broken hearts in b29

Just before yesterday's snow, I noticed an early Valentine's rejection in the gutter:



*sigh*.

urban street crime in middle-class B29 shock

There's a burnt-out car in Selly Wick Road!

From b29

Apparently the fire service were busy putting it out on Sunday evening around 6:30 PM.

Must remember to add it to Fix My Street, but in the meantime we're enjoying the NIMBYness of some of the B29 FMS entries: this person from the ever-lovely Weoley Castle posting in the "Flytipping" category clearly thinks that the race of the "youths" is relevant, though she hasn't quite grasped the precise definition of teenager ...

*UPDATE* - the car was reported to Fix My Street, and has now gone. Although we also got an email from BBC asking for the following info before they took it away:

Name
Address
Telephone Number
Make & Model of Vehicle
Registration Number
Colour of Vehicle
Is the vehicle taxed?
Exact location of vehicle

That seems like a lot of personal info you're required to give them before they act ... information gathering overkill?

Igloo, Selly Park

new_folder has captured a beautiful snow construction in Selly Park...

snow snow snow snow

This morning, snow at about 7/10 on the #uksnow scale morphed B29 into Narnia ...

  

65 Oakfield Rd - free tree info

65 Oakfield Rd - free tree info

If you find yourself wandering around B29 and wondering vaguely to yourself "what is that tree?", then the people at 65 Oakfield Road, apparently in conjunction with Bimringham City Council, have encircled a horse chestnut (I recognised it from the conkers :)) with a tree information booth.

Bizarre. But pleasing. Can we have more?

Perhaps an edible plant recognition system? Or a B29 celebs chart? *Are* there any B29 celebs?

safe snacks

Just found the Scores on the Doors site, which publishes BCC health inspection results for cafes, restaurants and other food-based stuff in B29.

The results for food hygiene in restaurants are here, though no-one got a max of 5 stars. Bohemia and the Oak Tree Sandwich Bar top the list with 4 stars - looks like Oak Tree Lane might be B29's shiniest because the takeaway list is topped by Chez Moi on the same street. Also pleased to see the tasty Jumbo takeaway on Pershore Road with 4 stars - they also do healthy food, although the site doesn't list any healthy eating award results for Brum.

The pub list is topped by the Ember Inns chain - The Country Girl and the SPT. I can' t say I'm a massive fan of the SPT food: the nicest thing I can say is that it's OK if you get peckish while you're drinking. At least they seem to have stopped their bizarre refusal to serve soft drinks in pint sizes (previously you'd get "sorry, it'll have to be a 10 oz glass" or something ... wtf?).

On the cafe front, the Rich Bitch recording studios max up with 5 stars (can you go there if you're not recording something?), and the trusty Selly Sausage gets 4 (though personally I'm not a huge fan of the veggie options). My favourite hangover buster, Lesley's Corner Cafe, gets 3 - I'm happy to carry on scarfing down the veggie breakfast with that. The site also covers things like butcher's shops, but I'll leave you to do your own meaty searches.

B29 tortoise walk *EDIT* now starting at 1

Desert Tortoise by dotdoubledot

EDIT: we're now planning to kick off earlier - at 1 PM.

We're planning a walk around the perimeter of B29 this Sunday (5th July), recording our feelings as we go, in the spirit of the flâneur ("a person who walks a city to experience it").

Apparently, in 1840s Paris, it was very trendy to wander around with a tortoise on a lead to make sure you were gong at the right speed to truly experience the city - so can anyone lend us a tortoise?

The plan is to start off from The Nature Centre on the Pershore Road at about 1 and walk around the google map of B29 as closely as possible until our feet/tortoises run out - leave a comment if you're interested in joining us :). We're happy to pick people up on the way, walking-bus style (we'll let you know where we are via @birminghamb29. You are welcome to get off and on as you please.

mapping B29: our view

Thanks to Michael's sterling work in mapping out B29 in google maps, we can now create our own map of the area. He's made the map open to everyone with a google account. I really like the idea of creating our views of the area before the Google Maps street car comes round :).

It woud be great to see your views of the area on the map. The first thing you'll need to do is get a google maps account, then click the "save to my maps" link on the map itself. If you haven't used google maps before, here's a handy guide to editing maps - though on the B29 map you're free to use whatever icons you like - I've started by using green pins for street signs.

We've kicked off by adding some street names to the map - have fun!

How many Mbps please: how fast is your broadband in B29?

Is B29 a slow broadband area? According to the BBC, the government may miss its 2012 target to give every household in the UK access to 2 Mbps broadband, and some Virgin users in the area are reporting speed issues of their own.

There is a telephone exchange in Oakfield Road (B29 7HW), and according to the BBC report then any house within 4km *should* be able to get at least 2 Mbps.

I thought it would be interesting for us all to report our true broadband speeds, and see how much it differs between providers. Those of you using BT lines can use the BT speed checker, otherwise try the Broadband Speed Checker, or take a look at the speeds your modem reports directly from its config/admin pages.

That way, if your speed is much worse than people close by with the same mode of access (i.e. cable or broadband), you should definitely recheck all the internal factors that affect broadband speed - see this handy guide. Even if you can't find an in-house fault like a rogue phone socket without a microfilter, it's also worth googling around to check your hardware/ISP compatibility - we had a NetGear wireless router that turned out to be incompatible with TalkTalk (our cheap but pretty sucky ISP - their customer service is laughably awful).

In First Avenue, with broadband over a BT line, I get approx. 6.3 Mbps download speed according to the Broadband Speed Checker service (that's fixed cable - over my Wi-Fi it's more like 2.3). I could in theory improve this by switching providers, as we're less than 1km from the Selly Oak telephone exchange and we're in a cable area. According to the excellent Sam Knows site, there are 6 other local broadband providers from the Selly Oak exchange I can consider (plus additional secondary sellers not listed).

How fast are you? Any broadband recommendations for B29 (on price and on customer service)?

birminghamB29 twitter group

Twitter have implemented some changes which'll make it easier to aggregate Birmingham B29 info - just follow @birminghamB29 and reply to it (i.e. send a message containing @birminghamB29) with any B29-related info you want to share :).

pricing democracy

How do local MPs stack up in the expenses row?

Dr Lynne Jones has published her own response, which says she abhors the abuse whilst taking a sly swipe at "well-paid journalists". Nevertheless, she embraces the transparency principle, linking to her They Work For You figures, which show that apart from staffing costs where she was ranked 15th out of 645, she's mostly way down the list of expense claims.

This is particularly interesting given that she's stepping down at the next election, and in contrast to efforts by others to feather their nests while on the way out.

Nearby Stephen McCabe (MP for Hall Green), on the other hand, overclaimed for his mortgage, which surprisingly doesn't make a mention on his website. He also voted strongly against a transparent parliament - a position which he may well find is untenable prior to the next election.

Local councillors

The row made me wonder about Birmingham City Council expenses transparency - and it's clear there's a lot of work to be done. It seems ridiculous (very Douglas Adams) that the Register of Allowances is only relevant to the current financial year, and that it and the full Register of Members Interests are only viewable in person at the Council House during office hours. [edit - thanks to Robert for digging out the URL for the Members Allowances - though note it's still a set of PDFs rather than a searchable data source].

How can it be acceptable that some members can opt out of the e-version of the Register of Members Interests? It may not be a legal requirement to provide an e-register, but surely it's an accountability requirement - especially given that the Council's Local Code of Governance claims the following:

"Governance is about how local governance bodies ensure that they are doing the right things, in the right way, for the right people, in a timely, inclusive, open, honest and accountable manner;"

Having an unsearchable expenses register and a partial e-register of interests is neither open nor accountable.

Also note that the e-version of the Register of Members' Interests is a scanned hand-written document filed by member (and therefore also unsearchable). To achieve "effective scrutiny", the Council should provide all this data online for people to query, visualise and cross-reference with, say, Councillor voting patterns to make up their own minds.

I'm not assuming that Councillors are overclaiming expenses, or voting in line with their special interests, but hiding the data in hand-written documents will conceal any patterns both from voters and from the scrutineers. Humans just aren't very good at visualising patterns from flat numbers, and if we don't have the data to make some shiny pie charts then voters may assume the worst.

So, out of interest, I've transcribed what information is available from the e-Register of Members' Interests here for B29 (Selly Oak) Councillors (be aware that transcription errors may arise from it mostly being hand-written):

Wright, Robert (LibDem) (see also his blog)

Statutory Register (07):

(i) Membership/control/management of bodies appointed/nominated by BCC

• Local Access Forum

(ii) Other bodies

• Liberal Democrats
• Unlock Democracy (formerly Charter 88)
• Amnesty International
• Friends of the Earth
• Public and Commercial Services Union
• Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors

(iii) Any employment or business carried on by him

• Civil Servant
  

(iv) Any person or body who employs or has appointed him:

• Water Services Regulation Authority

(v) Any person or body other than BCC who has made a payment to him in respect of election or expenses in carrying out duties:

• Selly Oak & Edgbaston Liberal Democrats

(viii) any land in BCC's area in which he has a financial interest:

• 26 Cecil Road, Selly Park, B29 7QQ

Gifts Register: (07/08)

• Birmingham Rep - 2 tickets for Hysteria (declined - est value £25)
• 2 x West Midlands Passenger Transport Authority / Centro - meal (est value £25)
• Birmingham Rep - 2 tickets for Rafta (est value £25)
• Hyder Consulting Ltd - meal & ticket to carol concert - (est value over £25)
  

He was fortunate to decline the tickets for Hysteria - it was one of the worst plays I've seen for years (we left in the interval).

Interestingly, Robert both works for the Water Authority, appears to live in the area in Selly Park (Cecil Road) that got flooded last year, and has been dined by Hyder Consulting - an advisory and design consultancy working with BCC to try and solve the urban flooding issues - perhaps they are involved in the B29 flood modelling?

---

RADCLIFFE, DAVID (LibDem)

Statutory Register (07/08):

(ii) Other bodies

• Liberal Democrats
• University College Union
• Association of University Administrators
• Electoral Reform Society
• Cyclists Touring Club
• New Politics Network
• Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors
• Push Bikes
  

(iii) Any employment or business carried on by him

• Senior Planning Officer, University of Birmingham

(iv) Any person or body who employs or has appointed him:

• University of Birmingham

(v) Any person or body other than BCC who has made a payment to him in respect of election or expenses in carrying out duties:

• Selly Oak Liberal Democrats

(viii) any land in BCC's area in which he has a financial interest:

• 46 Regent St, Stirchley, B30 2LG

Gifts Register: (07/08)

• WMPTA - meal (est value £25)
• Birmigham Rep - 2 tickets for "Our House" (est value £50)
• Birmingham Rep - 2 tickets for "His Dark Materials pt1" (est value £50)
• Birmingham Rep - 2 tickets for "His Dark Materials pt 2" (est value £40)

---

DOW, ALISTAIR (LibDem)

Statutory Register (07):

(i) Membership/control/management of bodies appointed/nominated by BCC

• Muntz Trust
• SIFA / Fireside
• Kings Norton United Charities
• Birmingham Opera
• Birmingham University Court
  

(ii) Other bodies

• Aston University Free Church Chaplaincy
• Warwickshire monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
• Liberal Democrats
• Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland

(v) Any person or body other than BCC who has made a payment to him in respect of election or expenses in carrying out duties:

• Selly Oak and Edgbaston Liberal Democrats

(viii) any land in BCC's area in which he has a financial interest:

• 23 Hindon Square, Birmingham, B15 3HA
  

Gifts Register: (07/08)

• 2 sets (?) Birmingham Rep tickets (refused)
• PTEG dinner (est value £25)
• Hippodrome - 2 tickets (est value £25)
• Old Rep - 2 tickets (est value £25)
• Robert Keys Associates - guest at Birmingham Post awards lunch (est value £25)
• Redcliffe Catering - dinner (est value £25)
• PTEG - dinner (est value £25)
• Hyder Consulting - meal and carol concert (est value over £25)

PTEG may refer to the Passenger Transport Executive Group (publicly funded policy/strategy group on public transport). Robert Keys Associates - I couldn't find. Redcliffe Catering are local catering contractors.

There. That was a bit tedious, wasn't it? It's interesting to reveal the interests of our local counillors, but I still want to see their expenses .... Though it looks like the Birmingham Rep spends quite a lot of time giving out tickets to local councillors.

more bizarre weather #b29

This evening (28 April 18:30) we have a lot of weather going on in B29:

• thunder
• lightning
• hail
• rain

Brrr.

Traffic's crawling on the Pershore Road; looks like we might have an awful lot of water around too ...

B29 games map

I've started a map outlining some lo-fi games to play should you find yourself aimlessly trundling around B29 - from avoiding scary shops to guessing the staff-to-client ratio in a curry house.

It's an openly collaborative map, so please add your own B29 games; I'm aware that this blog gets skewed towards Selly Park (where I live) and not California (wayyyy over in B29 *West* [edit: thanks Jack, doh!].


View Larger Map

Also, I'm planning a trundle over to the rest of B29 shortly - anyone got any must-sees or highlights?

spring sprung

... and after the snow comes spring.

Inspired by new folder's lovely B29 spring pic, here's another flickr slideshow from the B29 flickr group.

Add your pics to the B29 group and tag them with "spring" to ping them up here.

EDIT - multiple iFrame / blogger borkage means that we can merely admire a single new folder pic here :)

B29 snow

Archive of incoming snow Feb 09 (even tracked and rated on twitter).

Jump to flickr to see all the snow scenes posted to the flickr B29 group.

Going to party like it's B29?

Randomly met a resident of Second Avenue yesterday, and on chatting about the upsides of living in B29, he mentioned that his street has an annual street party.

photo by Annie Mole

I live just round the corner, and I've never stumbled across the street party - usually in late June (my invite must have been lost in the post) ... but it made me realise that (a) there aren't many places in B29 for casually meeting other B29-ers, especially since the mac is shut (other than Flood Meetings?); and (b) a large-scale street party (i.e. a fête) would be awesome, despite growing up in deepest darkest Sussex and vowing never to having anything to do with countryside-type things again.

Anyone up for a B29 village fête? We could simply congregate in Selly Hill Park with hats (for wearing), wellies (for wanging or wearing, depending on the weather) and strawberries (ditto). Put "late June" in the diary.

where post please?

I've lived in B29 for 8 years, but I still wasn't sure I was using the nearest postbox ... until I came across a handy site that maps them all - from a nice man affiliated with the lovely mysociety.org bunnies. thanks!

Wonder if mysociety can fix the bizarre practice of the postie having to bring large things round to your house without being able to check first that someone's in ...

Latest flood missive from BCC

Another month, another City Council missive about the floods back in September 08 ... This time it's to feedback about the (paper) questionnaires they sent round and to let everyone know they are Doing Stuff.

Interestingly, they are also asking if it's OK if they share the result of their investigation into the causes of the flood with the Environment Agency and Severn Trent Water ... this seems to (a) be a no-brainer and (b) imply that the various agencies still can't work together - at the community meeting the Council organised shortly after the floods, it was clear that the agencies didn't really have a model for communicating, and there was a certain amount of shifting responsibility round on each other.

If your house is filling up with sewage water, you don't really care which agency has responsibility. It transpired that Severn Trent didn't even realise the flooding was contaminated with sewage until the community meeting - and again it doesn't take a genius to realise that if you have a holding tank of sewage under Dog Poo Lane, and there's a massive flood on the lane, there might be some kind of unpleasant leakage going on.

Nevertheless, we now have a useful list of numbers (including out of hours) for BCC flooding - though it's still split between "blocked highway drainage flooding" and "river flooding", plus EA's floodline, Severn Trent and Flood Forum - which is still a lot of numbers to choose from if you're not entirely sure where the water's coming from.

In September, Bournbrook burst its banks because it couldn't fit under the road at Pebble Mill, and submerged Sir John's, 4th and 3rd Avenues - does that count as river flooding or poor drainage or Severn Trent or EA's problem? EA says it doesn't deal with surface flooding (and had no flood alerts up about B29 at the time) - and the Council don't seem to have plans in place to deal with incidents where the Bournbrook is too fat to fit under the road.

Still, this incident has incited the most contact we've ever had from any local governmental type agency, other than the time the Lib Dems came round to see if we wanted anything ... and of course the flood of semi-interested activists at local election time. Though I still reckon we've had the Jehovah's Witnesses round more often than any political bunnies - and they even claimed it was nice talking to me last time after I (politely) declined The Watchtower on account of being a committed atheist.

FYI the flooding contact details in full:
BCC Highways (blocked drainage) 303 6644
BCC river flooding: 303 7235
Out of hours for both: 303 4149

EA floodline: 0845 988 1188
Severn Trent: 0800 783 4444
Flood Forum: 01299 403055

b29 under water

just a quick post to note the floods; the river rea is all over the Selly Park playing fields, with water flowing from Kitchener Road onto them - when we took a look a few hours ago, water was geysering up in the middle through the manholes.

The Bournbrook broke its banks just by Pebble Mill and flooded 3rd, 4th and Sir John's Avenues, and the Pershore Road was flooded at Pebble Mill and Cartland Road.

Here's a video of the river at the bottom of First Avenue:


I took some more pictures, but not of the avenues flooding; I felt like it wasn't very helpful for the people whose houses were disappearing underwater to stand around and take pics of it ... but loads of people did have their cameraphones out so I'm sure there will be lots of pics.

More floodwaters (apologies for the terrible camera angles):


Looks like it's stopped raining, so fingers crossed.

*UPDATE*

Sadly, the water kept rising - the bottom halves of Hobson and Kitchener Roads and Cecil road were really badly flooded, with water levels up to people's thighs. Fashoda Road was half flooded, and you couldn't drive up DogPool lane - there was a fire engine at the junction with Fashoda doing what it could.

The waters did start to subside around 5ish, but that was little consolation for the people whose houses were submerged. One of our neighbours reckoned it was by far the worst flooding for 20 years... and there's more rain forecast for Tuesday with the fallout of hurricane Gustav :(.

Sharing B29 places ...

I've been looking at B29 on a few location sharing sites (is there a better collective name for location-based social networking sites? I'm sure James knows...), most of which seem to suffer from being based in the US, clunky UIs and/or too few users.

One such site is streetadvisor.com, with just two whole Birmingham entries. It struggled to find my street - insisting that I live in Water Orton. I've never been to Water Orton, so I guess it might be nice, but I definitely don't live there. The map interface is relatively friendly, however, with the kind of slideable google map overlaid with widgets that's become the norm, so I eventually found my street which streetadvisor insisted is in Bournbrook. pfff.

Once you've located your street, the site invites you to rate it on a variety of scales including retail opportunities, provision of health services and schools and availability of gas. This feels like it might be a useful tool for people looking to move somewhere, but I can't really see what would motivate users to add their street .. or am I missing something? Would you want to showcase your street? Would the pre-defined categories help, or would you rather praise your street in your own words?

Mobile social networking is the latest start-up frenzy with a whole smorgasbord of sites popping up. Brightkite had a lot of industry buzz, and it's got a nice interface, and puts B29 roughly in the right place. The focus is on knowing where your pre-existing friends are, rather than on reviewing or discovering stuff. Again, it suffers from a lack of other users - at the time of writing, no-one else is within 4,000 metres of me :(.

With Rummble, the focus is on sharing info on physical locations and reviews with your pre-existing network, so in theory you get "trusted" local info. Over at Plazes, you get more of a microblog+location feel - it's more about discovering who's around and what they've tagged rather than local reviews. Plazes just got bought by Nokia, and they've got an API to enable developers to extract and reformat the info that people add, which implies the site will be funded for some time ... I'll award zkout the honorary gratuitously stupid 2.0-esque name award.

The common problem with these micro-local sites is that their usefulness won't become clear until they've achieved a critical mass of users - which is much more of a challenge on a small local scale than across a much more generic user group. Stiff competition also implies a lot of market churn - the likelihood is that different local groups will champion different micro-local sites, so it's difficult to see the business model working, at least in the short term while sites fight it out for market share.

Anyone found a good location sharing site? Or should we just stick to a huge mashup of individual google maps?

Here's the only one I've found so far for B29 - one that's quite juggling-specific ;)

If you've got a lovley B29-specific map, let me know and I'll add it in ...

Map of B29

In case you were wondering, here is the B29 area in full detail (click on map for larger image).