Planning Alerts

just briefly, before a larger post about the flooding and the political wrangles emerging from it:

If you'd like to be alearted via email about B29 planning applications, sign up for free at planningalerts.com.

This site trawls Birmingham City Council webpages - so you don't have to - and indexes planning applications by postcode, so you can sign up to be alerted when anything happens near you.

A wondrous free idea run by volunteers and hosted by mysociety.org; it counteracts the awful slowness with which local authorities are freeing their data by just getting on and writing screenscrapers (basically, bits of code that suck in web pages and sort out the useful data) instead.

Is Birmingham the new Coventry?

An entirely trivial point: looks like the new way to kill off soap characters is to have them move to Birmingham (though not specifically B29 ;)). The BBC have just offloaded the Trumans from EastEnders by relocating them here...

Podnosh, The Knife and Fork, and a new speed camera

This very complimentary snippet on Podnosh today has made me release that it's been a while since my last post.

So then I started to borrow yet more content from Podnosh, like this insightful blog from a newly trained Birmingham bus driver which is well worth a read.

Then I noticed that Birmingham: It's Not Shit has gone through a very worthwhile redesign and come out looking very lovely and shiny in the wash.

And it has an associated flickr group with a recent photo of one of the landmarks of B29, the soon to be disappearing Knife and Fork (left: photo by ellybrown1980).

Still just about surviving (although not still serving unfortunately) but by the gathering of equipment and signs I would imagine that it is sadly just about on its' last legs.

I also couldn't fail to notice tonight that an extra speed camera has appeared on the Pershore Road very recently (not even any marker lines on the road yet), heading out of the city just after the junction with Pebble Mill Road beside the Nature Centre. Just about here.

It didn't slow down my journey to the excellent Jumbo Chinese takeaway though, thankfully.