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"The Scottish Executive will ensure communities throughout Scotland have access to broadband by the end of 2005, the enterprise minister has said."

This message posted on the Broadband for Scotland site:

"STOP PRESS: All remaining trigger exchanges to get broadband by summer 2005
All remaining local exchanges in the Highlands and Islands with trigger points set are to be broadband-enabled by the summer of 2005. This was the undertaking made by BT as they announced the scrapping of the pre-registration scheme and a commitment to make broadband available because of already well-proven demand."

Just to let you know there's brand new Epostcards on the .

Send a pal an image of Oban, Applecross, Colonsay, Oronsay or Tobermory.

Apologies for the shameless advertising!

Greetings to bloggers old and new. Welcome Wil and welcome back Archiemeanoch(we thought you had foresaken us).

At last some good news on what has not been a good week. I got locked out of own house on Monday (took two hours to chisel through my own chubb lock). Then last night someone put a brick through my car window at 3 in the morning. For their trouble they acquired a sheaf of old train tickets, a trowel, some rhubarb root seedlings, a pair of garden gloves, and a book of matches.

I'm a swing voter tempted to move over to the Hang 'Em and Flog 'Em brigade or get behind the minority parties like the "Smasha Ma 72 Beetle and I Smasha Your Face Party".

I go this message from Mark Sweeting:
"I started a directory of British Bloggers from all over the world just under a month ago, and over the last few days I've been trying to get more Scottish people to join up.

Our Scottish members have grown from 1 to 12 in the last couple of days, but they all seem to be based towards the South end of Scotland. Would it be possible for you to mention BritBlog somewhere on your site to encourage people from the Islands to join up?"

To which I said 'yes'. Mark continues:L

"Your readers may especially like the UK bloggers map, because once people from the islands add themselves to it, they will
be able to see which bloggers are near by."

from the Guardian:

"When the Electoral Commission discovered last month that women don't involve themselves in party politics - preferring to vote, sign petitions and talk behind the scenes - worried female columnists in Westminster came up with a variety of explanations.

Women don't like joining groups; they don't like swallowing a party manifesto whole; they think there are too many men in the game, and too few women. These are plausible enough explanations. But the one that caught my eye turned up a few paragraphs down the reports, noted slightly shamefacedly: women have relatively little confidence in their ability to influence the political process.

Never mind the guff about women preferring to vote for women: this is the key finding. Unfortunately, there's no easy fix for a lack of self-belief. Even more depressingly, women's reticence is evident in the bright new playground which the fringes of Westminster are beginning to notice: that of political blogs.
Women do blog. just under 40% of English-language weblogs were owned by men and 36.3% by women (the rest belonged to groups, or were of unknown origin). But BlogCensus also found that nearly half the weblogs surveyed were personal diaries - and in that category, women outnumbered men by about two to one. Fewer than one in 20 of the political blogs was written by a woman."

"Councillors in Lochaber have thrown out four out of five bids by Wind Energy Ltd to erect masts to assess the potential for a future development."

I see this story in the papers today:

"GIGHA is to be the site of Scotland's first community-owned windfarm.Three second-hand 225kw wind turbines will stand 31 metres high (45 metres when a propeller blade is vertical) in a field at the south of the island near Achamore House. Sales of electricity from the three turbines are expected to generate up to 拢80,000 a year, paying for their own upkeep and funding development projects on the island."

It would be interesting to see how the anti-wind farm people respond to this? Would this community owned scheme be something you'd consider, or is it windpower itself that you oppose? It seems as if there's two different models emerging of how renewable energy evolves. Would you back it?

Just as a contribution to the Puffer discussion going on in and around Island Wanderer I spied the Vital Spark lying up at Crinan a few months ago. I hope she's not going to be allowed just to lie and rot there?