Inspired partly by the Transition Town meeting last night – but more so by the lovely spring weather – we decided it was time to start turning the gravel bed at the back of the house into four productive raised beds for growing veggies. But what would we find under the stones? had the previous owner laced the soil with weedkiller?

We decided the safest plan was to create four temporary beds, plant potatoes and some spare onion / garlic / shallot sets, and see what happens. If all goes well, the conversion to raised beds will be an autumn project.

As the photos show, the initial results are encouraging. There’s a good spade and a half depth of good soil, and the odd earthworm wriggling around under the weed control fabric suggests that there isn’t anything too poisonous there.

One bed dug, three to go, then wait and see what grows!

At a public meeting last night, Kendal was formally announced as the latest Transition Town (there are apparently around 270). South Lakes Action on Climate Change, a local pressure group, announced they had successfully passed the audit to achieve TT status. The town mayor and local MP were there to add their congratulations.

TT’s grew as a response to the challenge of Peak Oil – the date when forecasters state that oil production will start to decline irreversibly. As the global economy is built on the relatively low cost and high availability of oil, environmentalists predict that without corrective action, this shortage would have catastrophic effects on the human race.

TTs are one attempt at corrective action at grass roots level – encouraging communities to start to transition now to a low carbon future. Last night’s meeting showed excerpts from In Transition 1 – the movement’s video manifesto, and there was no doubt about the enthusiasm and committment of the fifty or so people in the room.

However, earlier in the day I had watched the Tory prospective parliamentary candidate campaigning in the centre of town. He was attempting to raise the closure of a free informal car park in Kendal as a major issue in the area. If he is right in identifying this as the biggest issue in the town just now, then I think the good folks in TT have some way to go to winning hearts and minds of the people in the street in Westmorland.

The OpenOffice.org Marketing Project produces daily statistics for the number of people downloading the software from our central download site. You can always see the latest version here – and an explanation of why this is a big underestimate of the number of people adopting OpenOffice.org here.

Today’s graph (saved on this blog – click on the thumbnail for a bigger version) shows a couple of interesting ’spikes’. On 11th February we announced OpenOffice.org 3.2, and the downloads jumped as a result. This publicity is aimed at the general media and people who haven’t yet discovered OpenOffice.org.

On 26th February we switched on the online update notification for a number of language groups. This tells existing users directly that OpenOffice.org 3.2 is available. The result has been a much bigger and more sustained increase in downloads. So, well done developers – the new features added in this release are attracting old and new users alike.

We bought our new house in January with the intention of ‘greening’ it as a retirement project. We’d been reading resources such as the Green Building Magazine, the Green Building Bible, T-Zero, the Energy Saving Trust, etc. High on the list was improving the insulation of the walls. The house was built in the 1920s, with an unusual external timber frame construction (see the photo), and the walls are a mere 6 inches or so thick.

All the experts suggesr that the best way to go for this sort of house is external wall insulation (EWI) – like putting a tea cosy on a tea pot – and our house would appear to be perfect for this treatment. One of our neighbours’ houses has had its walls ‘thickened’ in the past, presumably by EWI (the work was done before the present owners bought the house). There are a number of proprietary products on the market, and the work would appear to be easily within the grasp of the average local builder.

Unfortunately, trying to find someone accredited to carry out the work is proving difficult. You can find installers’ websites which claim they do EWI, but a phone call shows they actually only do cavity wall insulation. The government is pouring grant money into cavity wall insulation, so the suspicion must be that installers have decided to concentrate where easy money is to be made.

Given that 1 in 4 homes in the UK have solid walls, this would appear to be a very short sighted approach. Our quest continues … watch this space.

Four years ago, the OpenOffice.org Marketing Project put together some web pages to present the case for using OpenOffice.org, which we called Why OpenOffice.org? It’s a sign of the increasing level of worry in Microsoft that they have now produced their own Why Microsoft? pages.

The recent launch of OpenOffice.org 3.2 ahead of MS-Office has scored a marketing point in the race to be “the 2010 Office Suite”. This regular flow of free upgrades from OpenOffice.org contrasts with the disruptive “let’s rearrange all the tables on the Titanic” upgrades every few years from its pricey rival. With their own surveys showing that OpenOffice.org has broken the key 20% market share figure in several key markets, Microsoft Europe are under particular pressure. Maybe they need to translate their Why pages into German, French, Italian, Spanish, etc as soon as possible

Accordingly, it is Ordered that the <openoffice2009.com>, <openoffice-gratuit.com>, <openoffice09fr.com>, <openoffice-fr.com>, <openoffice-pt.com>, <openoffice-pl.com>, and <openoffice-nl.com> domain names be TRANSFERRED from Respondent to Complainant..

With this ruling, Sun Microsystems has scored a victory against one operator of para-sites – sites which extract money from naive people searching for OpenOffice.org – a free download.

Unfortunately, it is only a small part of the solution. Most people are mis-directed to these para-sites via search engines. There is nothing to stop this operator setting up new domain names and buying keywords on search engines to direct people to the new sites.

As long as search engine operators turn a blind eye to these activities – and indeed generate advertising revenue from them – the problem will not go away. Search engines are big business, and with big business should come big responsibilities to act ethically, and not condone making money out of ignorance.

So, search engine operators – are you “evil” or not?

At last … we now have a temperamental but intermittently usable broadband connection at home … and so much has happened in the past month. The first ever face to face (f2f) meeting of the OpenOffice.org Community Council outwith a Conference … and OpenOffice.org 3.2 is announced to the community and to the world (after more release candidates than I care to count )

The minutes of the f2f meeting can be found on the Community Council pages in the wiki. I’d recommend them to anyone interested in OpenOffice.org activities, as the discussions covered a wide range of topics: from the recent Oracle announcements, to important changes to the OpenOffice.org infrastructure, to a new logo for OpenOffice.org.

And the new version? download it of course for all these reasons. I’d like to congratulate Florian for the way he handled all the Marketing tasks around the release. I was delighted when he agreed to take over the Marketing Project lead from me at the start of the year, and he’s doing a great job.