I wouldn’t say I was a highly experienced or adept WordPress designer but I have learnt a thing or two about how it works over the years, and I do have all number of instances of it working in various ways in my main work, my freelance, and personal life. Today, I was able to bring all of these influences together to fix the faculty news pages quickly. It was just an added bonus that in doing so I was also able to solve a problem on both this personal blog, and the Abingdon Concert Band website.

What I don’t understand is why the government think that it’s going to make the world a safer place to know the ins and outs of everything we do and say online. Yes, I know that bad people are planning bad things via the internet, just they are doing exactly the same thing on the phone, in the back rooms of pubs, and front rooms across the country. And you know what, they always will, for as long as there are bad people in the world. But this doesn’t mean that they need to snoop on us all. If it does, why do they not have a civil servant standing in the corner of all our front rooms and public houses taking notes of everything we say?

And how many years has the Royal Mail been in existence? Never have they seriously suggested that the government should be keeping a record of every piece of post that is delivered. Even if they did, unless they made it compulsory for every piece of mail to have not just the recipient’s details displayed on the front, but also the the sender’s and a brief subject line of what it’s about. So why are email and online transactions any different? It just doesn’t make sense.