So we finally got married!

Wow, May was probably the most incredible month of my entire life!

The actual wedding was bloody amazing - everything we worked so hard for went according to plan and the weather helped us out. I’ve dumped a load of photos and a couple of videos of the proceedings on to the wedding website - drop by and take a look.

Yve and I spent the honeymoon in a place called Caherdaniel, right down at the bottom left of Ireland on the Ring of Kerry. What a fantastic place - the drive through Ireland just got better the further south we got.

If you’ve never been, go…

I promise you’ll not regret it!

A few of you have asked if we have a wedding list - well, I spent a bit of time and I have put my list online.

Don’t forget the Wedding forum!!! So far the only posts (other than mine) have been from spammers, but I live in hope that someone will leave us a nice message :-)

I’ve just finished the last of the Wedding invites (for the day people, everyones who is invited to the reception are going out this weekend).

I’ve also set up a site for wedding updates.

The media industries (the film industry, the broadcast industry and the recording industry) have for years produced content for the consumption of the masses purely for the purpose of driving advertising revenue. It is this fact that makes me feel slightly queasy.

Am I the only one who finds the term “content producer” a bit insulting?

To reduce the last 100,000 years of human artistic endeavour to the generic term “content production” is a pathetic indication of the disposable nature of our modern existance. Everything we are, our culture, our songs, art, poems and stories reduced to items of “content” for “consumption”. Business views these items as commodities to be traded, and talks in terms of “intellectual property”, completely denying the rights and desires of the creators.

To be perfectly honest, I find the term “consumer” pretty degrading too.

Should the value of an individual in a society be measured by the amount of “stuff” he or she consumes? What of community, self sacrifice or personal achievement? Should the goal of humanity be to consume until there is no more left to consume - that certainly seems to be the message fed to us by our media, and their corporate masters. The only irony in that statement is that there appear to be so many weak people in the world fitting within their model of the universe that this worldview appears to be the only one that makes sense by virtue of sheer numbers.

That makes me feel ill because there is only one logical conclusion to that scenario.

From the article: “The other advantage of a clips service is that it would allow for full exploitation of content sharing; users would be able to forward clips of their favourite shows to their friends or blog readers, without fear of breaking copyright laws.”

Clips? How can that possibly be a good or useful thing? When was the last time you thought, “I know, I’ll video the trailers for programmes that are going to be on next week and lend them to my mate at work?”. More likely, you tape something and if they haven’t seen it, you lend them the tape.

Until the idiots who pull the strings understand that no-one is going to want to do less with the things they already have, then they will not understand the Internet.

The Internet is not a channel to be “monetised”, it is an extension of human connectivity and therefore an extension of community. It is our responsibility to inform the industry players that their understanding is flawed. This should not happen by widescale infringement of their rights, it needs to happen by embracing change.

Do not “consume” content produced by these people. Use the tools that the Internet provides and seek out music, films and art that are produced with this new community in mind.

Tags: media youtube piracy films video

I found a reasonable primer at http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/05/14/py-xml.html but like most sites, it doesn’t really cover the subject in any depth.

This is a shame, as I have found the library to be one of the most complete XML toolkits around, not to mention its speed. It comes complete with a set of Python bindings, so I would imagine it to be used more but if this is the case, it’s users are keeping their code secret!

So if you are looking to use Libxml2 and Python, you need look no further.

If you already use this combination, why not help out - I’ve put it on my Wiki so jump on in and add some content!

Anyway, in the meantime I’ve put a page together to provide links to a few of my tracks.

It’s better than having a non-functioning link on my menubar.

Seeing Yve in action as a riding instructor this weekend was really good. In all the time I’ve been with her
I’ve never seen her teach, which is a shame as she looks right at home in the arena. She’s teaching Charlie and Rhia at the moment, as well as a couple of (more advanced) lessons for the yard.

I was just there to take photos - I chose the 70-200 2.8 mounted on a monopod for the shoot. Urgh!!! If I thought taking band photos was hard because of the lack of light, this was a real experience. The arena was in almost complete darkness, the lights that were there seemed to cast no illumination at all.

Thank Nikon for ISO’s faster than 1000 that’s all I have to say on the matter! I might go along next week - I think I can do a lot better…

A great day for the law and for the people

I think this is a great development. Access to this information I believe is essential in order for the public to judge whether Government is correctly doing its job. As an example, I looked up the Communications Act 2003 which lays out clearly and distinctly what OFCOM should be doing, and how it should behave.

I hope that this is an indication of the Governments will to give us back our data.