Savoury stuffed marrow

Something for Natalie to do with her spare courgettes . . .

Ingredients
1 marrow (or large courgettes)
2oz butter
2oz plain flour
¼ pint milk
4oz cheddar cheese grated
1tblsp freshly chopped tarragon or thyme
2tblsp chopped parsley
Salt and ground black pepper
8oz cooked chicken diced
1oz white breadcrumbs

Method

1. Peel marrow, cut in half lengthwise and scoop out seeds.
2. Bring large pan water to the boil, add marrow and simmer for 4-5 minutes. Drain and arrange cavity side up in lightly oiled, ovenproof dish.
3. Preheat oven gas 5, 190C.
4. Melt butter in saucepan, stir in flour and cook for 1 minute. Gradually stir in the milk, bring to the boil and simmer until thick and smooth.
5. Remove from the heat and stir in most of the cheese, most of the herbs and the chicken. Season to taste and spoon into the marrow cavities.
6. Mix breadcrumbs and remaining herbs. Season and sprinkle over the marrow filling. Bake for 25 minutes until golden. For extra crunch, place under a hot grill for 1 minute before serving.

Serves 4

Tescos v Police Stations

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/7957168/Twice-as-many-Tescos-open-247-as-police-stations.html

This prompted some twitter conversation this evening so I thought I'd blog a bit about it.

For a start, I didn't believe there were more Tescos open 24 hours, seven days per week than police stations in Essex so I did a bit of research of my own.  I even plotted the results in a Google Map:


View Tescos v Police: 24 hours servcies in Essex in a larger map


Red - 24/7 Police Stations
Blue - 'nearly' 24/7 Tescos
Purple - 24/7 Tesco (Brentwood)

The results were quite interesting. There are 15 '24 hour' Tescos in Essex but only one of these are genuinely open 24/7.  All the others are open 24/7 for 5 days of the week, normally Tuesday - Saturday with regular hours on Sundays and Mondays.

In contrast there are 11 police stations open 24/7 out of a total of 49 station which are open to the public.
I think Richard Edwards, the Telegraph Crime Correspondent may need to dig a bit deeper into the Tescos stats and check those '24/7' claims again.  If there is only 1 genuine 24/7 Tescos in Essex, it is likely that there are more like 50 - 75 nationwide, not 394 as reported.  Unfortunately, the storefinder on the Tescos website offers many options to filter stores but there is no 24/7 filter!

This leads on to another debate.  Can you really compare a public service paid for by the tax payer and a commercial business driven by profit?

How many people need to go shopping (and how often) compared to those needing to visit a police station?  We visit Sainsburys 3 or 4 times a week and spend several hours in there in total.  I don't think I have ever needed to visit a police station except for my job (and that doesn't count).  If every family in the UK had a need to spend several hours per week in a police station, there would be many more and they would probably be as big as your average Tescos or Sainsburys.

I have had a need to use an airport more often in the last 25 years than I have had need of a police station.  However, I think it is OK that there is only 1 airport in Essex and only three international airports in the region. I'm not demanding that there should be 15 airports in Essex so why should there need to be 15 24/7 police stations?

LoveFilm - HateFilm

I Hate LoveFilm.  No I don't really but we're not currently on friendly terms.

Not only have all the last 3 Blu-ray discs been faulty to the point of unwatchable, we now have an ordinary DVD which doesn't work either.  This one is the 1932 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  Tested in two different DVD players, it jumps and skips at exactly the same point and you have to skip to the next chapter to clear the fault. We also have the last Indiana Jones film at home on Blu-ray and I am almost dreading watching it for fear of wasting another 2 hours.

LoveFilm have been in touch via email and Twitter to stress that their rental discs are exactly the same as the retail ones and that they get regularly checked and cleaned.  They also ensure they give me back the credits for the damaged films but I still feel annoyed about wasting 2 hours to find out.

AudioBoo - more clips

AudioBoo official button

AudioBoo is a good tool to distribute audio clips and seems to work in a similar way to Twitter and YouTube.  I'm not sure if it will catch on as a mainstream social media outlet alongside the giants of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube etc but it seems to be unique in the market place.  I have added some more clips and will now upload any new audio added the the Essex Police website.

The only problem is that out of 4 browsers, I still cannot upload a clip from work.  Being on IE6 doesn't help but Firefox, Safari and Opera all couldn't cope. Chrome is a no-no apparently because it has to be installed per user and it generally is too modern and forward thinking.  Firefox almost made it but failed at the last minute.  It decided Flash player wasn't up to it and threw some kind of error.

Would be interested to see if anyone else is considering using it.  It does offer comments which you cannot pre-moderate but it is supposed to send an email if anyone comments or if anyone follows you - similar to Twitter.  So far nobody is following and nobody has commented so I can't test to see if the emails are actually sent or not!

AudioBoo success

I have added 5 audio clips to audioboo.fm this evening.  This is in effect a trial for a suitable outlet for our audio clips alongside YouTube for our video clips.



You can even embed it into a web page!  You only have control over the width and height.  It needs to be fairly wide otherwise the title text bunches up a bit.  Not bad though.

Twitter stats

Police forces on Twitter - August 2010

This is a graph to show the forces who are using Twitter.  The force with the most tweets on the left and the forces currently not using twitter on the right.  Everyone else in the middle! Interesting to note is the range of tweets (red) compared with the followers (blue).  Also, it seems not many forces feel it is important to follow those people who are following them.

This map shows the forces (blue) who are currently using Twitter with those not yet involved in yellow.

It would be interesting to know if any of the 10 forces not yet on Twitter are planning their introduction or have already decided against it.

If I have this wrong, of if any forces join Twitter in the coming months, please comment and let me know.  In six months time, it will be interesting to see if there is a difference in the coverage on this map.

I'll aim to do a similar blog entry for forces on Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

And finally, has anyone discovered AudioBoo yet?

http://audioboo.fm

This site is a perfect complement to the social media sites.  Audio can be uploaded in a similar way to Twitter and there are close links to Twitter, Facebook and podcasts with iTunes.

ukpolcamp, crowdsourcing and npwmg

I went onto Wikipedia to find out more about crowdsourcing after it was mentioned on Twitter.

"Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call."

I like this idea a lot.  It appeals as a compromise between continuing development in isolation within an organisation where innovation can become stilted and soured (see institutional memory), and the outright waste of money by passing everything into the commercial environment where money has to be more important than anything else.


I would like to explore the dynamics of mixing the desires of the various police web managers to work collaboratively; the wider scoping of a barcamp and the ultimate public collaboration of crowdsourcing.  Maybe a group like the web managers would be better engaged in providing organisational support and momentum in creating the appropriate environment for effective police barcamps and crowdsourcing (and then taking part) than trying to work together initially on their own.


This leads to to considering how an open environment which includes the public can work in developing resources to improve police IT and web systems.  Public automatically includes criminals and those others who would love to disrupt developments.  This aspect can be taken positively or negatively and I would hope that the potential benefits would outweigh the overly protective attitude police forces traditionally have to all things new (see institutional memory again!).


What would the environment look like?


I see two separate areas to consider.


1. The places where people discuss ideas, present concepts and agree policy both in meetings, barcamps, blogs, websites, Twitter etc.


2. The point where code and graphics are created, databased and where web projects are incubated.


The first is just words and ideas and something anyone can already freely get involved in anyway but my concern is when the words start turning into prototype sites and real development.  How can access to developing code and sites be both open and accessible and also controlled and kept safe from rogue code and scripts?  I think this is the key area the web managers could assist in - the gatekeepers of the code, controlling the interface between the experiments and proposals from the wider collaborative communities and the secure, safe environment where the development is tweeked, tested and perfected prior to first release.


This is an area where Google or Mozilla can surely assist us?  They manage the fine line between mass collaboration which includes the public and the end products.


Got to stop now - ITV4 is showing the Touring Car Championships from Snetterton in Norfolk where the two boys have been taken for the day by Peter our next-door neighbour. I need to be fairly clued up with the races, drivers and general terminology for when they come back later on. 


Jason Plato has won the first race - who's he then?