Claudia Inge Blog

I have no idea since when this site is around, but BBC has an own Guide to Comedy online. A great archive with lots of info on every single show from 1936 to today. You can read about ‘Roseanne’, ‘Cheers’, ‘The Cosby Show’ or ‘The Wonder Years’. Or any other show that made you be home early and sit in front of the tv laughing your ass off or biting nails.

If you like comedy shows - and why shouldn’t you? - you really have to take a look at that guide. The only thing they have to do is setting it up-to-date. For example Sara Gilbert’s new show, ‘Twins’ is not available in the guide yet (To be correct, there has been another show with Sara, that lasted only one season and I never have seen, which is not listed under her name, too). And maybe there are other show missing, too, I haven’t noticed yet.

Technorati Tags: comedy, bbc, Roseanne, Sara Gilbert, tv show

In February, the movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” starring Ben Stein, will be released. The film apparently argues that intelligent design is being wrongly excluded from public school classrooms, despite the fact that intelligent design is rebranded creationism and is a religious view without scientific support. There is no scientific theory of intelligent design to be taught in schools–it doesn’t exist.

The advertising for the film says that P.Z. Myers appears in the film–but he was not interviewed for a film called “Expelled,” but for an apparently fictional project called “Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion.” Mark Mathis, a producer for Rampant Films, contacted Myers, and he agreed to appear in that film. Now, as it turns out, Mathis is an associate producer on “Expelled.”

Myers writes:
Why were they so dishonest about it? If Mathis had said outright that he wants to interview an atheist and outspoken critic of Intelligent Design for a film he was making about how ID is unfairly excluded from academe, I would have said, “bring it on!” We would have had a good, pugnacious argument on tape that directly addresses the claims of his movie, and it would have been a better (at least, more honest and more relevant) sequence. He would have also been more likely to get that good ol’ wild-haired, bulgy-eyed furious John Brown of the Godless vision than the usual mild-mannered professor that he did tape. And I probably would have been more aggressive with a plainly stated disagreement between us.

I mean, seriously, not telling one of the sides in a debate about what the subject might be and then leading him around randomly to various topics, with the intent of later editing it down to the parts that just make the points you want, is the video version of quote-mining and is fundamentally dishonest.Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education reports a similar experience–she also was interviewed for “Crossroads.”

The producers of this film are sleazeballs. This kind of technique is already at or beyond the ethical edge for a comedy film like Borat, but to do this for a film that purports to take on a serious issue–and pretends to be on the side of God–is well past any such boundary. If, as has been suggested, this film is going to argue that belief in God is necessary for moral behavior (a falsehood), the behavior of the producers proves that it is not sufficient.

The lesson for the future: Do not sign an agreement to be interviewed for a film if the agreement contains language that says they can use “…footage and materials in and in connection with the development, production, distribution and/or exploitation of the feature length documentary tentatively entitled Crossroads…and/or any other production…” That “and/or any other production” is a big loophole that will be exploited.

I’m going to stray a bit from the library theme, and talk about design of RESTful SOA. It’s a topic close to my heart, as most SOA talk these days are full of vendors claiming money can buy you not only love, but immortality. With SOAP? Hah!

No, I think reinventing what the Web does really well already is a) a waste of time, b) doomed to make a bad copy (as the web is constantly moving, while the SOAP / WS-* stack is immersed in slow-moving standards), and c) over complicating things (I like elegant simplicity such as the innards of the Web).

REST

Roy Fieldings’ REST dissertation has swooped upon the middle and higher layers of the IT world lately, making a lot of them admit that, perhaps, this whole deal about using HTTP and loose XML (often XHTML) to create scalable, fast, simple and dynamic applications (well, as an architectural style, to be specific) might have something going for it. REST has been around for a long while, being the very fabric of what the internet is based on, slowly extended and refined over the last years 15 years (even though a lot of these concepts are again based on earlier technology).

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a little bit tricker to define, especially these days when big corporations have discovered and use it as a buzzword, but basically it is technical architecture creating loosely coupled (meaning; the items in question knows very little of each other) services, and where a service is a piece of software that some other piece of software might use (as opposed to direct human usage). Now, a lot of people already talk about this stuff, so I’m not going to add to that. I’d rather talk about what I think when I do this stuff, to talk about actual implementation.

Working in both these two worlds, putting them together to design and create applications, is quite different from the normal software development processes that’s so popular these days. The most striking difference is that during application design you think in terms of resource orientation (as opposed to object orientation, or functional design) and how to represent services (as opposed to a program, or a module).

You can either plan a big-bang approach to this (standard waterfall models) per service, or you timebox a more agile approach of creating one or several services that does the simplest thing needed to service your proposed application. The world spins around the axis of identifying application to solve problems; let’s turn things around (and this is a big part of SOA) and see if we can come up with services that solves problems instead.

Typically you have a sleigh of applications that all have common functionality, such as user management, database storage, configuration, session handling, search and a few other bits and pieces depending on the business you’re in. There’s many ways to deal with reuse of these “things”, and I deliberately call them “things” at this stage, because as soon as you call them “modules”, or “libraries”, or “reusable code” you’re setting the scene for quite implementation specific stuff, such as what language you’re going to use, or what platform it runs on. I don’t want to deal with “libraries” for example, because if some library is written in Java then I need to make my other solutions in Java, too. If I have a “module” that does X in Windows using C#, the chance that “module” is linked to that technology is quite high.

Things

No, I want to talk about “things”. For example, let’s talk about users. A lot of applications deal with users in some way or another, whether it’s displaying information about them, for them, authenticating them, create properties on them, or otherwise work with their user data. How can we create a service that applications might have good use for?

Since we meddle here in all things REST, the first thing we do is to think of the service in terms of resources (as being resource oriented is extremely important; expose URIs for every resource, as small / atomic as need be). I usually create two sub domains to hold services, one for internal behind the firewall services (soa.domain) and one external (ws.domain; ‘ws’ for web services), and I also try to have a trim set of basic elements that express generic functionality (search, user, session, database, properties, etc) wrapped in an even smaller and more generic set of domains (x, y, z, a, o, a, etc.). Through this, the first part of my design process is to play around with URIs and hierachial taxonomical ideas to see what feels right ;

http://soa.example.com/identity/user[/{userid}]
http://soa.example.com/user[/{userid}]
http://soa.example.com/user/id/[/{userid}]
http://users.soa.example.com/{userid}

Balance this with ideas on premature optimization (what, you thought that was axiomatically bad? It’s allowed to think about these things, you know in terms of request times for a domain (the more domains involved in a series of calls, the longer the overall response time, generally speaking) and what feels right.

In my case, the first one seemed the most right. I’ve developed a small set of root categories in which I “place” my services, such as /search, /publishing, /identity, and so on. These categories are not canon; they are placeholders for loose ideas and thoughts, bound to change in the future as your SOA evolves.

Evolution

Evolution in your SOA is very important, so you should design for it in mind. For example, what about version control of services? Some talk about versioning being part of the XML schemas that services deliver, others talk about content negotiation (crazies :). I take a rather pragmatic and somewhat naughty approach (in the sense that you shouldn’t put semantics in your URL’s which humans will look at and try to pry apart and use / misuse) and put versioning into the URL at the base of the service defined. For example ;

http://soa.example.com/identity/user/v1[/{userid}]

I also set a rule to service development ; maintain backwards compatibility as far as you can. There’s no need for an ever update to the version number if you design your XML schemas that pass through them in smart ways, and this reduce the overhead of deployment, introspection and dependency. Another rule to service digestion is to only react to what you understand, and ignore all that you don’t; this again enables backwards compatibility as you, say, add a new (but non-critical) element to your metadata which older service users don’t understand and simply ignore.

For proper development of a RESTful SOA, though, I’d suggest two things as a minimum ;
use test-driven development for the service definitions (and use whatever methodology you like for the actual code for the service, although test-driven there too won’t hurt you), so write your tests for your service (I use XPath with XSLT scripts for this) first and then develop the actual service until it passes all tests, andcollect your services’ tests into a large test suite ; whenever you add, subtract or change a service, make sure all tests pass. (If you can sneak this into a build farm of sorts, all the better. Automation for this type of development will probably save a lot of gray hairs) Through this you know what breaks and what’s backwards compatible with your changes across the whole SOA. Don’t deploy anything from development into test or production unless all tests pass. This is not a trivial task, and should be in the hands of someone who is full-time responsible for the SOA’s well-being.Now, in evolution of SOA’s as well as in nature, don’t be afraid of screwing things up. We don’t want perfection. We will never get perfection. And we certainly won’t get anything near it in the first go. All these services must be allowed to change over time, dramatically at first, even to the point of deleting it completely, and start from scratch making something different. (In fact, I’d advocate making all these first-generation services with version number /v0-ALPHA/ in all caps, as in http://soa.example.com/identity/user/v0-ALPHA[/{userid}] ; this will mark them as experimental and trigger other developers to tread gently. If they worked great, just update them to a /v1/ version)

Time management of this development is also important. Because services must be allowed to break, be allowed to screw up, we must also allocate time for these screw-ups to happen. Trust me, it’s a good thing ; a smaller failure now ensure we don’t screw up big time later. (And this very point is probably the cause of so much bad management and so many failed [enterprise] projects as it’s very easy to overlook or not taken seriously enough. I can write a whole book on this topic alone!)

And people who have some sort of ownership of a service (as developers, or analysts, or whatever) must be given time for short iterative development, for little updates, modifications and tweaks. Services won’t be successful if you treat them as small bangs (meaning; gather requirements, write spec, make it, sign it off), and probably only can work through continuous tinkering. Such tinkering doesn’t have to be time-consuming nor difficult to manage, but it does require you to plan for it. When Bob goes on to his next project, remember that he’s also needs a half-day per week to tweak and fiddle with his service.

Introspection

One feature that I can’t emphasize enough is service introspection, an area that most writers I’ve seen gloss over. And sure, you don’t need it in order to create a SOA or a web service. But I’ll assert that you need one if you’re a) smart and b) want to create a healthy SOA that can stand the test of time.

Introspection in my world does three important things ;
Handle the client state through hyperlinks (part of the REST paradigm)Documentation of interface, use and dependenciesProvide test suiteAsking a service for introspection in my world goes something like this ;

http://soa.example.com/identity/user/v1?introspection

or, if you want to split the three up ;

http://soa.example.com/identity/user/v1?introspection=state
http://soa.example.com/identity/user/v1?introspection=docs
http://soa.example.com/identity/user/v1?introspection=tests

1. Handling state of a client through hyperlinks is a somewhat forgotten part of REST, which is easy to miss when your design is at an early stage (and it usually stays that way because you don’t think you need it by the stage you’re made aware of it). It basically comes down to either URL-driven or FORM-driven hyperlinks that takes you from whatever state the current URL gave you to the next one. For example, a resource soa.domain/search?q=fish might give back a list of URL’s to pages of results, or a form to do a sub-search, all documented through hyperlinks. I personally think the use of XHTML is good for this, but a bit more formal and equally elegant is the use of the Atom Publishing Protocol (not to be confused with the Atom Syndication Format).

2. Documentation is important, and could be as easy as just returning an XHTML page with some text about what it is, how to use it, and so forth. However, I see a major part of documentation as to what dependencies the service has got, so I’ve got a section that looks a bit like this ;

<ul id=”SOA-dependencies”>
<li><a href=”http://soa.domain/some_service/v2″>Some service</a></li>
<li><a href=”http://ws.google.com/wdsl/service/1.0″>Some Google service</a></li>
</ul>

Notice that this is perfect XHTML. All that’s required to understand this list is understanding the identifier for the list, the “SOA-dependencies”, which I can locate easily through DOM or XPath. Through this mechanism in services you can now map the whole dang thing, plot in your dependencies, check it against your test suite (talked about earlier) for ultimate coolness and power.

In this section I might add that I often incorporate a ping parameter which testing and monitoring systems can use to check the health of a running SOA, something like ;

http://soa.example.com/identity/user/v1?ping

or, if you’ve got the RESTful chutzpah required, use the HTTP method OPTIONS instead of a GET on a URL. I actually do both. The HTTP response code hence talks about the generic health of the service as far as it knows, and you can use this info not only for monitoring and testing, but also for automatic systems and smart clients.

3. It may seem a bit strange to ask a service to give you a test-suite, but it actually is a very encapsulating and clever thing to do, making sure that tests are all handled at the same place where development takes place. I can do ;

http://soa.example.com/identity/user/v1?introspection=tests

and I’ll get back something like this ;

<testlist>
<test name=”My first test”
href=”http://soa.example.com/identity/user/v1/2456325786234985″
xpath=”/response/item[@name=’user’]/id”
is-true=”2456325786234985″ />
… [more tests here]
</test>

Basic test-case skills are probably a plus at this point to understand what this is about, but basically we assert that the XML/XHTML that the URL returns will give the result “2456325786234985″ when the XPath expression “/response/item[@name=’user’]/id” is run.

Your testing framework for the SOA simply collects these test files at intervals to build a larger test-suite that stands as the controller for the whole system.

Finally

Just a few finishing thoughts about rigidity, complexity and management of a RESTful SOA ;

If you don’t have dedicated SOA people, then don’t do it. If your people (developers, analysts, managers) aren’t very flexible, then don’t do it. If you don’t understand REST, either really learn it (this book is the best there is on this subject!), or don’t do it. If you think you need complex systems, don’t do it. If you can’t wrap your head around resource-orientation, then don’t do it.

The thing is, you can perfectly well live without it, create SOA or some other well-meaning version of that concept with SOAP/WS-*/BPEL/ESB or whatever big vendors are more than happy to help you with. You can create POX services just fine. You won’t be RESTful, but you will probably survive without it. You don’t need it in as much as you can live on only water and bread for years and years, but of course I wouldn’t recommend it.

Anyways, a few thoughts there on RESTful SOA design and implementation. I haven’t digged into the semantics of modeling a full SOA yet, nor talked much about pipeline XML schemas (although the APP protocol is a good hint), system introspection through things like WADL, or even the hidden benefits of ROA (resource-oriented architectures). So. More to come, then. Until then, happy hacking.

This is probably going to be a little long because I have some time to kill. Technically, I should be working on my final revisions for my writing class but I have three hours at work to do that.  Later tonight I need to prepare for the long trip home. It's about a 9 hour drive from Hiram to Petoskey, it's not a bad drive (except near Detroit…ARGH TRAFFIC!)I am not very excited to go home for a number of reasons but one reason I am excited to go home is movies! I get to watch movies! I love movies so much, I can't even tell you. Since I came to school, the Internet has been a very big hindrance to my movie-watching habits. This past summer I got so insanely upset because Netflix was throttling me but it was then that I discovered that my local library has a great selection of foreign and art films, even Criterion Collection stuff! I intend to check all of them out. My favorite thing though, is going to be watching TCM 24 hours a day 7 days a week. We get it here but I don't watch it much because my roommate doesn't particularly enjoy old movies (she likes Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift if that tells you anything) but I just love it! A couple days ago Sunset Boulevard was on and I can't believe I had never seen it before! Billy Wilder is just fantastic. I love A Foreign Affair and it makes me cry that I can't find it on DVD. TCM is not like it's an “old persons” channel (though who knows, maybe Jeremy Irons and I could watch it together?) because they put out really cool things like these promos every month:

Christmas Promo for Turner Classic Movies
2 comments

TCM Muse Music Video

TCM Leading Ladies commercial

TCM This Month November promo

I mean seriously, how cool are those?! I could watch the Muse one over and over again.

So anyway, I'm pumped about all the movie watching I will be doing. There's not much else to do in the far reaches of the Superior State, they even closed the Blockbuster! I'm bringing most of my own movies home with me, especially my Chaplin collection. I must have Charlie with me at all times. I want to see more foreign films, I really love those. I watched The Spanish Apartment last weekend. I really loved the language use in that. Wasn't a movie that will stick with me in the long run, but it was a love story for Europe and the vast culture differences there.

Anyway, I have to go tie up some loose ends before my long drive home tomorrow. I suppose this wasn't THAT long of an entry. Gosh, I never thought I writing class could make me MORE convinced of my inability to construct a sentence.

Oh yeah, my first semester of Real College is over! What a waste.

Four wins in a row and the Pirates have moved to that definition of mediocrity, the .500 record.
Every win now is big money for the team and the players. But they will have to kick it up a notch if they want to win much the rest of this homestand.
That series with the Astros was an epic battle of weakness against super weakness. I’m with Phil Garner. The Astros lost these games more than the Pirates won them. The Astros were much weaker than the Pirates. The Pirates had just enough self-command to walk away big winners.
That said, wins are wins and you take them as you find them.
The next two series are all-important.
Ian Snell goes for us tomorrow, with Tom Gorzelanny to follow. They have their aces ready to go, so the Pirates should approach these two games as they would a playoff series. If they get blown out by the Reds and then get blown out by the Cubs, then they are back to needing something like a four-game winning streak just to regain the opportunity. And the way the last fourteen years have gone, it is hard to say that four-game winning streaks are common things.
So it could be the team’s last chance. They need to establish themselves as a group of men who tour the country with a winning record. The sooner the better. And that must be the goal: get above .500 and stay there–for a long time.
If they need a little extra motivation, they should study the standings. It is always a good day to win a baseball game, but it is an especially good time to be mediocre, or slightly above average, in the NL Central. The Pirates are locked up with the Reds. Only one team can advance from this point.

“Business ethics is a form of the art of applied ethics that examines ethical rules and principles within a commercial context, the various moral or ethical problems that can arise in a business setting, and any special duties or obligations that apply to persons who are engaged in commerce.”*1
When Jelly ask me two days ago where this article was I told her “It’s in my bathroom. I am using it page by page because I’ve run out of toilet paper. It’s much softer than newspaper… and quilted for absorbency.” That’s probably a very apt appraisal of the business ethics in/of Second Life, or rather the lack of them. This article will extend past mere business in Second Life to the business of Second Life itself.
We all have seen the lack of ethics in Second Life companies, from ignoring broken merchandise to doctoring photos to make products look better on ads, and even corporate sabotage, employee raiding (usually found in the music stations with DJs *cough- markus Damone -cough* and design firms), and plain old back-stabbery. The business market in Second Life is a dirty back alley full of panhandling hobos painting themselves shiny and doing the robot. Sure, some of them got where they are honestly and are responsible, ethical businesses devoted to the people they serve and to giving back to the communities. The fact that there are business like that make Second Life worth living. Even still it is a very ‘Caveat Emptor’ (or ‘let the buyer beware’) market full of shady dealings and thievery that Linden Labs does nothing about, thus condoning and allowing them to flourish completely unhindered. Remember the copybot scandals? How about blatant texture thieving in the hair market or the full perm ‘business in a box’ creators who resell stolen designs? How can Linden Labs expect designers to put time and effort into their creations to release them on a grid that offers them no protection and enforces no consequences? Linden Labs makes it feel like they are a benevolent god sitting behind the pearly gates refusing to dig in and get their hands dirty working with what they created, weeding the garden and raking the leaves. Sure, they give us ‘updates’ but if you’ve ever been around for an update you’ll see that they usually break more than they fix and add in frivolous things instead of making what they’ve already added actually work or work better. Linden Labs exhibits no trace of CSR. “Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a concept that organizations, especially (but not only) corporations, have an obligation to consider the interests of customers, employees, shareholders, communities, and ecological considerations in all aspects of their operations. This obligation is seen to extend beyond their statutory obligation to comply with legislation. CSR is closely linked with the principles of Sustainable Development, which argues that enterprises should make decisions based not only on financial factors such as profits or dividends, but also based on the immediate and long-term social and environmental consequences of their […]

Aki Takase - p
Rudi Mahall - bcl
Nils Wogram - tb
Eugene Chadbourne - banjo, g, voc
Paul Lovens - d

The Vooruit sums up my idealised image of Gent: a great union of period facade and trappings with a modern sense of interior design. Sometimes the contrast jarring, as in the stark red-and-whiteness of the ticketing office, but it works. Similarily, and maybe coincidentally, everyone’s sartorial choices somehow related to their musical contributions. Eugene Chadbourne’s Bugs Bunny t-shirt, the contemporary hipness of Nils Wogram’s red Lion of Judah t-shirt, the retro class of Paul Lovens’s usual white shirt and skinny black tie. Rudi Mahall’s amazing look stole the show, though: his thick sideburns, cheap blue suit and yellow shirt made him look like he’d just walked off the set of an early-80s German cop show. Only the grainy film stock was missing.

It’s tempting to compare the way Aki Takase pronounces Fats Waller’s name to the way she plays his music: both are beautifully mangled into new, just about recognisable shapes. While lots of anachronistic, free jazz-derived elements are added to Waller’s compositions, just as many basic stylistic elements survive: humour and absurdity, of course, a frantic scrappiness, jaunty melodies, the festive mood (when Chadbourne sang “The Joint Is Jumpin’,” it was no lie), swinging march/parade rhythms, ensemble motifs characteristic of the period, compact solos, New Orleans style front-line counterpoint, hints of Classical and Impressionist borrowings, lots of stride piano and even the Spanish tinge on the brief encore. I’m not too sure about Waller, but Jelly Roll Morton, for example, often through-composed and arranged his pieces. Takase took the same approach, setting duets, collective improvisation and Eugene Chadbourne’s singing in rigourous and varied frameworks. The first paragraph of my account of the Oliva/Raulin Quintet’s take on the era could almost be copy-pasted here.

Ethan Iverson’s review of a Waller boxset made me want to explore him more, so I got a ridiculously cheap compilation (10 CDs for 18 euros) that manages the vexing exploit of having only “Ain’t Misbehavin’” in common with Takase’s Plays Fats Waller. Though the band members were basically the same and the repertoire and arrangements strayed little from the album’s, there were a few subtle changes. The recorded version of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” is a duet between Takase and Chadbourne twith a tipsy, after-hours hotel bar intimacy. On stage, the full quintet participated, making it more of a boozy party and Chadbourne seized the opportunity to change the lyrics from “me and my radio” to “me and my banjo” as he hugged his instrument close.

As does the CD, the concert opened with “Looking Good But Feeling Bad” and “Vipers Drag.” Aside from Chadbourne’s heartfelt comic vocal pastiches, the former featured solos that applied a swing phrasing to wild lines, while the latter went further out, pushing the original material just out of sight, then bringing it back.

Everyone turned in fine performances: Wogram was his typically amazing self, Lovens and Chadbourne egged each other on and Mahall wailed, but the leader was never overshadowed. Takase deftly negotiated hairpin turns between delicate fury and sophisticated abandon, as she tightly interwove stride and free playing. A highlight was a duet with Mahall that started with ferocious bass clarinet barks and elbows thrown against the keyboard. When the pianist shifted to jaw-dropping double-time stride that Mahall could barely keep up with, the aggressivity level did not drop at all. She brought the same physical commitment to both ways of playing, making them seem like one.

Yes, but hang on - this one’s different.
THAT’S WHAT THEY ALL SAY!
They don’t all mean it, though. And they don’t all know what they’re talking about!
HOW ARE YOU DIFFERENT?
We’re not promising you anything.
SO WHAT ARE YOU DOING THEN?
Asking you to think. Then vote for yourself. For a change.

What Are The Mainstream Parties Offering?
The usual platitudes of course. Some unexciting and probably insincere promises which won’t make much difference to the quality of our lives. Consider what’s on offer from the usual suspects - New Labour, Tories, Lib-Dems - all totally committed to maintaining and defending the profit system, and serving the interests of the minority Capitalist Class. Labour, whether New or Old, has never aimed at anything more than managing capitalism. Maybe more crumbs for the workers - but only if the profit system allows it.

But what about the BNP?
Same again! Like the others, they want to keep the working class divided because they know that way we are more easily ruled over. They want us to blame our fellow workers for the problems which capitalism causes. They try to turn us against ourselves - blaming immigrants, or Muslims, or non-whites instead of understanding that it’s the profit system itself which is the problem.

The BNP like to pose as a radical alternative to the mainstream parties of Labour, Conservative and the Lib-Dems. The fact that these parties seem united in regarding the BNP as ‘beyond the pale’ serves to bolster the BNP’s image. But what neither they nor the mainstream can ever acknowledge are some fundamental things which they share in common. Chief among these is that in supporting one variety of capitalism or another, all these parties are fundamentally anti-working class.

The mainstream parties have long used the tactic of ‘divide and rule’ to keep us - the majority - in our place. Instead of realising what we have in common as a class, we are taught to regard our fellow workers as being the enemy, or the cause of our problems. The BNP’s version of this, of course, is its rabid nationalism. But when the BNP talk of putting ‘Britain’ first, it simply means putting the interests of the ruling class first! You can’t just wish away the reality of class division, and the interests of Blair, Cameron, Branson etc. are most certainly NOT the same as the interests of the working class in Britain. We have far more in common with our fellow workers elsewhere than we have with those who rule over us, and swapping Labour or Tory for BNP won’t alter that.

The BNP hits out at symptoms but fails to understand causes. Take immigration for instance. Immigrants are, quite simply, our fellow workers. They are NOT the cause of unemployment, they are NOT the cause of overcrowding, they are NOT the cause of crime. These things are caused by the system of production for profit; in fact, capitalism itself. It is the profit system which forces employers to drive wages down by importing cheaper labour, but the BNP have no wish to tackle this system - in effect, they think it’s ok for the ruling class to exploit the rest of us.

They also think we need leaders to do things for us - only with them being in charge instead of the present rulers.

Think Local or Think Global?
This may be a local election, but it’s impossible to separate the everyday local issues from the wider social system we live under. Councillors aren’t necessarily lying when they say there’s not enough funds for the things people want funding for - they point to National Government and say they don’t get enough from them. But the job of National Government is to run the profit system - that’s the number one priority and people will always come second to that in capitalism.

If we want to improve things we are going to have to act for ourselves. We’re going to have to organise democratically to bring about a society geared to meeting human needs, not profits. But production for use (not profit) is only possible on the basis of genuine common ownership and democratic co-operation - what we call socialism.

This kind of society may seem like a million miles away, but remember we already have the resources and technology to make it possible! After all, this is a world of plenty. What prevents us from enjoying it is class division. Under capitalism, only a tiny minority of the world have ownership and control over the economy. The vast majority of us have nothing except our ability to work which we are then obliged to sell to the minority. WE are the ones who create all wealth in society - but then we hand it over to the minority, the capitalist class!

One World. One People
We have a world to win. The Socialist Party cannot bring this about on your behalf, and we’re not promising to. As workers ourselves all we promise is to play our part in bringing about a sane and rational democratic society where we collectively make the decisions that affect us without needing to worry about how to pay. A society where meeting our needs is the only priority!.

The Socialist Party
What happens in Monkton ward depends mainly on what happens in the country and even in the world. That is why socialists are working for a different world. But it can’t happen unless you join us. The job of making a better world must be the work of all of us.

Since 1904 The Socialist Party has completely opposed the idea of leadership; has rejected all forms of nationalism and advocated a world without borders; and has opposed both the phoney ’socialism’ of the Labour Party and the state-capitalist dictatorship of the Soviet Union.

The world we want is one where we all work together. Co-operation is in our interests and this is how a socialist community would be organised - through democracy and through working with each other.

To co-operate we need democratic control not only in our own area, but by people everywhere. This means that all places of industry and manufacture, all the land, transport, shops etc. should be owned in common by the whole community. That way we could all enjoy free access to what we need without the barriers of buying and selling.

FOR A WORLD OF GENUINE COMMON OWNERSHIP AND FREE ACCESS!

An End To Pessimism
We, in the Socialist Party, reject the view that things will always stay the same. We CAN change the world. Nothing could stop a majority of socialists building a new society run for the benefit of everyone. We all have the ability to work together in each other’s interests. All it takes is the right ideas and a willingness to make it happen. So why not visit our website at www.worldsocialism.org/spgb and read about the real Socialist alternative in our magazine, the Socialist Standard?

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The InsiderExclusive's special in-depth interviews feature acclaimed doctors, authors, trial lawyers and notable personalities like Rikki Klieman and Thomas A. Mesereau, Jr., who appeared on "America's Finest Trial Lawyers" Series; Thomas Girardi and Howard Miller of Girardi & Keese, "Mass Torts & Pharmaceutical Drug Litigation" Series; John Manly of Manly, McGuire & Stewart, "Southern California's Premier Law Firm" Series; and Irina J. Drill of Lindborg & Drill LLP, "LA's Most Influential Women" Series; and Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, "Special Feature" Series.

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Here’s a rare sidestep from my overused “Relocating & Replacing” (R&R) posts. But I’ve been pretty surprised to see the number of other hockey blog writers who have actually read my blog. It’s kind of shocking, really, mostly because I haven’t been writing that long. Not only that, but they’ve taken the time to mention Delay of Game in their own blogs. Well as impressed as they are by my blog, I’m fascinated by theirs just the same.

Boltsmag   This is one of my favorite hockey blogs mainly because writer John Fontana follows the Lightning even more closely than I do. I found it shortly after I started Delay of Game last month. The reason I think anyone else even found my blog was because I once posted a comment on his.
the habs blog   Obviously, this is a Montreal Canadiens blog Ryan Henderson, like me, writes on the events of the league as well as the news of his team.
In The Crease   Another blog worth mentioning is run by Buffalo Sabres fan Lindsey Ungar who was recently kind enough to point out my series of satellite pictures over NHL arenas. Apparently some of you think they are pretty cool.
HockeyBlogs.org   The people at HockeyBlogs.org were kind enough to add me to their listings. Delay of Game is listed in the Tampa Bay Lightning section.
Obviously I’m fairly new to the world of hockey blogging. But I haven’t even really begun yet. As soon as the Lightning hit the ice, I plan to expand my coverage of them. Personally, I think TampaBayLightning.com could use some new writers and, like John said recently, a facelift. I’d redesign it for them for free. They’ve had the same site for a few years now. Time to upgrade.

Not only that but I missed hockey so much last year that I really just want to immerse myself in it. And I lack a lot of friends with whom to discuss the sport and my team. Here, I can write to whoever, whenever. Floridian hockey fans are tough to come by.

Plus, in the few weeks I’ve been writing Delay of Game, I’ve already met a few new people with whom I can talk hockey. People who like the Lightning and know more than me. I’m happy to surround myself with smart people. They can only make me smarter.

Anyhow, I just felt like I should make mention of these cool blogs I’ve been introduced to since starting my own. Should any others come across my hockey radar, I’ll be sure to make mention of them.

I think two posts is enough for today. Until next time.

Detroit’s Hockey Mecca (Space’s Perspective)   This is for In The Crease’s Lindsey Ungar who was the first to make a request for an NHL arena satellite photo (borrowed from Google Maps). Lindsey wanted to see The Joe from a bird’s eye view. Enjoy.