I might be causing a bit of controversy here (so it’s just as well nobody reads this) when I say that I’m quite content to see the rebranding going on at Imperial. Saying that I am happy is a different matter (nobody paid me millions to do it, unfortunately), but in contrast to a commonly held attitude among the more vocal of Imperial students, I don’t have much to gripe about.

The name change is fairly reasonable. It’s now "Imperial College London", with the preferred shortened version as simply "Imperial", whereas it used to be either "IC", or "Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine". Or, if you want to keep track of the newest ventures in what is supposed to be a university soley for science and technology, it could have been called "Imperial College of Science, Technology, Medical Sciences, Agriculture Sciences, Business Sciences and Engineering Sciences", or something similar. So long as people don’t use "ICL", or start messing around with punctuation (what a bunch of dipsticks, by the way), then I’ll be fine with it.

As for the visual branding, I didn’t have that much of an issue with the old colours, but I didn’t particularly like the college logo (a coat of arms of some sort). Too old fashioned, too fiddly for webpages and rugby shirts, and should have been kept as a coat of arms or crest, instead of being used as the day to day logo of the University. (For those of you not at Imperial, we’re the second best university in Britain, but like to confuse all and sundry by calling ourselves a college, when we aren’t.) Unfortunately, the new brand doesn’t have a logo at all, which is highly unusual. We really need something for rugby shirts and memorabilia, where just writing "Imperial College London", in Arial, would look a bit lame.

Signage : if people have any complaints about putting ’sticky backed plastic’ posters over the old signs, then I’m open to suggestions about a better way of doing it. Waiting until each sign needs replacing could take decades and would make the rebranding awfully patchy, replacing every sign immediately would cost thousands. Surely covering over the old signs is a good compromise (and it looks fine to me).

I’m not that bothered about the changes from ic.ac.uk to imperial.ac.uk, since it’ll hopefully stop the geeky ick-ack-uck way of saying things - it’s really geeky, since it’s only if you already recognise it that you know what it means. For anyone outside the academic community, then the new one will be easier to remember, since it has more meaning to them. Clapping yourself on the back for spotting obscure occurences of the old form (like in the IC directory) is fairly lame, but it seems that some people think it makes them far better than whoever is trying to organise the huge changeover. Grow up, kiddy-winkles.

On an aside, this is the longest ever weblog entry - I started writing it five hours ago, but got bored half way through, wandered off, and I’ve just finished it now since I’m going to bed. Sweet dreams.

I found a leaflet about the forthcoming congestion charge for taking your car into central London, which starts next month. I think it should be renamed to a £5 stupidity tax, but that’s not really very politically correct. There’s already been threats that vigilante car-lovers will be taking to the streets to try and destroy the cameras that read your registration number. I hope that if they do, they get a right good beating up from the police. But again, not very politically correct.

Basically, what gets on my nerves are the complaints about public transport in London. It’s obviously not perfect, but trust me, if you’ve every tried living out in the west of Scotland, the transport system in London is pretty darned impressive. On Monday, I paid £8.50 for my first bus pass (I’m bored with walking in and out of college) which gets me all zones, unlimited journeys, all services and operators, twenty four hours a day (and the buses do run all night, every night) for seven days. Which is rather good value. The down side is that the buses aren’t particularly fast - although at peak times the nearest bus stop has three routes, two of which have buses at 4 minute intervals (so around 1-2 minutes between buses!), it’s not significantly quicker than walking. That’s because there’s so many cars, each with one or two people in them, crawling along, parking in bus lanes and clogging up the roundabouts. If there were no cars, the buses would go much faster, and would therefore be seriously good. It’s not like the drivers are a major proportion of commuters - less than 10%. Get rid of them, and the 30% of commuters on the buses would end up with a gold plated service, and we’d even let former car drivers come and join us, for much less than they currently pay.

I sincerely hope that the £5 congestion charge is the start of a slippery slope of increasing charges and increasing zone areas, ending up with a few stubborn drivers entirely subsidising the public transport for the rest of us. That would be sweet.

After having stuffed up rotating the server logs earlier this afternoon, I was having a look at the new one to make sure it was working properly, only to find that the webserver itself was requesting pages every few seconds, and in fact, one page in particular. Then I remembered that Sam was pestering me last night about setting up an RSS feed so that he can put links to my weblog on his pages. I said I couldn’t be bothered, so now he’s parsing the archive page every single time anyone looks at any webpage on his site. So it’s just as well that UKShells internal traffic doesn’t get added to my bandwidth, although I might have to rotate my logs more often if he keeps this up…

There’s a few boring website related things planned for the next time I get a chance. I’ll be putting navigation links into the archive pages, so that you can easily read back an forward through them. The front page might get an overhall, and I’ve also been looking at accessibility thanks to Mark Pilgrim’s accessibility guide. I’d been using the abbreviation tag <abbr> to mark up all the abbreviations that I use, but found out that Internet Explorer will only recognise the acronym tag (every other browser recognises both). So rather than splitting hairs over the difference between the two, I’ve changed them all for the underprivileged IE users.

Finally, before I head off to a lecture, a quick hello to another fellow webloger out there. I still haven’t figured out which particular IC Student is responsible for this set of rantings. Honest.

So, I think that just about covers it for the ‘broad brush stroke’ approach to the problems in the Union. There are, however, one or two things that I would like to point out before I move on.

I seem to constantly harp on about my disciplinary, leaving myself open to accusations of a lack of perspective. I want to make it clear that I don’t think it was particularly important in the great scheme of things, but it unfortunately served to highlight a number of flaws in the Union processes. In addition, since I was actually there, I can easily use it to illustrate the points that I’m trying to make; I’m always concerned about just making sweeping accusations with no examples, since that just sounds like unhelpful griping. So it’s not quite as important to me as it can sometimes sound.

What do I want to come from this? I don’t want to go on some sort of crusade, I don’t want anyone else to have to either. What I would like is for some serious consideration to be given to the points that I’ve been making, which will hopefully make the Union a better place in the future. And that’s an important point - I don’t want to dwell on past mistakes, but for the Union to learn from those mistakes, and make sure that the next decision, meeting or discussion is carried out that little bit better.

Finally, I don’t want to be seen as over critical of the way the Union is run. I’ve spent the last few days doing nothing but give heavy criticisms, but there’s plenty to do with the Union that is done properly and fairly. There are some areas that need some work though, and I’ve tried to explain each in turn, in the hope that some out there is willing to listen.

Communications have been an issue within the Union for some time, to the point where the setting up of a "Communictions Working Group" was recommended in the aftermath of my disciplinary. In true comic style, nobody knows when it meets, what its mandate is, or who is allowed to attend. That shows the need for the working group I guess.

The lack of communication leads to a mistrust of the Union officers; rumours spread around, and we don’t know what’s going on. But I’ve come to the opinion that while I harp on about communication most of all, it may merely be a consequence of the previous four items that I’ve addressed - the lack of respect, responsibility, transparency and perspective. After all, we have a fully functioning webserver, mechanisms for minutes publication, email addresses for all the sabbaticals, various student newspapers; we have all the communication infrastructure that we need to ensure smooth distribution of information. But until the Union officers garner the required attitude to their jobs and duty, then the infrastructure will be wasted - the official Union news site that I developed is a perfect example - fully working infrastructure that is not being used.

I’ll stretch the meaning of perspective here, purely for the aid of a more snappy title. Not only do our student officers lack the ability to judge the relative importance of issues, they also lack the ability to think of issues from multiple viewpoints.

I’ll take the second idea first, for no particular reason. It is a rare talent indeed to be able to see an issue from all possible directions, and extremely valuble if you have got it. I don’t. Neither do our officers. But at least I try to work around my lack of talent, by listening to what others say, not just jumping for the first thing I think of, and trying to consider other options. For example, I had a drunken yet very enlightening conversation with Dave Parry last year on the LEQ system, and students hacking into it. He pointed out that the real problem is with lecturers hacking it; after all, it’s their jobs that are on the line, they are the ones with a vested interest in the results. I totally hadn’t thought of that, but Dave was right in what he said. On the other hand, we have the suggested policy from Sen of an amnesty on all outstanding disposal of chemicals and other Health and Safety issues. He was unable to concieve, despite my best efforts, that this is a purely damaging idea - instead of encouraging people to act responsibly, this only benefits groups that have been maliciously hiding issues due to the cost of sorting them out. If you stumble across and issue, like we did with the chemicals, but this happens to be the week after the amnesty, then you will be (financially) punished. Good guys lose, bad guys win. But neither Sen nor any other member of Exec had worked that out, which is worrying. I had no duty to think the LEQ issue through thoroughly, but our officers absolutely must do so. Yet they don’t.

Instead, they continually make policy that they haven’t thought through properly. How many people realise that we will shortly be advertising for an election for the new DPSA, even though that’s what they voted to do. My hat goes off to Jude Baxter for being the only one to vote against our new policy against graduate taxes. Two issues with this - firstly, there are actually a lot of Imperial student who see graduate tax as the preferred way of solving the funding crises (and is similar to my preferred method); Council should be representing those views. That was Jude’s concern. My concern is that the Union is rapidly backing itself into a corner on the whole funding issue. Instead of trying to rate some ideas as good, some as better, and some worse, the Union is blanketly applying the "not acceptable" to almost every solution proposed. They don’t seem to realise that putting your fingers in your ears and saying ‘no’ all the time rapidly loses all credibility, with the students and with the government. But the paper they passed was written less than an hour before the meeting, and passed with a few seconds debate without anyone considering the full consequencies of their action.

With the relative importance issue, I’ll try to be brief. It’s probably the biggest bugbear of ordinary students, especially those not involved in clubs or other Union activities. Dealing with matters that affect all of the students, such as transport and housing, come a sorry second to the internal structure debates and bureacratic pernicities of a typical Union meeting. I worked for the Union over the summer, and nobody could say what we were doing for the vast majority of students we are supposed to represent that neither come to the bar nor join our clubs. Health and Safety issues - moving the chemicals was the least dangerous thing I’ve done this year. I am qualified to say that, as a trained chemist, yet our officers hear the words "Dangerous Chemicals", "pouring down the sink", and stick their oars in where it wasn’t necessary, and was counter productive. They don’t understand the risks, they have no experience of the matters, yet they make no effort to find out more to enable them to put things into perspective.

An observer at the last council was of the opinion that his paper on "Fair Trade" was more important than the censure, to the point where he repeatedly (and successfully) tried to stop the discussion, so that he instead could spend yet more time trying to advertise his newly formed working group. His point was that coucil had lost their sense of perspective on the importance of following the rules, but I would argue that his perspective on the importance of his paper was also lacking. But he’s far from the only person involved in the running of the Union who lacks perspective.