Aqua, deep red or orange? Vote for your favourite Liberal Drinks beermat

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Martin

It’s time for Liberal Drinks to have a few beermats.

But what colour should they be? Or rather, what two colours should they be, because you can print different designs on each side?

The party seems to be getting over its love affair with ‘aqua‘. Strangely it never really started one with ‘dark red‘ even though it notionally had equal status to aqua in the Liberal Democrat brand guidelines!

I’ve thrown together a few designs and would really appreciate it you would vote to tell me which ones you like best. Just tick the ones you might be prepared to have under a pint glass in your local when you’re at Liberal Drinks.


Which beermats would you like to use?

Posted in Blog, Liberal Drinks | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Broken leg or heart attack? Cable and Koo on the state of the economy

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Martin

Vince Cable has often used the analogy of an economic heart attack to describe the problems of the UK economy since 2008.

I’ve just got back into reading economist Richard Koo’s excellent book “The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics“ where he offers another analogy: the broken leg:

During a balance sheet recession, the problems resulting from too little fiscal stimulus are far more serious than those caused by too much. The latter are similar to walking with a cane even after a broken leg has healed; the former to walking, or even running, when the bone has yet to mend.

Richard Koo, The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japan’s Great Recession, Wiley Singapore, 2009, p. 67

Given the lousy state of our economy, the analogy seems all too apposite. The case is getting ever stronger for Vince’s Plan A+.

Posted in Blog, Economy | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

WordPress broken your Google map? This is how to fix it

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Martin

You might have noticed some problems with the Google Map on this site at some point in the past.

Information ‘balloons’ had jagged edges and looked like this:

Faulty information balloon on Google Map - showing jagged corners in top and bottom right hand corners

when they should have looked like:

Fixed info balloon on Google Map with nicely smooth rounded cornersThe problem turned out to be with WordPress – particularly the TwentyTen stylesheet used as a base for the Winchester Marmalade template for this site.

In essence, this section of the stylesheet that sets the width for images on the WordPress page makes the images used for the map too narrow:

#content img {
margin: 0;
max-width: 640px;
}

So the daughter stylesheet needs to include something that gets rid of the width limit in the map like:

#content .boundarymap img {
max-width: none;
}

Many thanks to security_man and p for posting solutions to the problem.

Posted in Wordpress | Leave a comment

Could this sentence bring down Cameron?

Posted on July 17, 2011 by Martin

Jaw-dropping sentence in Paul Stephenson’s resignation note:

Secondly, once Mr Wallis’s name did become associated with Operation Weeting, I did not want to compromise the Prime Minister in any way by revealing or discussing a potential suspect who clearly had a close relationship with Mr Coulson.

He goes on:

I am aware of the many political exchanges in relation to Mr Coulson’s previous employment – I believe it would have been extraordinarily clumsy of me to have exposed the Prime Minister, or by association the Home Secretary, to any accusation, however unfair, as a consequence of them being in possession of operational information in this regard.

This puts Cameron’s decision to pick Andy Coulson and bring him to the centre of Government back at the very heart of the story.

All this on the same day as the Mail on Sunday implied that Cameron’s decision to choose Andy Coulson over Guto Harry was taken on the instructions of Rebekah Brooks.

Posted in Blog | Tagged | 2 Comments

Contented to be a Victorian belonging to an age which still believed in progress, material and social

Posted on May 29, 2011 by Martin

While digging through some old files, I found this family history written by my great-grandfather, James Tod, in the 1940s.  While I’m probably biased, I found it a fascinating account of growing up in the late Victorian era. It casts a very interesting light into a world very different from our own:

more …

Posted in Family History | 4 Comments