5alist competition

We’re running a competition on 5alist.com. It’s going to happen each week from here on out, and the winner will get featured on the homepage for a week as a prize.

Yeah, it’s not much of a prize, but it was either that or some CDs I didn’t want, and I’d probably end up sending them to someone who was in one of the bands, so we went with ‘peer esteem’ as the reward.

Essentially, all you do is go to the site and make a top 5 list on a particular theme. So if the theme was ‘Robots’, you might do a Top 5 Movie Robots or – I dunno – ‘Top 5 things robots can do that people can’t’.

That sort of thing.

To kick it off, we’ve started with The American Presidential Election as the theme. There’s bound to be some great stuff you can do there. I’ve started with my own meagre contribution – but you can do way better.

Look forward to seeing what you come up with. Don’t forget to read the rules.

Rusty McRoadworthy and the ride from hell

I tried a new route to work yesterday. I was trying to maximise the proportion of the journey that I could spend along the canal, and minimise the amount of time spent dicing with death along Stratford Road.

So I took Rusty to the bike shop for a bit of new kit, and some advice about directions.

I picked up front and rear lights, so I could cycle home after 3pm and be detected by the human eye – thereby making Rusty as completely safe as it’s possible to be and still be a bicycle on Birmingham roads.

As far as the route was concerned – after much deliberation and a couple of phone calls – the trick, it seemed, was to cut across Stratford from Highfield, go out to Acocks Green, and get on at Yardley Road. It added another mile or two to the journey, but a much nicer ride. Or so I thought.

Kids Radio in NZ

I was asked to write a letter of support for something today. Here’s what I wrote:

I write in support of the proposed Children’s Radio Network in New Zealand.

I campaigned for KidsNet in 1999-2000 when the Youth Radio Network was a hot topic on the NZ political landscape. While the aims of the teenage Youth Radio proposal were laudable – and it is to this government’s shame that no Youth Radio services were established (Kiwi FM does not begin to address the issue) – the YRN proposals under consideration did not address the area of greatest and most urgent need.

There is still not one radio station in the country that specifically targets the needs of 400,000+ primary and intermediate school-age New Zealand children, and this is a tragic missed opportunity on so many levels. The ability to share ‘our songs and our stories’ with those most eager to hear them; the chance to provide in-school music lessons with some of New Zealand’s finest performers (and much more besides); the opportunity to have our kids grow up in a media environment that values and respects their interests is one we would be neglectful to turn up. Not having a non-commercial public media outlet for New Zealand children denies them their cultural birthright.