Today is a good day. Campbell’s gone, The University of Bradford intranet has been redesigned in table-free CSS and I’ve just bought a High Output Automatic Ice Maker in Lemonade Tycoon Deluxe. I’ve done a fair few useful things as well, but you’re probably not interested in those.

But as for me, I am filled with power,

with the Spirit of the Lord ,

and with justice and might,

to declare to Jacob his transgression,

to Israel his sin.

Hear this, you leaders of the house of Jacob,

you rulers of the house of Israel,

who despise justice

and distort all that is right;

who build Zion with bloodshed,

and Jerusalem with wickedness.

Her leaders judge for a bribe,

her priests teach for a price,

and her prophets tell fortunes for money.

Yet they lean upon the Lord and say,

"Is not the Lord among us?

No disaster will come upon us."

Therefore because of you,

Zion will be plowed like a field,

Jerusalem will become a heap of rubble,

the temple hill a mound overgrown with thickets.

Micah 3:8-12 (NIV)

It's extremely early. I went to bed far too late. I was trying to use Windows Update to install 18.2Mb of critical updates on my parents' machine, as it seems no-one else ever bothers. It did 18Mb in 2 hours before the download failed. Oh the joys of 56k. Anyway, I'm off to France and will be doing my very best to be cut off from the world. Back in 10 days.

I've been reading the Charity Commission web site (yes, I know how to have a wild Friday night) and I've come across some things which I found interesting:

• Apparently charitable students' unions (such as UBU) should not comment publicly on issues which do not affect the welfare of students as students. The web site gives the following examples:

  • planning proposals for new roads or motorways which have no direct affect on the university campus or the students;
  • campaigns to outlaw the killing of whales; and
  • the treatment of political prisoners in a foreign country.

  To my mind that would make a fair amount of our policy illegal. We have current policy giving public comment on the war, the fire service strike, the situation in Palestine etc. Now I know that all these issues do, in fact, have a great personal affect on many of our students but simply in line with those examples, they look illegal.

  However, to my mind, issues like the Nestle and Bacardi boycotts would be legal, because while they may not directly affect students as students, the range of products sold in our bars and shops certainly does affect students as members of our association. Possibly, however, the policies should be phrased so as to be a reflection of students' concerns, rather than a statement of the Union's position.

• Also, while a charitable students' union may not support a political party or use its money for political ends, it may:

  encourage students to develop their political awareness and acquire knowledge of or debate political issues. To achieve this it may make grants to political clubs or societies on the campus.

  Now, again, to my mind that seems to say that we could donate money to societies and they could spend it to whatever political ends they like, provided they were constitutionally separate bodies from the Union to which we gave money; and not actually a part of the union itself. I also see no reason (so far) that that necessarily precludes us from having a Societies Federation for discussion of said grants and other general Union issues to which societies could (or could be required to) affiliate, without technically becoming a part of the Union.

Bare in mind though, that I am not a lawyer, and I have not been reading the law itself, just government guidance. I do intend to read the full 1993 Charities Act when I have time.

I downloaded all the files for the British System 7.5.3 (you seem to only be only able to get 7.5.5 as an upgrade) and copied them all over to the Classic on Mac formatted floppies, but they all just came up as documents. The Mac just kept telling me it couldn't find the application that created them. So I found an old PC version of Stuffit, uncompressed them with that and copied them all over again, but got the same error. That all took a very long time, as the Classic's floppy drive is extremely slow. I've managed download the system 7.5 network access boot disk and get that working (though it's slow), so I'm thinking I might just have to get the hardware and download the OS from the Classic itself.

24-7 Prayer are asking for lots of prayer for the media coverage they'll be getting as a result of this week's documentary about the Ibiza missions. Check it out, and be sure to watch the program; 20:15, Saturday, Channel 4. Apparently several of this weekend's Sunday papers chose it as their pick of the day.

This is the first document I've created on my Mac. It's still not networked, so in order to post this I'm going to have to save it to disk and copy it to my Windows machine. I've managed to DOS format a disk in the Mac, though when I tried to Mac format it, the computer gave up and ejected the disk. Hopefully I can save this to that, and hopefully Word on the PC will read Mac Word from 1992. I've been reading on-line, and I'm hoping I might be able to reformat this computer's hard drive and install a new OS, though that might loose this copy of Word and I don't know if the Mac OS includes any word processing tools.

My shiny new computer arrived this morning. I've not persuaded it to do much yet, as I don't have the hardware to connect it to my Windows network. In the meantime, here are some pictures: