About Brum

With the next Brum Twestival fast approaching in September this year, the organisers have decided to hold a vote to find out which local charity is the favourite of the twestival-goers – and which will be supported at this year’s event. All the candidates are excellent charities in their own right, and I strongly urge everyone to vote for the local charity of their choice.

This year’s candidates are:

• Acorn Hospice
• Kidney Kids Appeal
• Birmingham YMCA
• The Conservation Trust
• SIFA Fireside Day Centre in Digbeth
• St Mary’s Hospice in Selly Oak

There’s more info on each of these charities on the Brum Twestival site.

Having had a good friend who died from advanced stage lung cancer spend his last weeks at the BSMH, I’m especially grateful to them for the wonderful care, attention and compassion they give to their residents and their families on a daily basis. They’re entirely funded by donations and the odd benefactor; to lose St. Mary’s Hospice - or indeed, any other Hospice – would be a tragic thing to happen and would drastically decrease the availability of quality palliative care in the West Midlands. Besides that, it would put an even greater strain on the NHS to provide the same level of extraordinary care.

So, please support your local Hospice – and indeed, support all of your local charities. If you can’t afford to donate to all of them at once, set up a rota system or donate to a number in turn, changing every couple of months. What’s £10 or £20 a month? It’s not much to you, but to them it means the world. Thank you

See you at the Twestival in September!

Roll up, roll up – it’s the shiny new About Brum podcast, replete with delicious podcasty goodness and compatible with all half-decent media players and devices.

The inaugural episode features Nick Booth of Podnosh and Birmingham Social Media Surgery fame! Also, Birmingham- or West Midlands-based band? Get your music featured on the next instalment… Contact me for more details.

Click here to download the podcast's audio file

Links to articles mentioned in podcast:

http://www.paradisecircus.com
Nick Booth: PodNosh.com
Nick Booth: BeVocal – Acock’s Green SMS

Intro music for this episode: Advantage – Never Say Never

If you think you deserve to be featured in a future podcast, get in touch - I look forward to hearing from you!

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have already noticed unmarked black gantries appearing in several areas of Birmingham over the past week or so. Some have already gone up in Digbeth, and from informal discussion with contractors installing the gantries today it appears that there are at least 10 more to go. Today (Monday), two gantries were erected at the top of Broad Street (the Five Ways end), one overlooking each direction of traffic. These gantries will shortly be outfitted with ANPR cameras – so for all you Vehicle Excise Duty, car insurance evaders and generally Naughty People, Broad Street and Digbeth high street (amongst other areas) are soon to officially become No Go Zones.

Update, August 2009: these gantries are now fitted with ANPR cameras – the reason you might not see them is because they are really small! If you look at the gantries closely, there’s one or two ‘lumps’ on each one – those are the cameras. Your travel in and out of the city, including dates, times and durations of journeys, are now being logged by Central Government. Enjoy.

According to sources at Birmingham City Council, the cameras themselves are not under their management or jurisdiction as West Midlands Police undertake day-to-day operational responsibility (with much of the central gantries set to be operated from of their Steelhouse Lane station). However, Birmingham City Council’s CCTV department can supervise and control the CCTV cameras being fitted alongside some of the gantries. 

Personally, I am in two minds to the introduction of ANPR to the city centre (as I am sure many others are)… Read the rest of this entry »

I’m currently upgrading About Brum to the latest stable Wordpress – I’ve left it too long without updating and it was becoming dangerously obsolete, so I took the plunge a little earlier today.

There will be some temporary ugliness but fortunately the WP coders have made upgrading to a new point release wonderfully simple – one click to update the database, step-by-step instructions that cover even non-standard installations, and just about all of my pre-existing settings, plus all my previous posts and categories have been carried over without a problem.

The last thing to be  completed is a transition to a new theme; I should have this finished by this evening so please bear with the temporary ugliness or occasionally distorted page layout as I tweak the final design.

Cheers!
Christopher

…As apparently they’ve just decided to take delivery of a new VRA (Voice Risk Analysis) system for their Benefits helpline, in an effort to reduce fraud (often indicative of lying, just how polygraphs work) by detecting stress in a caller’s voice. Rats.

In the first three months of a pilot scheme in Harrow, north London, that began in May, 173 housing benefit and council fraudsters were exposed, saving the council £110,000.

…

VRA is used only in conjunction with questioning by call operators who have been trained to detect deception, says a spokesman for the Capita Group, which owns the technology. It works by measuring “micro-changes” to the frequency of the human voice and relaying to the operator, in real time, the level of risk that the speaker is being deceptive.

I’ll reserve judgement on the efficacity of this scheme - however, I’ll be amazed if the helpline staff can even hear callers, given the shocking condition of some of Birmingham’s antique telephone lines!

Remember: lying: baaad. Birmingham City Council knows all… They’ll be installing those fancy mirror-style TVs in your homes next so they can broadcast inspiring promotional content to you!

While many may not know who these guys are, The Persuaders a design agency based in the Midlands who’ve done a slew of work for a variety of companies, including the BBC and (ironically) Digital Central, an Advantage West Midlands organisation who in turn produce their own content and sites.

The Persuaders did a CMS-based site for Digital Central, and I never realised this until I found my way to their almost without realising who they were! I thought it was highly ironic given that Digital Central is supposed to be able to do its own in-house web and content design (and indeed, they have, I’m working next year for a company whose entire online presence has just been bolstered by the rollout of a new ‘Digital’ site, complete with promotional tools and online retail facilities).

Makes you wonder why Digital Central didn’t just design their own site in-house… Anyways, the Persuaders site is a very fine piece of design, and makes an interesting few minutes of perusal just checking it out, seeing who they’ve designed material for – you might have actually engaged in some of their content without even realising it.

This made the news sites a while back now, but I’ve had it in one of my Opera tabs for a long time and never bothered to note it down on here. It seemed appropriate that I reference it, even though others have done so long before myself.

It’s a music video made as a promotional tool for the council and as such works quite well – it’s got some great montages of the sights in and around Brum, and the song’s pretty good to boot. The BBC site’s got it available for streaming on their Birmingham LocalTV subsite (and the accompany article, with a link to the video, can be found here).

Something I hadn’t noticed until I just had the video playing in the background – so I could only hear the sound – was that after the song finishes, and the credits roll, there’s a bloke heard speak very quietly in the background of the audio. I don’t think (well, I hope not!) that this was intended, but I don’t have a copy of the video on DVD so I can’t verify against the original version, so either the BBC kit had a dry wire or ground loop somewhere in the signal path, or the video was VERY poorly mastered!

What he says is quite amusing, too… If you’ve got very good ears, or you just turn the volume all the way up (the scientific method), this is what you’ll hear:

<guitar fades out>

“And join me to meet the mushroom picker who doesn’t mind working in the dark, and having compost dumped on his head… Join me to meet the mushroom picker who doesn’t mind working in the dark, and having compost dumped on his head… That’s right, join me at Warwick University where we meet a mushroom picker who doesn’t mind working in the dark, and having compost dump-”

Make what you will of that, but either which way, it’s an amusing easter egg! I’m feeling generous, so I clipped the audio and attached it as an MP3 for your enjoyment, though you can just watch the video in its entirety on the BBC web site if you think I’m having you on. Take a listen: Warwick University Mushroom Pickers?

An odd couple of bedfellows, but both quite significant events that took place last weekend – Birmingham hosted the Gay Pride weekend, seeing hundreds and thousands of people converge on the second city for a weekend of festivities, celebration, drinking and general madness… My lesbian housemate certainly seemed to enjoy herself, though she’s not shown me some of the snaps from her weekend exploits yet!

Unfortunately, as is customary with any big outdoor event, it rained all weekend. Oops. However, it doesn’t seem to have dampened peoples’ spirits, as is evidenced by taking a look at the photos from the weekend on the BBC Birmingham pages.

Last weekend also marked the start of Tolkien Weekend 2007 – something I’m far more interested in What’s not so well-known is that J.R.R. Tolkien (more info on the BCC pages) drew a lot of inspiration from the scenery in and around Birmingham when he was writing his Lord Of The Rings saga (as he lived in Birmingham at the turn of the century), and a lot of that which he drew his inspiration from is still around for all to see today. Buildings like Perrott’s Folly (just down the road from me in Edgbaston, and across the way from the Ivy Bush, the pub where Tolkien used to drink) serve as a mysterious reminder to those who are fans of his work as to how he even partly envisioned his amazing universe in the first place. The Folly gave Tolkien the spark for his idea of the Two Towers of Mordor- the Folly was built in line with the old water tower, and when you view them from a distance the similarity is striking.

Other landmarks include Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog, the blueprint for Fangorn and the Old Forest, as well as various places in and around the Midlands where Tolkien grew up. Tolkien didn’t just derive inspiration from Birmingham however, and there are many guides (including this one by Simon Rose) detailing in much greater depth many of the other buildings and locations whose influence can be seen in his later writings.

Photos from the 2007 Tolkien Weekend are available here, here and here.

In other good news, Longbridge will be officially back in action from today – the 29th of May – after it was announced that Nanjing Automobile are not only making Longbridge their EU headquarters, they are reopening the factory for production and using the factory as an R&D facility for new development. Since buying the company in 2005, Nanjing has invested many millions of pounds into the facilities and have long said they have wanted to resume production at the facility. They’ve also premiered several new models of MG vehicles based on old Rover designs at this year’s Shanghai Automobile Show, and now seem set to scale up production of new vehicles. (More info here, here and here.)
Credit for all photos: BBC News Online

This is something I’ve had in my bookmarks for a while waiting for a purpose:

I know this may well have slipped many people by (it almost slipped me by when it was first published) but the BBC ran a feature about a film made to promote Birmingham in the 1970s. Called “Telly Savalas looks at Birmingham”, it was narrated by… Yeah, you’ve guessed it: Telly Savalas (yes, Kojak)… Ironically however, during his narration he refers to several things he’d seen and done in the film – in the first person – when he’d never actually visited Birmingham at all.

It’s a real piece of history now, showing Birmingham as it was – back when the concrete had just set and everything was shiny and new. Of course, it looks a lot different now. The ‘Brummies on film’ article on the BBC Birmingham website has a full rundown of the film, some backstory and (of course) an excerpt from the film itself can be found on the BiNS site – it’s a real eye-opener.

More recently, a new short film was made to celebrate Birmingham and promote its better features for the wider world – sharing some of its locations with the 70s short film. However, it’s much more upbeat, and was shown to property developers in Cannes (apparently) to, I guess, promote spending in the area. As promotional short films go, it’s not bad at all, and the soundtrack (by a local band) is pretty good at that. You can watch the entire thing via the above Brummies on film link.

(Or, alternatively, if you’re after something a little more modern (and a little more humorous), go take a look at this little masterpiece: Birmingham: City Of The Future.)

Two big items of news to cover really: the Town Hall reopening soon, and the company which owns the Mailbox (one of the most recognisable landmarks in Brum centre) has put both the Mailbox and the Cube up for sale.

Obviously nobody told the Mailbox’s developers to hold back on an asking price, because they’ve set the figure at the princely sum of… wait for it… £300 million! From their blog article, it appears that the owners, Birmingham Development Company, are selling up because…

 …[the sale] will allow BDC to focus on new projects both within Birmingham and elsewhere. First and foremost, it will complete the construction of The Cube, The Mailbox final phase which will include a boutique hotel, waterside cafés, rooftop restaurant, designer retail stores, offices and apartments. BDC is also actively looking at a number of new developments to bring forward over the next few years.

Rrrright. Well, their loss, someone else’s gain. Companies like Harvey Nicks and the BBC (who have their regional headquarters in the back half of the building) must’ve been paying a FORTUNE in rent to them!

In other news, the newly-revamped Town Hall is due to reopen soon (October!) and some have already had a chance to see inside (not me, unfortunately, but I’m looking forward to the launch in October). I’ve taken loads of photos of the outside already, it really does look great – restored to how it looked before (literally, just how it looked before) but so much cleaner! It’s taken long enough… The Town Hall will also be run in conjunction with Symphony Hall, which means that there’ll be a much wider ranger of artists and events held there. The URL for the new site isn’t the best though – THSH.co.uk. And as bounder of B:iNS fame ponders, should it be pronounced th-ishh?

More stuff soon! Time to get this site up and running already.