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It’s easy to poke fun at the Daily Mail. And just as easy to get angry at it.

It’s for these reasons that I usually leave it up to many other blogs to pick over its rotting carcass and shriek hysterically at it. One such blog highlighted one of those “light” show business pieces where they were, well, insulting the ex-cast of Friends by pointing out the fact that they’d aged.

After coming across the original Daily Mail article today something in particular took my notice…

Before signing up last year to another sitcom called Cougar Town, things had become so bad careerwise that Miss Cox, who played Monica Geller, applied for a licence to work as an estate agent.

Was it that bad? Well, seconds later I had my answer courtesy of Wikipedia… she was playing a “real estate” agent in the aforementioned sitcom. Coincidence? I’m guessing not. Although no word as to whether the Mail have somehow mixed her fictional and real life characters or whether she applied for a licence so that she could “try” the job that she was acting out. Indeed it was the fact that most actors do the latter that made me look it up.

Who’d have thought that the Mail wouldn’t have taken a few seconds out from their busy schedule of bigotry to check it out for themselves?

After a mild rant back in December about some of the support queries I get (with regard to my WordPress plugins), I’m happy to say that I’ve had the pleasure to work with someone who has actually been helpful, responsive and, more importantly, replied to his emails 😉

A Dutch gentleman named Bas de Meijer reported a couple of problems via a comment on one of my plugin pages. One I was able to resolve quite quickly and update the relevant plugin, the other was, erm, more difficult to pin down. This was related to another plugin and turned out to be due to me using a PHP command that didn’t work in PHP 4 (which he was using). As far as I know this command is the only one of this type that I’d used and it was a simple job to modify it to something else and get the compatibility. However, to actually work out what it was I had to send Bas a number of different versions of my plugin, each with more and more debug output being added.

The result was the two plugin releases announced last night – indeed, even adding Technorati to Simple Social Bookmarks was his idea. Thanks Bas. But, then again, he seemed to enjoy the experience just as much….

Thanks again for the great job you have done. Not only by designing the plugin, but also by spending a lot of time to debug it with me. It is much easier to say ‘it should work, so you must be doing something right’ or ‘well, upgrade your system’. But you really wanted to make it work. That suites you.

It was a pleasure helping you. I know from myself that I rather would solve the problem, than to switch to something else.

So come on, those who have a problem, report it, but never respond back to me – I don’t bite!

Elvaston Castle, just outside Derby, is a fantastic 19th century house set in 200 acres of woodlands, parkland and gardens. It’s open to the public and I’ve been going there since my eldest daughter was young.

Unfortunately, it’s under threat. Derbyshire County Council, who own it, are threatening to sell it to a private company to be made into a hotel with much of the grounds to be used as a golf course.

Naturally, as soon as I heard I signed the requisite petition.

However, speaking to a friend, who has also visited the grounds on many occasions, I was set thinking. He believes that selling it is the only way to ensure the house doesn’t crumble away and that DCC doesn’t just end up having to pay hand-over-fist. But surely that can’t be it? Surely there must be a way to save it for the public?

Well, a quick look on the internet proved there was. The Friends of Elvaston Castle are a group dedicated to saving the buildings and grounds for any such private ownership. And reading their site shows that things aren’t always what they seem. They have some grand, but sensible, plans hampered generally by DCC who, amongst other things, won’t release financial details. Yet one of the main reasons for DCC wanting to sell it is because of the costs (and, indeed, my friends main argument).

But let’s just stop there a second. Why should the fact that it costs money each year be a problem? Isn’t that what we pay our council tax for? Should everything pay for itself? Or as the Friends of Elvaston Castle put it…

This must raise the question as to why the Derbyshire County Council can no longer finance the annual maintenance costs of the Country Park when these costs should surely have been budgeted for when the authority annually sets its ratepayer’s council tax for the provision of Countryside Services?

They believe that a not-for-profit trust should take over ownership, ensuring that the house and grounds remain available to the public, yet doing what DCC hasn’t done – promote it! It gets 20% of the annual footfall that Alton Towers does, yet charges a small fee for parking and has nothing but a small cafe and gift shop on site. If DCC is losing money, it’s not trying very hard to prevent it. I guess the handsome income from selling to a private company is more appealing!

So, apologies to my friend, selling to a private company is NOT the best approach. Maybe if all other avenues have been exhausted then it could be a final route to take, but it’s quite obvious that this has not happened. But we mustn’t think that because a local council can’t support a local amenity, then this is the only solution – there are usually groups of people willing to take on such a challenge.

In the small village that I grew up, stands the last working windmill in Nottinghamshire. I don’t know how many hours of my life I’ve spent there. But today it stands desperately in need of help. For something like this, there probably isn’t a private option (unless somebody wants to have the sails removed and turn it into a house). In this case they are already run by a “Friends” group, but even they are struggling. Local fund-raising isn’t enough and a recent theft of metal from the building has left them even worse off. Consider the millions of wasted pounds every year from government and you wonder why this kind of thing is allowed to happen in the first place.

But I’ll leave the last words to The Friends…

Through our own research and enquiries, we believe that the Elvaston Castle Estate, run on sound business practices which have been proven successful by both trusts and local authorities in other areas, will not only protect vital public open space but also contribute to giving our citizens an improved society in which to live.

For some time Gmail has offered the ability to default to using HTTPS, for more secure access. However, they have now announced that it is to be made the default.

One thing this will lead to, assuming you use it, is Gmail Notifier to stop working.

Google themselves, hidden away in a help screen (read the section in the yellow box), offer a solution to this in the way of a downloadable registry change that will force Notifier to use HTTPS too. Simply download the zip file, uncompress it and run the file named notifier_https.reg. There’s a second file in the folder too – notifier_https_undo.reg – this is for restore Gmail Notifier back to how it was.