“The Cardiff Hackney Carriage Association, which says it represents about 700 of the city’s 950 drivers, said its members would strike as part of a dispute with the council over fares.”

This is what the South Wales Echo (WalesOnline) reported this week. The report goes on to explain exactly when taxi drivers in Cardiff are proposing to strike;

“Mathab Khan, the association’s chairman, said the industrial action – between midnight and 4am next Saturday and Sunday – would cause “total havoc” in the capital.”

So here we have the chairman of an association threatening to cause “total havoc” – excellent. What a man.
Striking from midnight to 4am on a Saturday night, and not just any Saturday night – a night when the city is hosting a sold-out international football match and a Kylie Minogue concert.

Speaking from experience, taxis can be hard enough to get on a weekend night around kicking-out time as it is – or at least, it was before structured taxi ranks were introduced, now there is a long wait at best.
But under the previous system, where you near-enough had to stand in the middle lane of Castle Street to attract the attention of a car arriving back into the city from the suburbs, there were times when I had to admit defeat and to walk home.

I lived in Tremorfa then, and to get there you have to walk through areas with some of the highest crime rates in Cardiff. Roaming gangs, speeding cars, drug dealers and prostitutes were all things that I encountered and had to deal with on these walks home.

Luckily I never got into any trouble, through being street smart – avoiding streets that I knew were bad news or poorly lit, but mostly this was down to plain luck; I’m sure of it.

Making hundreds of people have to seek alternative routes home at that time of night, most of whom will elect to walk, is just plain irresponsible. With horror stories of sexual assaults in Cathays and others, can Mathab Khan and his members really go ahead with a strike with a clear conscience? Do they serve the people or Cardiff, or do we serve them?

The Cardiff Hackney Carriage Association is trying to make a point, but using vulnerable people as pawns. Could they justify their strike if a person got stabbed, raped or assaulted – because they had to walk home when they would usually get a taxi?

I suppose the advice has to be – if you cannot get a taxi home that night, arrange to walk home in a group, or at least in a pair. Be safe everyone.

Taxi drivers split over strike action [WalesOnline]

After our “blizzard” of Friday morning which left about 4-inches of snow in and around central Cardiff, and then with the sky pouring white stuff most of the day on Friday, Cardiff Council seems to have retreated and called it quits. I haven’t seen a council vehicle in days, the roads are a mess, nothing has been cleared since the snow dropped and this is causing chaos – with cars getting stuck, unable to move at junctions and all normal services (buses, mail, rubbish collections) seemingly cancelled or on a limited service (with regard to buses).

Of course, all of this stems from the single point of failure, and that is that if you don’t clear roads and pavements, nothing else can function – and this leaves the burden firmly on Cardiff Council’s door. The repercussions of them not doing their job, and making roads passable, means that all other efforts are doomed to fail, it’s simple really.

I was at Penarth Road this morning, just after the snow started falling, watching buses with “Sorry, not in service” on their signs and returning to the depot. The picture this afternoon is pretty grim for anybody that has to travel around Cardiff – their Facebook page is being continually updated with service cancellations, because the state of the roads is making many routes undriveable.

Here is a picture I shot at the intersection of Penarth Road & Clare Road in Grangetown today – this is one of Cardiff’s main roads, and it hasn’t had any attention at all since the snow first fell – a clear example that Cardiff Council do not have the equipment to handle large scale snowfall.

Many council’s across the UK are hiring snow ploughs, a rental service that is available in South Wales, but Cardiff has clearly opted not to do this – and I’m sure many people would like to know why.

Update: Cardiff Council have tweeted that they currently have 4 gritters working the city, 3 of which have ploughs. The questions that must be asked now then are,

a) Why have they not been deployed before? It snowed 3 days ago.
b) Why are there so few for such a large city?
c) What do they class as a “strategic route” and “principal road”? I would have thought Penarth Road & Tudor Street would have been, considering the trunk traffic that the former takes and the bus routes that rely on the latter.

Update: Cardiff Council have pointed me to this map on their website (beware, it’s not very user-friendly) which shows all of the routes that are to be salted (doesn’t say anything about ploughing, salting won’t do very much over the sludge) during winter times. If there are currently only 4 gritters out at the moment, they won’t even touch a portion of these routes – they have 12 available, according to this page on their website, where they boast about having “26 gritter drivers and loader drivers trained to City and Guilds Winter Service Operations 6159 standard are scheduled to be on a rota.”. So where have they been until now, or do they have weekends off?

Update: The page that Cardiff Council pointed me towards has some information on footways, and the salting plan for pedestrian walkways; and as far as I can tell none of the plan was executed. I walked through the City Centre yesterday and nothing had been salted or cleared, and the snow was forecast. See the details here.

The Point Cardiff Bay Limited, trading as The Point have today filed for voluntary insolvency.

The popular live music venue and club night host has been open since 2004 and has been largely successful, despite being located away from the city centre.

Since opening The Point has played host to many popular artists and bands including the Stereophonics, Cerys Matthews and Feeder. The venue also played host to the popular fortnightly rock night Bogiez, which moved there from The Engine Rooms.

The venue closed in late 2008 to undergo soundproofing after complaints from neighbouring residential buildings.
The bill for this work, in addition to factors owing to the current economic climate have made it necessary for the directors to file for insolvency.

This is not the first time that this venue has been hit with problems. It was previously known as MS1 until 2003 when insolvency brought about a buyout by a partnership that was to become the Point Cardiff Bay Limited. 

Future gigs and events have been cancelled and ticket holders have been advised to contact their credit card companies for refunds, this unfortunately will not cover customers who have paid for tickets using debit card or cash who will unfortunately lose the money that they have spent on tickets.

There is currently no news on whether scheduled gigs and club nights will be moved to other venues.

This is Filesharer.org, launched in protest of the Pirate Bay trial by the Norwegian political party Rødt(Red), it allows visitors to upload a photo of themselves to be displayed on the website, outing themselves as filesharers and thus criminals, making the point that these so-called criminals are normal everyday people.

Starting a war against the Pirate Bay is probably the most stupid course of action to have been taken yet by the recording and motion picture industry. The website has already once been attempted to be taken down but Swedish law has prevented this, why try again when the law hasn’t changed?

Closing down this one particular website, albeit one of the most popular, will not show any significant decrease in the number of files being downloaded using the BitTorrent protocol. With other large directories, such as Mininova or BtMon still to be disposed of (this Pirate Bay trial has taken 2 years to come to court) it will be a long time before BitTorrent sites are gone. And if they do all miraculously disappear, they will just go underground.

Digital files can be copied and transferred an infinite number of times, so as long as they exist, someone will engineer a way to continue this chain of copying and transferring.

If there were an infinite stockpile of food somewhere which we all knew existed but were being told ‘There is no way to get to it’, somebody would spend night and day trying to find a way. When you consider the sheer number of people that have share this interest, it is inevitable that they would succeed. The same theory would apply to file sharing.

As I am writing this, actor, presenter, geek, conservationist and comedian extraordinaire Stephen Fry is stuck in a lift in London’s Centre Point. How do I know this? Well, he sent me a picture of course.

That he sent this very same picture to 107,923 other people is neither here nor there.

This image was distributed by Stephen Fry using his iPhone and Twitter.

I have been following Stephen Fry using Twitter for around 4 months now, since he started in October.

By January he had 50,000 followers. Since he mentioned Twitter on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross on January 23rd of this year the number of subscribers to his tweets has more than doubled, now standing at the figure quoted above and rising by literally thousands every day. It seems that Mr Fry has kicked off a tweeting craze here in the UK. People who did not know the difference between a retweet and a twat last week now have accounts and are posting their every move.

Stephen Fry being stuck in a lift for 30 minutes has, at the last count,  spawned over 2,100 tweets tagged @stephenfry, #frylift or similar. Twitter brings celebrity closer than ever before and Fry is working it very well. He almost seems like a real friend of mine. He posts where he is going, what he is doing, how he is feeling, what he is eating, all in under 140 characters.

The other morning I opened up Twibble (the Twitter application I use for my Nokia N95) and immediately knew that Stephen was out for a walk because he felt that he had eaten too much cheese the previous night, further proof to the fact that Twitter is bringing us closer to our idols than we have ever been.

Other Twitterers include Jonathan Ross, John Cleese and newbie Russell Brand.

How long will it last though? I have been tweeting for over a year now and have a few followers, perhaps now will be my time too? One can only hope.

Don’t forget to follow me!

Update: Stephen and his new lift friends were released at 23:33. 35 minutes after becoming stranded and causing an internet storm.

Now that the UK is officially in a recession, what is interesting to see is how news organisations want us to visualise economic slowdown.

When the Great Depression is mentioned, a lot of us would picture people walking around, in sepia, with mouth and brows arced downwards, like a sad clown. But where did this image come from? Television, most likely.

Though this isn’t a new piece of imagery, call me crazy, but this is how I’ve always pictured it. An episode of the Simpsons is one example that I can remember where this has been brought to screen, in the scene an ancestor of Moe Syzlack comments “Oh, jeez, there’s always a line”, when attempting to commit suicide from the top of a skyscraper in 1929 and is greeted by a long line of other jumpers, obviously a very popular pastime when Wall Street crashed.

Today the image used by most major news outlets is the ‘its raining and here are some shops that have closed down, how depressing.’ scene. In this image there is usually 1, but no more than 3 people in the shot. None look interested in shopping in the least. Mostly they are shot speeding past the camera, blur lines and all, representative of an entire populous that just doesn’t have the money to buy.

The BBC think that recession is best represented by a Hasidic Jew and a poorly dressed fat woman who hasn’t had the spare money to go to a hair salon in the last 4 quarters, quite obviously representing the length of time that UK growth has been negative and subsequently how long it has taken to get the official ‘recession’ stamp.

For quite how long growth will continue to fall, I don’t think anybody knows, but what is for sure is that while we’re in this state there will be a lot more images and depictions of life as it changes significantly. The boom and bust policies of governments and corporations have once again showed us its downside and we’re left kicking ourselves for being so naïve as to think that our prosperity would never end.

Where once credit was only an online application away, giving our society the illusion that we were flush with cash to spend on luxury cars, binge-drinking and all-inclusive Carribean holidays, many are having to learn new skills in penny-pinching, seeking out deals and shopping with thought. Perhaps then not all is bad? Responsibility being given back to individuals and families for their actions and spending is a way of giving back some free and constructive thought, previously clouded by credit lines that were tantamount to being unlimited?

To cement my position in the league of Welsh bloggers, I would like to offer a quick round-up of the news coming out of Wales in the first half of this week, flanked of course by a bit of my own banter.

Traffic ban to stay in force despite appeals
Cardiff’s St Mary Street will remain closed to private cars for at least another year – despite calls for the link to Cardiff Bay to be reopened.

With work about to start to demolish the old terminal building at Cardiff Bus station it would be foolish to re-open any part of St Mary Street to private traffic. The bus network has had to be re-jigged to move buses away from Wood Street, where demolition work is to start imminently, congestion around Westgate Street and Castle Street is eased by the fact that buses have free-run of St Mary Street. If cars are allowed back on it, buses will be held up, causing more congestion on the aforementioned streets; Castle, Westgate and Wood, making it counterproductive in the long term.

Logo aims to ditch ‘sterotype’
Promoters say a new logo to market Cardiff marks a departure from the stereotype of daffodils and dragons.

Stereotypical daffodils and dragons? Are “Cardiff & Co” (who came up with this name?) worried that when people think of visiting Cardiff, they will picture it as one huge field with daffodils and roaming dragons? Instead, we get this new logo which is indistinguishable from that of a company or even web 2.0 site. Perhaps they should rename the city too, in line with current trends, CardiffR beta, perhaps? In fact, it’s also a complete rip-off of the Greek tourist board logo.

Call to limit anti-terror control orders
Terror suspects should only be placed on control orders for up to two years unless there are exceptional circumstances – and some should be given Asbos instead – the Welsh peer in charge of monitoring the Government’s terror legislation said last night.

Well, in a way he is right, terrorist plotting is anti-social, but surely Lord Carlile is not so imbecilic as to suggest that we hand out ASBO’s to vandals, drunks, abusive teens and suicide bombers?

Dilapidated shed on market at £150,000
It’s partially covered in plastic sheeting and even the estate agent trying to sell it admits it’s “dilapidated”.

And who said that Wales’ housing market was on the verge of crashing? Ideal student accomodation perhaps?

Cardiff club is bought for £700,000
A watering hole opposite the Millennium Stadium has netted four South Wales councils £700,000.

Exactly what Cardiff city centre needs, another faceless chain pub for the drunken masses to congregate.

Criminals rewarded with free rail tickets
Commuters have voiced their outrage after young offenders were given free rail travel by a train company.

Money saving tip: Spend your weekends causing criminal damage to get free rail travel to work in the week.

Assembly staff tell of workplace bullying
National Assembly staff have made an average of one complaint a month of bullying or harassment to their bosses in the last three years.

Just more fuel to fire the argument that the NAfW really is just ‘jobs for the boys’.
How can the Assembly Government be involved in promoting equality and bullying schemes to private companies when they have not even got their own staff under control?
Their next step should be to launch an initiative within the organisation and publicise this, to prove that they are taking steps to clear out the chauvanists, racists, bullies et al. Every large company that I know of has a policy and/or scheme to counter or take action in situations involving sexism and bullying, does the Assembly Government have these facilities to their staff? If so, they could deflect criticism by making light of this, they need to lead by example.

Mum may sue cinema after her daughter falls 14ft
A mum has said she is considering legal action against a cinema operator after her daughter fell 14ft from a balcony.

I’d love to get the inside info on this case, where she fell from etc.
The Vue Cinema complex is ultra-modern, only completed in 2002, and the barriers over the fantastic drops are chest height for me. So for a 14-year old girl, let’s assume she is average height, to be able to ‘fall’ over one of these, she would have to have been very stupidly climbing over it.
If the case does come to court, it would be interesting to see if what the cinema company says is true, that the injured girl refused treatment. Of course, they would have the upper hand in any case, assuming they’re innocent, as the building is covered with CCTV cameras.