pity for them that I’ve never borrowed money on my credit card, and probably never will…

Curiously, I started going by Jay about a year or so after that.

Anyway, the reason we found this is that when seeing my Dad today, I borrowed from him a selection of papers from his collection of family records, specifically the earliest records regarding my great-grandfather, Jacob Schlackman. When we got home, Elizabeth’s librarian/archivist nature kicked in and she quickly located a number of good leads for more information about him. The revelation that another Jay Schlackman died in the US in 1998 is unrelated to our family (as far as we know), but the juiciest of the relevant finds is a record of a court document in the National Archives in which he is named as a “co-respondent” in the divorce papers for Lily Duparc (nee Griggs), the woman he later married (i.e., my great-grandmother). The court document is dated 1919, just one year before their son (my grandfather) was born!

We are now planning to make a trip to the Archives to take a look at this, and other records, including the 1901 Census record for Lily when she was 5 years old. Elizabeth also found burial records for two people who appear to match what little information we have on his parents (Aaron and Lia Schlackman), who were buried in Edmonton Federation Cemetery, North London, in 1925. This is interesting because we did not even know before if they had immigrated to England or whether they had remained in Paris, where we know he had siblings.

As you can no doubt tell, it’s been a thrilling evening of research in the Schlackman household.