Poetry Cafe 2 (by sarah)

During the Literature Festival there was a fringe event called Poetry Cafe held at the Museum and Art Gallery in Cheltenham and I was reading!

Due to competition from other events it wasn't as well tended as the first one in September but I ended up going back up to read twice! That is two more times after my initial reading 🙂

I also bumped into someone I hadn't seen for a while who was very excited as he has 'always loved my work' 🙂 and got even more excited when I pointed out I now had a poetry blog.

I read:

The Markov Chains of Literature

A Little Chaos

The Break-Up

I Want

The Baby-Wocky

Ladybirds (by alaric)

Sitting at my desk working, I found a spider in my hair. So I went and opened the window to put it out.

This is, the big office window's not been opened for a while. As I opened it, lots of stuff rained down on me. And when I looked I realised I was covered in ladybirds.

Seems they're attempting to hibernate in the gap between the window and the frame - except now they're all disturbed. So I shook them off of me, and left them to collect together so I can decide what to do with them.

I took some pictures as they started forming good clusters:

But there's plenty more than that still making their way into the clusters... and I opened the other side of the window as they were crawling into the gap from the inside (and I don't want them inside), which caused a whole load more to shower down.

Wish me luck.

Poetry Monster a.k.a. Turquoise Monster (by sarah)

With National Poetry Day Yesturday I thought it was time to finially launch my Poetry Blog it is in fact another Monster - this time Turquoise Monster who is a Bardic Rhymerian Monster 🙂

Anyway just thought I'd let you all know that Turquoise exists 🙂

Hero Poem by Jean (by sarah)

Today is National Poetry Day Uk and with giant knitted poems and a flock of fun events around the place I thought I'd get Jean to write a poem on the theme.

This is it 🙂 :

Super hero!

Super man

Doctor

The UK MoD Manual of Security has been leaked (by alaric)

The UK MoD Manual of Security has appeared on WikiLeaks.

I'm not certain this is a good thing, to be honest... the intelligence services are renowned for overstepping their mark, and I'm sure the sections on dealing with investigative journalists and the like will be useful to those who fight against that kind of thing, but I suspect the bits about dealing with foreign intelligence agencies would probably have best been kept secret. Still, the cat is out of the bag, so perhaps it's no bad thing if the MoD are forced to have a total security audit and overhaul their manual 🙂

I've not managed to download it - WikiLeaks servers seem to be rather busy - but the front page does have some interesting snippets from the sections about visitors to China and Russia, discussing the kinds of things the local intelligence agencies do to try and extract Western commercial and military secrets.

This has some interesting bearing on the growing tendency to outsource software development tasks to developing countries. I know a lot of this work does go to China, and so we can probably assume that any intellectual property made available to developers in China is probably scrutinised by their security services and passed on to Chinese companies that may be able to benefit from it.

In the depths of my career history, I once worked on a software system that was to be used in a Government project to protect the nation's "critical national infrastructure"; and I gather that another part of the system was outsourced to an Indian development team. I'm not sure if the client was actually made aware of this, but at the time, I felt concerned that national security might be threatened by this.