Entries from April 2009 ↓

Panic in the Techbelly family’s secret underground lair this morning when we thought the washing machine broken. A domestic disaster, given the child’s insistence of vomitting on or otherwise soiling everything we own, every day, more than once.

Just so others can find this post: the broken washing machine was a Siemens xlp1400 (or maybe xlp 1400), and the symptom was a flashing key symbol.

Turns out it wasn’t broken – the flashing key symbol meant that the child lock had been accidentally engaged. The fix, given by the friendly folks on the Siemens help-line: simply hold down the start button for two seconds. Bingo, the laundry cycle can crank up again. They also offered to send us a new manual for the machine. Which was nice.

Couldn’t find any information on the interweb of how to solve this – hence this post. After-sales service on the web becomes increasingly impossible through the spew of affiliate and review sites that vie daily to dominate the search results – to everyone’s disadvantage it seems. (Although, it would have been helpful if Siemens published their manuals online in a way that google could search them. Just saying).

This might be the most boring post I’ve ever written. And the most useful.

Thinking more about my previous post decrying British journalism for its imbalance in reporting arrests and not releases.

So, I searched for ‘plymouth terror arrests’ on Google news:

Yep. That’s 422 reports of the arrest, 10 of the release. Only 3 news organisations reported the releases, and all of them as local news.

See the problem?

You know, we could make this a story again if we all blog about it, tweet it, link to it on facebook. Please do.

Update: Paul has blogged about this and added it to Reddit. Please vote up if you think this deserves more coverage.

I’m sure that in a newsroom somewhere there’s a journalist or editor with a bee in their inky bonnet about the arrest and subsequent release of 5 people in Plymouth last week.

I’m sure there’s someone arguing that the release without charge of these five people should be plastered all over today’s newspapers. After all, their arrest under the Terrorism Act received blanket front page coverage.

I’m sure there’s a passionate journalist, right now, doorstepping the police officers involved and trying to tease out how the arrest of a 25-year-old man for spraying the grafito ‘Antifa’ lead to the unwarranted detention of 4 others under the Terrorism Act.

I’m sure there’s someone asking what it must be like to be a 16-year-old schoolboy wrongly arrested under the Terrorism Act.

I’m sure a feared editor is banging a table with angry fists and sending journalists scurrying to uncover the facts: to disclose the ‘information [the police] had at the time of the arrests’; to make public the evidence presented to the district judge that allowed their continued detention.

I’m sure the ‘material relating to political ideology’ is about to be revealed in an in-depth investigative report. We’ll soon know if we’re talking about tracts inciting revolution or copies of Thatcher’s autobiography.

I’m sure that one of those awful infographic timelines is being sketched out, describing what came to light between the initial Friday night arrest for simple criminal damage and the Sunday arrests of his associates.

It may well be that the police actions were proportionate and necessary – in good faith. But something smells wrong here – and has done from the initial reports of the action. Surely there’s a journalist or editor somewhere that’s pursuing this story?

So far, no evidence of said reporter has appeared.