Do pass this message around so that as many Lib Dems as possible can see it and respond: "On Saturday afternoon the party's Federal Executive is meeting to discuss how the party should handle the Parliamentary situation.

There's no pre-set, universally supported answer to this so the FE's discussion is going to be meaningful and important - which means that if you want to influence what the party does, now is the time to let the FE know.

Because many members of the Federal Executive are scattered around the country - sleeping, travelling back from election counts, making their way to London and so on - the FE members may be hard to get hold of and many will not necessarily be checking their emails frequently.

Therefore, in order to ensure that people have a chance to send in a view that will be read before the meeting, we've agreed with the Party President Ros Scott a special email address - balancedparliament@libdemvoice.org which can be used to email in your views. A member of staff will collate all the messages and make sure that they are drawn to the attention of Ros and also reported to the members of the FE in time for their discussion.

A few tips when emailing this address:
- Given the pressures of time, short and concise messages are likely to be more effective than 12 pages essays
- As with letter writing or lobbying more generally, saying in full who you are and where you're from is likely to add to the impact of the message
- Please send your message as soon as possible"

I find the blank advertising panels make a stronger statement than the commissioned art - Full Circle by Knut Henrik Henriksen. Their temporary blankness makes them even more poignant.

(download)

Click here to download:

Kings_Cross_Underground_which_.zip (544 KB)

  Thank goodness the lyrics are now revealed! And helpfully captioned so you can sing along.

  Ladies and gentlemen, our soloist tonight, etc, etc...

  Anyway: snippets from Stairway to Heaven and (for balance) Highway to Hell.

  Who else is in?

Stairway to Heaven.mp3

(download)

Click here to download:

Stairway to Heaven.mp3 (406 KB)

Highway to Hell.mp3

(download)

Click here to download:

Highway to Hell.mp3 (289 KB)

Liberty Street, London SW9, is an enviable address with a suitably distinctive street sign.
 
Unusually for London, the sign features The Village Font, (a derivative of Albertus™) which was used in the 1960s TV drama The Prisoner.
 
Bonus font fact: Liberty Street is just around the corner from the Type Museum in Hackford Street.
 
Tantalisingly, the museum is not open to the public at present. As with the Village in the Prisoner series, I'd like to know what one has to do to end up inside...
 
 

Tastes a bit like Google juice...

I downloaded ÜberTwitter to my BlackBerry recently - it does so many things that TwitterBerry can't.
 
These are the ones I like in particular:
 

1. On the ÜberTwitter icon, the umlaut accent marks change from green dots to red stars when new tweets come in, without you having to launch the app
2. Tweets are appended with your (approx) location on a Google Map - don't worry, it's optional but can be useful for campaigning, events, or just showing off when you're on holiday ;-) When readers click through, they see something like the above screenshot
3. Photos are embedded in tweets without having to click through to them - although you can, if you want to enlarge or go to the hosting site
4. You can take photos and post them directly within tweets. No need to set up a separate account anywhere, ÜberTwitter takes care of it all by posting an ÜberPic complete with the number of views
5. You can look at a user's timeline in isolation
6. There's a retweet command (TwitterBerry had me doing a lot of copying and pasting)
7. Reply all - useful for when you want to reply to a tweet containing several usernames without keying them all in
8. Reply to DMs as DM, not @ (to avoid those awkward moments - what Auntie used to call "showing your petticoat." We've all done it...)
9. Hashtag search
10. Trending topic search
11. Search friends and followers (and your friends' and followers' friends and followers... Huge time-sink alert!)
12. Look for twitterers near you: "Everyone near you"
13. It updates differently. Whereas TwitterBerry automatically updates to view the most recently posted tweets, so that you have to scroll down and read the rest in reverse-chron, ÜberTwitter saves your place at the last tweet you viewed, then you can scroll up and read in order.
14. Shows the bio of a user when you click on one of their tweets.
15. Favourites: you can mark them and view them, plus those of your friends (encore huge time-sink!)
16. You can delete your tweets
17. There is an Unfollow command
18. You can follow conversation threads
19. You can select "load more" to view even more tweets from a selected timeline
20. It shows which twitter client other twitterers used to post their tweets (I take a nerdy interest in such things and know others who admit to the same...)

 
Automatic URL shortening is promised for the next release - excellent!
 
It would also be nice to have:
 

1. Umlaut accent marks turning a different colour when "@" replies or DMs are received, or getting an asterisk like the BlackBerry Facebook icon does
2. Ability to view sent DMs as well as received ones
3. Ability to post short sound files in tweets

 
Although I really liked TwitterBerry, I've taken to ÜberTwitter straight away - it's helped me find so much more information, and easily too.
 
Have you tried it yet?  Which features do you like/use a lot?
 
Download ÜberTwitter here.

Treets are back!
 
I used to buy them with my pocket money.
 
They were the 70s forerunner to M&Ms and inspired an uncle to tell the following awful/brilliant joke, long after they'd stopped making them. (I don't think he'd realised).
 
Anyhoo, drumroll please...
 
"Once I got a peanut stuck in my ear, so I poured in some chocolate and it came out a Treet."
 
Best bit was the baffled audience. Now it's my turn to be baffled, as I've found Treets in a stub on Wikipedia:
 
http://bit.ly/xdaxf