Month: December 2007

Differing levels of Vandalism

A week after I phoned to police to tell them that our 95 had been vandalised I get a letter through the post from Gloucesteshire Police.

Its depressing reading – says so much about what our police force has become:

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Offence : Criminal Damage to property valued under £5000 – vehicle
Date Reported : 03/12/2007
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..
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The offence you reported has been recorded within our computerised crime reporting system…..

To date our investigations have failed to identify the offender. Nevertheless we shall continue to review the matter.

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So its been logged on their computer – wonderful. Did it really take them a week to do that? Actually No. It took them 2 days to log in into the computer (or print the letter) as the letter is dated 05/12. Then they posted it – two days AFTER they had printed it, and it arrived on the 10th (they did at least not waste money sending it out first class!)

So how do we interpret “Criminal Damage to Property valued under £5000”. Does it mean the property is worth less than £5000, does it mean that they did less than £5000 worth of damage?

Its sodding vandalism – my personal property has been vandalised. But apparently the severity of the crime is linked to some odd concept of commercial value. Would it be more of a crime if my car was a £350,000 Ascari and they’d smashed the windscreen, or it would it be more of a crime if they’d mashed the mirrors and slashed the tyres on the 93 at the same time.

Its my car – its how I get to work, its how I go shopping. But to the police it is simply an item of monetary worth.

As for the “we have failed to identify the offender” well, to use an american phrase: no shit sherlock. It happened on a quietish side road, where we hardly ever see policemen. The scrotes from Whaddon roam round the neighbourhood causing trouble all over the place. The police do nothing and then the sodding council gives Whaddon a million pound community centre which I’m sure they’ll torch to the ground soon.

Still the police have more important things to do than chase criminals – its learning Polish All this from the police force whose Chief Constable – Dr Brain (just got to love that name!!) says will have to cut services as they are short of money in next years budget

Oh well

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Now playing: Bif Naked – Nothing Else Matters
via FoxyTunes

Christmas

Well we are well on the way to planning Christmas. The Booze has been ordered (which is one of the most important things) and we’ve done a lot of the shopping.

Should be picking up a tree sometime this week – there is a shop close to us which delivers them, which saves you having to mess the car up shoving a tree in and out of it

Why Do People…

vandalise other peoples property?

Heading out today after the frost had cleared I noticed that the windscreen on my Saab 95 Estate has been smashed. It was OK when I parked it at 6:20 on Friday evening but I didn’t use it over the weekend and the weather was so bad I didn’t notice it as I was dashing in and out to my other car over the weekend.

Some low-life has wacked the windscreen right in the middle of the drivers side – windscreen is broken beyond repair so I’ve got to get it replaced.

This is the second time that I’ve had a window smashed in recent months. The previous time it was my other Saab (a 93) which was wacked on the passenger side.

The cars are usually parked on opposite side of the road and in both cases the vandalism has been on the road side of the vehicle – so I guess they just drive (or cycle) down the road and smash windscreens as they go.

The police have been informed but what can they do – the yobs in Cheltenham seem free to roam around doing what they like and the police seem incapable of stopping them.

So that’s another expense I didn’t really want – especially coming up to Christmas.

So thanks a bunch who ever did this. Serves me right for living near the cess pit that is Whaddon I guess

Tweaking a Calendar for WPMU.

NOTE: Kieran has made a newer version of his plugin which works with WordPress MU and integrates by using an embedded Calendar tag to display the calendar.

So basically I’m abandoning this plug in and suggest you get Kieran’s new version instead. That is what I’ve put on this site.

This is basically Kieran O’Shea’s WP Calendar plugin for WordPress tweaked to work with WPMU with a couple of additional features.

1) Calendar table created for each user
2) The Calendar is wrapped to work in multiple templates without needing a file in each template. See the section below for more on this
3) Input and Display date formats on the Admin screen can be changed by the administrator.

Installation.

1) Drop the files from the archive into the matching folders in your WPMU installation
2) Edit the edit-calendar file and change the $eddateformat and $eddatesep variables to match your date format (by default it they are set to d/m/Y and / as I’m in the UK).
3) Enable the Plugin
4) Edit your .htaccess file and add the lines in the add.htaccess file towards the top
5) If you want to use my template wrapping then you need to use the wp-calendar.php file that I have provided along with the two tag files (edited to support your templates). If you dont want to use it then you need to install the calendar file manually into each template (but you dont need the tag files)

Template Wrapping.

I use Template Wrapping a lot – it allows me to easily drop cross blog functionality into the blogs without having to create a new page template in each blog. For example the calendar page only exists at the top level – there are NO files in any of the templates for the calendar, the structure of the page round the calendar is created using the two tag files and a couple of calls in the file containing the call to the calendar code

To enable template wrapping you need to do the following:

1) Drop the wp_opentags.php and wp_closetags.php files into the top level of your WPMU installation
2) Create a new file from the empty_page.php file
3) The new page can now be accessed from each blog.

You will find that you need to edit the wp_opentags and wp_closetags files to work with your templates. This can take a while due to the way different people build their templates and no hard and fast rules on opening and closing DIVs in the header,page and footer.

A Zip file of the various files including my wrapper files is available for download

If you have any comments, suggestions etc then please post them as comments.

You can see the calendar in action here