While I am a lot less opinionated on matters of student governance than some of my colleagues - a conscious decision to avoid a heart attack before 30 - I have to say I wholeheartedly disagree with the way in which bluster, rhetoric and speculation have been used as the main selling points of a "reform" process whose single biggest change appeared to be the abolition of the NUS Conference which, for all its faults, has served for many years as a vital proving ground for policy review and direction-setting by democratic consensus.

What happens next remains to be seen, but I sincerely hope any similar attempts to review and restructure the NUS are carried out with a significant amount more openness, honesty, and consultation with the students' unions the NUS is responsible (and duty-bound) to represent.

(As always, anything here is my tuppence-worth and not the views of the Union as a whole, or of anyone apart from myself!)

I just couldn't resist this:

Housemate Jen told me Chargrilled - the "humourous" t-shirt and hoodie company - are selling navy hoodies at half price today (April 1st... Yes, I know it's April Fool's day), as well as their "buy two, get one free" t-shirts deal - I've just chucked £100-worth of stuff in the shopping cart and the subtotal weighs in at... £57.

Bargainous :o) Check them out today - chargrilled.co.uk (and they're on Facebook, too).

As I said before, this post is entirely my own work, is not endorsed by the Union (or anyone else), and should something go horribly wrong with any orders you place with any outside companies and you end up losing your home, your car and your family, I'll deny any knowledge. So there... ;o)

(click to enlarge)

It's horrible when something like this happens; it's worse when it's practically in your "back yard", and my thoughts go out to everyone affected by the incident.

More news coverage is online at the BBC and Sky News. 

Throughout the interview, I was sat off behind camera and, as the grilling drew to a close, and realising the need to get a photo of the occasion, I grabbed the only camera to hand: Jacob's Nikon D-something-or-other (D40 perhaps? I dunno...). I managed to turn it on and ask, in my best "meeja-related-person" voice, "ehhm, could I ask you gents to pose for a very quick photo please?".

Both Mr Denham and Mr Leverett agreed and, putting on their best grins/grimaces, turned to the camera. Yes, I managed to take a photo... But no, I hadn't got as far as figuring out how Jacob's damned flash worked.

Bugger.

Of course, I bravely soldiered on and did my best to give the impression that I knew exactly what I was doing, and that my command of the camera's manual configuration meant I didn't need such paltry technological aids as a flashgun... Until Jacob shattered my carefully-crafted illusion with "You have no idea how to operate my camera, do you Alex?"

"Err, no... Not exactly" I replied.

Bugger. Again.

Still, I think you'll agree the photo below is singularly one of the most impressive pieces of photography this year:

... ahem. You can read the University's more coherent take on the visit here, or read our teaser article-thing here. Or you could check back on Monday to see the video of the MP's interview, in our news section. 

Cheers! /al 

p.s. As I type this, a massive fight's kicking off outside (i.e. outside Portsmouth's fabled Scandals). I'm off to watch... Or, more likely, hide under my bed...

Gamel - Pugwash mag editor and graphic designer extraordinaire - has finished the image which will adorn the back of the Pugwash hoodies this year:

I particularly love the dig at my Mac "obsession" - the monkey is typing away on a Banana laptop. In my defence, and as far as I'm concerned, I spend a lot of time on my laptop because I'm doing work - everyone else, however, has christened my laptop "Alex's girlfriend" (much to my better half's amusement) because of the amount of time I spend on it... Cheers... Gits the lot of you! ;o)

It's been a bit cold lately, and I grabbed a shot of the sunset over Biggin Hill while I was home visiting the 'rents. Apologies for the quality of the shot - I blame the camera - but the sky was like cut glass and I could see clearly right across London (about 40 miles) from the back window of the house...

Talking of photos, on my way back to Portsmouth, my carriage stopped next to this frankly ridiculous waste of a sign yesterday:

On the subject of bitching, I don't think I'll ever understand why some people feel the need to rip other people's work apart in a public forum just because they don't understand its purpose; it's like me accusing Aston Martin of selling overpriced rubbish just because their cars cost more than a Ford Fiesta... Meh... Sorry for the oblique rant, but it's frustrating when you pretty much live and breathe your media presence and sometimes the only feedback you receive is complaints!! Still, it could be worse... ;o)

In webgeekery, I've been tweaking our "news wizard" - a (very) basic wizard-style web tool we use to create news articles:

Where we used to be quite limited in terms of what we could do with the images in news articles - you got a 200x150 pixel image in your news article, with or without a caption, and that was it - you had to know a bit of HTML if you wanted to tweak it - now our online news editors have the ability to create news articles which have a widescreen image right across the article:

The main application for this will, I hope, be when we start putting more of Pugwash magazine's features online, as it will allow us to make a bigger feature of the article image, since the magazine is very much a visually-led medium. Unfortunately, with only two more issues of the mag left this year, I can't help feeling time's running out very quickly already!

A quick stop press: Digitially Imported 'net radio - I've been listening to their lounge feed after almost a year of not being able to pick it up, and I'm loving it. If you're in the market for some blissed-out, chilled beats, check it out - di.fm (and my new subwoofer's here at last, but I'll ramble on about that another time).

And, last of all but I have to tell someone this - tomorrow will be the first day of actual, real holiday I've taken off work all year - yey!! I can't believe that I, of all people - the world's biggest skyver - have managed to make it almost 2/3 of the way through the academic year without taking holiday. Only another 24 working days to get rid of between now and July 1st... Ohhh dear... ;o) 

Ooh, p.s.: Happy Damned Easter :o) 

Image (c) Dave Gorman

Not having experienced this on a Mac before, I guess that's one of the warning signs a more experienced (or geeky?) owner might have attributed to what was about to happen next. Unfortunately for me - but brilliantly for you if schadenfreude is the only thing that gets you through the day - I took no notice of this warning sign.

The photo was taken on February 14th. A few days later, my laptop's hard disk karked it in spectacular style.

Ah well, you live and learn... There's another 82 random photos in the set including a couple of excellent bits of graffiti that made I chuckle (which I'll write a separate post about shortly). Bored or suffering insomnia? You can find the rest of the pics here on Flickr :o)

Their website comes across much like I imagine UPSU.net does - a rapidly-evolving work of love by one or two hard-working HTML-geeks, and the results show (I admit I'm guessing about the webteam here, but the site feels a lot like someone's put a lot of work into it, and is perhaps still tweaking things as they go along...).

More importantly, the content is rich and diverse, ranging from features on the Union's clubs and societies (complete with pictures of Beautiful People™, of course ;o) through to the not-too-Geek-orientated weekly online news roundup (Facebook doing instant messaging? Srsly?!). In fact, revisiting the website to get the link to the Facebook article, I notice that they have a whole "online" section - not an entirely crazy idea, I suspect.

The content is also easily accessible (although the online front page appears to have a heavy bias towards comment which might just be down to layout tweaking than a lack of news-based content, it seems) and - yey! - they're using JonDesign's Smoothgallery (which I've gushed about previously) to rotate the top three news stories.

Very nice, and definitely worth subscribing to their RSS feed.

/al

A quick bit of background: NUSSL is, to all intents and purposes, the trading side of the NUS, providing large-scale buying power to students' unions across the country for a wide variety of services. Each year, the NUSSL convention is held in some plush location, and is basically a big networking-and-freebie-grabbing opportunity - the antithesis of the NUS Conference, if you like.

While sitting in NUSSL's AGM this morning (notable for being possibly the shortest AGM in the history of mankind), I decided to start scratching out some thoughts on the strategy I'd like to see the Union's online media employing in the coming years. Much of it is already in operation in some form or other, and much of it is common sense, but we don't - as far as I know! - have a "ten commandments" listing of the key underpinnings which can and do make the Union's online media presence great.

So, here's my first, very rough draft of the things that I think might be vitally important to the Union if it is to make sure that what it is doing online continues to be relevant and effective for its students in the coming few years. If you can be bothered to read on (and, I'll be honest, these ramblings are usually enough to make even the most committed person stifle a yawn or two), then please bear in mind a) that this is a VERY rough draft, that b) there are more people involved in setting the overall direction of the Union that just myself, by a very long shot, and c) that nothing below is presented in any order of priority. At this stage this is just a simple listing of ideas.

As a result, the bullet points below will no doubt be reworded and rejigged, and may completely change, in the coming couple of months. That said, I hope some of the common-sense aspects will stay in some form or other!

Hokay, let's go: in the next couple of years, I would like the Union to focus on...

• Content digitisation: get *everything* online, delete nothing, and make it as easy and logical as possible for people to discover this information,
• Instilling a cultural shift in the Union's staff and student volunteers: it is important to seek to foster a sense of ownership and a desire to invest time, effort and - where appropriate - money into the development of the Union's web presence,
• Ensuring training is a cornerstone of everything we do online: it is important that any new aspect to the website, any new tools, and any new functionality, is both as easy to use as possible, and as well-documented as possible, so that it is as easy as possible for anyone to quickly pick up and use a new system,
• Investing in developing and documenting the current Content Management System (a Frankenstein-like version of Mambo): the only way to get the most out of UPSU.net is to make it as easy as possible for developers and owners alike to develop it*,
• Committing and maintaining its focus on the importance of accessible and usable design**,
• Avoiding the temptation to allow invasive advertising practises: too many good websites are let down by an overwhelming abundance of adverts which only serve to annoy visitors with very little effective gain. Sorry for the mini-rant!
• Investing in staff: I really do think that we can justify employing a member of staff to work full-time on the website. With the right commitment from the Union's myriad staff and student volunteers, the job of maintaining, updating, and developing the website is much more than a full-time job. Employing a full-time member of staff to provide this online support will be the first step to everything the Union can do online in years to come,
• Making its retail operations available online as far as reasonably possible: this is no doubt a difficult and scary proposition to consider, given the horror stories almost anyone involved in retail will have heard about bad investments, security breaches and downturns in sales and customer footflow, but done properly, online sales can and will massively boost the Union's offerings in some areas, for example our ever-popular University-branded hoodies. I know that a number of staff are greatly in favour of getting this project going!
• Committing to ensuring student- and Union-generated news content is consistently and completely made available online in browsable form (i.e. PDFs are not acceptable here!): the wider the spectrum of up-to-date, accurate and engaging information the Union makes available online, the wider the appeal of the Union as a whole and the greater the return-pull of the Union. In other words, keep it interesting online and students will doubtless sit up and take note of the Union's complete operation,
• Finally, the Union should make sure it keeps an eye on developments in (relevant!) open-source and community-led web services: making extensive use of open-source technologies, for example the Mambo CMS which this website is built upon, and the use of community-driven websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, will massively extend the Union's ability to engage its audiences without having to invest in the "reinvention of the wheel", so to speak. Of course, how effective this is relies entirely on the vision and abilities of those driving the projects, so it makes sense to ensure that any investment in people is done with long-term gain in mind.

Of course, this is all just my two-penneth, as I said before, and I suspect it will need a LOT of work to make it into a working set of guidelines which the Union can easily incorporate into its overall strategy at every level.

... My head hurts now!! :o)

* Steve Baker recently referred to the UPSU.net website as an "iceberg" - there is now *so much* going on inside the site that it would take years, if it were even achievable, to recreate the intricacies and hard work that's gone into the website to make it work how it does. No, it's not perfect - there are MANY things on my wishlist which need tweaking or even rewriting, but I believe it's really important that we resist any urges to restart UPSU.net from scratch,

** A website doesn't have to be boring, plain, or look like it was designed 15 years ago on a monochrome monitor, but by the same token, UPSU.net must remain as accessible as reasonably possible to the widest range of users. Where this isn't possible of course, it must be possible for the same content to be made available in an accessible, preferably digital, format. Accessibility is an absolut requirement, but too many potentially good websites are effectively hamstrung by project management which dictates that every aspect of a website must be 100% accessible - an unrealistic aim, and a frustrating one when accessible alternatives are perfectly acceptable,

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 faces around the Union.

Last month, I made a conscious decision not to choose who I wanted to support during the elections process. To have done so would have been to make my life as a trustee of the UPSU charity and editor-in-chief of a lot of the Union's media much harder, and I have no doubt that at some point or other I would have found myself second-guessing any editorial decisions I made to reassure myself that I hadn't unintentionally biased myself for or against a particular candidate. It's a decision I definitely don't regret, although explaining to candidates that I wasn't planning to vote was a difficult process (although, in my defence, I also didn't realise I could vote until yesterday!).

The hardest part of the elections process, for anyone involved with the Union, is the thought that a candidate who you count as a friend might not be elected. Unfortunately, that's a position I found myself in this year, and it's never nice to see a friend's election bid failing to be successful but, that said, there's a small amount of comfort to be gained in knowing that everyone who was elected this year have, so far, shown a great deal of promise and ability, and a willingness to go out of their way for the positions they all campaigned for which will hopefully translate into rampant enthusiasm for their new jobs when they come into office.

So, here's to the new Sabb team. The old Sabb team have a short four-and-a-half months left in office, and the last few weeks are going to be spent working closely with the new team members, so in no time at all, last night's successful candidates will be sitting at their desks in the Sabb office learning the ropes of the new jobs.

Good luck! :o)

/al

The evening is always scary for the candidates, so a big pat on the back to the girls and guys for doing so well tonight. A few are going to need to be trained to talk louder into the microphone, but that's nothing a little adjustment of the mixing desk can't fix. Alternatively, the "sound engineer's limiting stick" can be used to similar effect... 

Tomorrow night we're doing something very similar over at Rees halls for their residents. I'm told space there is limited, so it's more an opportunity for residents to come down, wonder what the hell we're doing and ask the candidates some questions rather than a bring-all-your-supporters-along-and-make-lots-of-noise night. Not that I mind either way - all I have to do is sit behind a sound desk and try not to get into (any more) trouble!

Thursday and Friday night will see the elections candidates at the Union, so that should be a really good night and will see Pure FM "OBing" (broadcasting live) and the Pugwash News bods recording and interviewing. Ooh, that reminds me, we have loads of interviews from tonight we need to sort out, as well as the candidates' segments.

If only I had half a clue about video editing... Oh dear...!

In other news (ahem), the latest issue - issue 11 - of the newspaper arrived today. It's looking good, although the editorial/pre-press process still needs a little tweaking.

Newspaper "oopses" 

This also appears to be as good a place as any for me to publish some "oopses" from the newspaper... 

I'm guilty as charged of cocking up Jacob's article with the inaccurate 'Frewen Library wins "Best New Building"' headline - apparently the Frewen part is the old building - the new building is simply The University Library. Sorry Jacob!

We also have some images on the PWs front page of the paper credited to "some guy with a camera", and an article has been attributed to the vaguely-titled "Union Council Chair". My apologies to the two hard-working bods involved. The cause of the mistakes will be looked into, and a suitable scapegoat found and made an example of. Possibly...

* potentially, of course ;o)

I had a play about with it today and created this feed in a couple of minutes for our news bods to keep on screen in the office, which updates every 30 seconds with the latest UPSU, University, Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK and World headlines.

Cunning stuff... 

In the absense of any time to write more than a couple of sentences, and still not having got my dead hard drive resurrected, here's some pics taking roughly in the last week for you to look at. Or not... ;o)

Ties and scarves at the Copy Shop

Ooh, new clothing!

Ben and Laura in eco-friendly transport endorsement

Ben and Laura went out delivering newspapers. Thankyou both of you :o)

The Portsmouth Uni wall of debt

Students + student loans + interest = big debt. Last week saw a debate and campaigns on the issue.

Fruit & veg market comes to the Union

The Thinkfresh market arrives at the Union, and should be back next Wednesday, too. Awesome :o)

Fairtrade freebies

A very nice chap set up a stall at the Union giving away samples of Fairtrade fruit 'n nut bars and muffins. Yum :o)

Ooh, new toys!

... and it was broken before it even made it out of the box. Back to Germany then... :o(

Pretty...

... sunset. Apparently, there's a whole world out there. I'm doubtful...