All posts by Ryan Cullen

That was long

Council

Today’s Development Control meeting lasted 2.5 hours, longest meeting I’ve had so far on the council.
I knew that when I put my name forward to be on the committee that meetings could go on for some time and I’ve been expecting worse.
We had 12 applications to consider with the longest being the land to the rear of 41-69 Hykeham Road. It was obvious in advance of the meeting that this might take some time. The applicants had submitted two applications offering two options for access to the site and there were 40 pages in the agenda taken up. Almost everyone who lived on that bit of Hykenham Road objected, as well as the 3 ward councillors and for the first option even the County Council Highways and Planning department.
The rules for speaking to the committee are 5 minutes against, 5 minutes for any councillor and 5 minutes for and we had all of these twice.
In the end we voted against the development (as per the recommendation from the officers), but I’m sure we’ll see an official objection to the decision.
Six applications were approved without much fuss. One extension application was obviously going to lead to neighbours not talking, but either way the vote went that would happen (we approved it). The new development for 29-31 The Strait and land to the rear were exciting to see and also approved.
The only application which split the committee was for the former Community Rehabilitation Centre on Long Leys Road. I felt that we couldn’t object to the application, in line with the officers. Others felt the building were too high, too dense and not following the draft for Long Leys Urban Village. The application was rejected, but a vote on the rejection lead to a chairs casting vote against the reason to object. Finally I proposed a motion to reject based on the officers opinion which was passed.

Whilst it sounds confusing that’s nothing compared to LDYS policy debates.

Weekend in Brum

Other

On Friday (actually more like early hours of Saturday) me and Heather decided to go to Birmingham for the weekend. We booked a room at the Premier Travel Inn and then after a short sleep made our way towards Bournville.

Cadbury We had attempted to book tickets in advance for Cadbury World however you can’t book tickets on the day via the website. At £12.50 each it was a little dear, and the free chocolate was melting quickly. However the historic facts about Cadbury were interesting and it was a nice day out.

We then headed to the hotel to check-in, and then went out to the Bull Ring. I’ve been a couple of times to the new Bull Ring and it’s amazing how the place is so much nicer than before. We wandered around the shops until we almost fell asleep. The only problem I had was the litter. It was really disgusting. Some of the litter was from a red mobile phone company, but most of it was wrappers from an ice cream van that was giving out freebies.

We then headed back to the hotel for dinner and a good night’s sleep.

White Rhinoceros On Sunday we made our way to West Midland Safari Park, this was only £8.99 each and we got a lot more for our money. We spent two hours driving around the safari and there was loads to see. I think we both enjoyed the elephants most. However as they were the furthest away from the car the photos aren’t that great. After parking the car we had a look around the rest of the park, and whilst watching the snake man do his presentation I managed to get stung by a wasp, who decided that flying up my sleeve was a great idea. I panicked like a small child until the wasp finally flew away. We had a look at the theme park rides but at an extra £8.75 each to go on all the rides, and none of them being that exciting we gave that a miss.

Overall though we had a really nice weekend.

Missing…

LibDemBlogs

Blogger and BlogSpot are being rubbish. I’m finding that requests aren’t being returned for a large number of users (which changes everytime) XML files. For the time being all Blogspot hosted blogs have been disabled from the site. Hopefully they’ll fix their end soon and we’ll get you all back on.
19:00 update I’ve changed the cache period from 25 minutes to 2 hours, so new posts may take time to appear. However this does seem to allow BlogSpot blogs to appear.

Dream Number

TV

Dream NumberThere are adverts on TV at the moment about the new lottery game Dream Number. In it they mention that “Winning just got easier”. The game has a 1 in 10 chance of winning and the most likely prize is only £2. In the small print it says compared to Lotto Extra, this game has now been removed, however it had odds of 1 in 13,983,816 and had one prize that was almost always over a million pounds. I’m sure that whatever concept they could have come up with would have resulted in more chances in winning.

YouGov

Other

YouGovFree money? I’ve been doing it for ages and have just reached the £20 mark. However compared to other survey site you do seem to earn more.
If only the Brand Index surveys weren’t so boring, they just seem to go on and on, and seem to be about the same companies every month. However at the end you do get to give negative points to Tony Blair and get 50p for the hassle.

Superman Returns

Reviews

Superman ReturnsSaw this on Wednesday with David. It was a great film. Lived up to the first two superman movies and Brandon Routh played a great Christopher Reeve. Rather luckily the little boy wasn’t anoying at all and Kevin Spacey pulled off playing Lex Luthor, both things I worried about whilst watching the trailers.
My only issue is why was Lois Lane dating Scott (Cyclops) from the X-Men? 8/10

The problem with thirds

LibDemBlogs

In Lincoln we (currently) elect in thirds. Being the newest councilor for Park Ward I have noticed a problem. Of all the casework that has dropped through the door or been left on the phone, all of it has been for my attention. Nobody ever asks for Cllr Quinton, yet she is the one who knows which department or officer needs to be spoken to.
The only good thing is that I’ve now got a casework helper…
…Heather.

Gravatar

LibDemBlogs

I’ve added Gravatar to LibDemBlogs for the moment. I’ve used the email addresses which people requested to be added to the site to generate the gravatar. If you don’t already have a Gravatar visit their site www.gravatar.com and register. If you do and it doesn’t appear, let me know which email address you think I should be using. If it does appear and you don’t want it let me know and I’ll work out what to do.
Note if it slows down LibDemBlogs or it just doesn’t look that good I may turn it off.