Alex Muller

UoY’s student union (YUSU) elections are all this week, so I thought I’d write up a quick post on where my votes are going. These are from the perspective of a generally uninterested-in-politics student. Nouse (the amazing campus newspaper) have a great page (alright, so I’m a little biased) page on all the elections candidates that you can have a peek at. Enjoy.

Re-reading this just after I wrote it, the most important thing for me is: be really visible and very loud, make your policies and yourself known to absolutely everybody who will look at you. Honestly, it doesn’t matter that much what you say; as long as one of your policies isn’t "cull kittens", you’ll be fine.

President

This is a choice between four, and here’s my take on them. Grant Bradley is a decent candidate, and seems to have campaigned well, but is too unknown on campus to win the position of figurehead of YUSU. Bushby is too… "boring" for me. Alright, that’s mean; but I just don’t feel like he’s the person who should be at the centre of the student union. So the race is between Tom Langrish and Tim Ngwena. Both have great experience and nothing stands out from their policies, so it’s a pretty even choice between them. I’m not sure which way I’ll go yet.

Student Activities

I’ve seen none of these three at all on campus or online (by comparison, I’ve seen one person from at least all the other positions). Remembering that I’m voting from the point of view of a lazy student, I’ll probably put Rory Shanks top. Seeing as he’s been doing the job for a year with no major hiccups that I can tell.

Democracy & Services

Dave Sharp’s been campaigning pretty actively round Halifax college – and has been openly critical of the person whose position he’s gunning for. Lewis Bretts gets the prize for the most visible campaigner of everybody in this election (who could miss the giant wooden fruit and vedge stall, really). When it comes down to it, I think it’ll be Bretts top and Sharp second. I’ve heard nothing about Ed Durkin or George Papadofragakis, so they don’t mean much to me.

Academic Affairs, Welfare and York Sport

Academic Affairs doesn’t even need a section. Charlie Leyland’s going to get it, and rightly so. Re-electing people is so easy.

For Welfare, Ben Humphrys has been the most visible, so he’s going top of the list. A few people have said positive things about Pallas, so he’ll go second. And I have no idea who Jenny Coyle is.

And Emily Scott’s the most visible of the York Sport people, so again, she’ll be first. After that, I was impressed by Michael Leahy at some point last term, and I don’t know who the other two are.

Section 76 of the Counter–Terrorism Act 2008 – introduced a few weeks back – is very, very interesting. Essentially, it allows anyone taking pictures of police officers (or members of the armed forces) to be arrested if there is some any kind of possibility that the photographs will be used in the preparation of an act of terrorism.

Obviously, this causes issues with what police officers now have the power to do. So I’ve decided that it’s probably worth finding out what the people on the ground actually think, in the ineffectual, time–consuming way that only a student can: asking them.

So today, I decided to take the first step. Knowing that this could, in fact, be totally painful and I could be arrested on the spot for anything (wasting police time?), I was pleasantly surprised. The policewoman I spoke to was very well–informed about the new law, and her point of view (from what I could tell with two minutes of talking to her) was reassuring. I asked her whether she’d stop a journalist taking photos, to which her reply was an instantaneous "no, because they have the right to."

Yes, she is only one person; there are well over 31,000 police constables in London¹ and countless more across the UK. Yes, it clearly would’ve been better if the law hadn’t come about to start with. And yes, Gordon Brown’s response as quoted in the fourth paragraph of the appropriate Wikipedia section does make me want to bang my head against the wall and scream. But I’m still reserving judgement for now; it doesn’t seem to be nearly as bad as it could be.

I’d known this for ages, but only just consciously realised that there was a way to get rid of those tweets that make me sigh painfully to myself. These regex expressions are what I’ve put into Twitterrific’s built in tweet filter.

New blog post.*http

I hate these notifications of blog updates on Twitter. This is exactly what RSS is for, and it works just fine. If I might like your blog, put a link to it somewhere (ooh, how about that section on Twitter that’s handily labelled More Info URL?) and I’ll check it out in my own time and decide if I want to subscribe to it.

^@.*http.*twitterfall

I absolutely love Twitterfall as a product and use it whenever there’s breaking news or events, but following the two developers means a whole load of replies to people I’ve never met advertising their service. Using this is an easy way to keep up with the interesting stuff they post, while getting rid of the links I don’t want to see.

twizmaster and [mM]ac[hH]eist

These two annoy me. The former is an account that’s used as a Twitter quiz service which people reply to with their answers (and reply to all too much). The latter? Search it using search.twitter.com and see for yourself.

And how to implement them…?

The easiest way is to use Secrets.prefpane and add them to the Filter Tweettext option (separated using the pipe character, as they’re regular expressions.

A few days ago on Twitter, I wrote this:

Hashtags are "a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets." To see what I mean about normal words being tagged, go to search.twitter.com, pick a random word and put a hash sign in front of it.

Updates like this annoy me, because there’s absolutely no need to tag normal words in a tweet. For every person on Twitter who’s versed in all things #, there are many more who haven’t had the trend explained to them. This means there are people tweeting both "#episode" and "episode", so we’ve got two terms that need to be searched for to find tweets relating to TV.

I’ve seen some nice Twitter guidelines in the last couple of weeks (some on corporate usage spring to mind), so I thought I’d have a go at some for hashtagging…

When should I tag?

There are a couple of things in this category:

• When at an event, or a gathering of people – or trying to keep track of an event. Future of Web Apps and The Pirate Bay’s trial are two that have worked quite well in the past.
• When Twitter’s search might not give proper results for a phrase. #safari4 was one from yesterday, as I suppose “Safari 4″ could give some strange results.

And when should I not?

Essentially…

• When the search function on Twitter will give you exactly the same result. I cannot see the point in #plurk or #youtube. I suppose #lost (for the TV show) does make some sense, as it’s trying to differentiate from people just using the word "lost".