That's the end of elections for another year, and the last year I'll be involved in the Union. It's been a helluva fortnight, with a larger UPSU Media presence than ever before.

For the first year ever, we've had photographers and videographers (is that the right term?) running around at pretty much every elections-related event, a massive amount of visual media, a great deal of coverage in Pugwash News, not to mention Pure FM's involvement in interviewing the candidates live on air and broadcasting the hustings candidates' question time events in the evenings last week.

I'm amazingly proud and grateful to all of our student volunteers for all their work in the last few weeks - we have, for the first time, a lot of video footage (and there's more to come, which will be used as teaser-material for next year I hope), and there's been an almost constant stream of photos and updates going online from elections-related events.

(You can check out the elections photos, videos, and Pure FM podcasts, and our elections minisite - the largest ever at 75 pages - here).

This year, we've seen roughly a 15% rise in voter turnout despite the poor weather and the end of term (who doesn't know at least one friend who went home half way through this week suffering from parental withdrawal symptoms? ;o) and, although candidate numbers were the same as last year (fourteen candidates), the distribution among positions has been almost diametrically opposed, with last year's least-contested positions seeing the largest numbers of candidates this year.

A couple of people have observed that this year's line-up has been a very marked "pitched battle" between sports clubs and societies and, while I can't comment on how accurate that statement is - it is, after all, a pretty narrow-focused assessment of a candidate to say that they're a "sporto" or "society person" (or "soco"?) - the figures do seem to show that the candidates who received the most votes in each position are all well-known fac...

You know those days where you get comfy on the sofa and just, well, vegetate? I tend to do something similar at work - I just park up at the desk and start working through my Never Ending To Do List (TM). Ok, so it's not as relaxing, but I guess it helps to get things done.

Anyway, today started out with my first SAGA meeting. Not the over-50's holiday and insurance company, but the University's Students' Academic and General Affairs committee, which (according to the Uni website - I'm not claiming to know anything about anything here, naturally...) is the Board of Governors' main way of getting feedback on the matters that are affecting the students of Portsmouth, through the Union's Sabbatical officers.

SAGA also makes sure that the information fed back to them via. the Sabbs is properly listened to and actioned. To save me rambling even more than usual, you can find out more from this page on the interweb.

So why have I been annoying people then? Well, after coming back from SAGA with a long list of Really Important Things That I Must Do Right Now If Not Sooner, I had to go round trying to track down the various bits of information to complete these odd jobs.

Of course, pretty much everyone I asked was also up to their collective eyeballs in their own workloads, so I ended up feeling like I was going in circles and annoying people on the way, so my mantra for the next couple of days is going to have to be "stop being so bloody annoying", otherwise I think I may lose my kneecaps...

Today I have mainly...

• ... been to SAGA and learnt lots of new things (which I then promptly forgot),
• ... played about with exporting the AU Dinner video so we can put it on t'interweb,
• ... PDF'd 160 Union Council motions, amendments, agendas and meeting minutes from 2002 to 2007, ready to build a shiny new archive of Union Council goodness,
• ... bugged people to get the AGM agenda ready to go (it's on its way, and my annoyance tactics aren't helping it go any faster, so I'll try to stop pestering now!),
• ... bugged Jodie Austin for details of the AU Dinner awards (sorry!). They're online now, so panic over,
• ... finally put Elle's tenancy deposit news article online (only a month after I was asked to do it - sorry!),
• ... turned on the new Get Involved template (and I'll be polishing the Get Involved pages over the next few weeks),
• ... done some more bug fixing on the site to repair the RSS feeds after the upgrade to the database broke a few things (again, sorry, and a thankyou to hosting bod Clive Garder for helping fix it!
• ... tidied up the AGM pages and found out where the AGM agendas and minutes are kept so we can build an archive of that, too...
• ... and a load of other really boring, boring things no-one cares about, too.....

...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz /al ;o)

UPSU.net has a new toy, which (I hope) will make it a lot easier to add a video to your blog, and easier for us pixel geeks to add videos to news and web pages.

Find out more here, and to see a really bad impression of Richard Hammond advertising a boot sale (... or something ...).

/al 

1. Find a video you like on YouTube,
2. Start a new blog entry, and think up an appropriate title (witty and/or attention-grabbing is better),
3. Copy the handy HTML code provided by YouTube and paste it into the HTML editor in your blog,
4. Click the "update" button to return to your blog's WYSIWYG view,
5. Click the "save entry" button,
6. Admire your... Oh bugger, where's my video gone?
7. Click the "edit" link to open your blog entry again,
8. Click the "HTML" button to see what's happened to your HTML,
9. Wonder why your HTML code seems to have turned itself into a random jumble of code that makes no sense to anyone,
10. Repeat steps 3 to 6 at least 5 times,
11. Google for an answer to the problem,
12. Try 15 different permutations of your Google search. Still nothing,
13. Google for a plugin to work around the problem,
14. Find a plugin but not too sure if it'll work, so off we go to take a database back-up before anything else is done...

So, far from being able to upload a video about a floating dog, I'm now looking for a way of putting YouTube videos into blogs without breaking everything.  Oh, happy days...

/al - trying once again not to break anything... 

I'm supposed to be in work nice and early tomorrow; I promised myself I'd be in bed around 9pm when I started feeling tired.

Like the best-laid plans, that didn't happen - I'm sitting here stuffed full of pancakes, trying to figure out how to record video podcasts with the sound and video synchronised (harder than it looks apparently...), wandering around UPSU.net thinking of everything I'd like to get done (on my wish list), and wondering what all the other elections candidates are doing - sleeping, partying, planning...?

Still, I've added a new toy to go with another of UPSU.net's new toys tonight - you can now click one button to export a personal note from the notes thing I cobbled together last week into a blog entry. It *should* work, but when I click the button to try and export *this* note into my blog, it's bound to all go horribly wrong now ;o)

... <click> ...

!! It worked! Right, enough geekery - bed-time. PWs tomorrow - I need a pint or three after this week!

Peace out /al