Dumpling in a Hanky

Oh, it’s all go on the jury front at the moment! First, I’m called up to be a juror, then the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales decides to d iscuss the topic of tweeting and doing online research while acting as a juror . In terms of my own experience in a Scottish court, I have to say, there weren’t any warnings about tweeting or going online via our phones by anyone official while I was in the public area of the court, or the jury room. I think there may have been a comment by the Clerk to turn phones to silent while we waited to be selected, but that may be a figment of my imagination, as I was reminding myself to make sure my phone was on silent while sitting there. Once selected and led to the jury room we were told by the court officer that we had to turn our phones off, and we were to be allowed one phone call to a relevant person who needed to know we’d been selected and therefore unavailable until 4pm (childminders etc) on the landline in the room, but other than ...

So, I work in a law firm, I deal with law-type stuff…but it’s all commercial law. I’ve never dealt with criminal law, and have no real clue about how that all works. So, when I got my third call for jury duty in three years (the first two years they exempted me as my current and previous workplaces mean I know various legal types, and may have opinions that would render me biased, but this time I thought I’d go along anyway and they could dismiss me if they felt I was unlikely to be able to serve ), I turned up to the Sheriff Court like a good girl. And my, what a long, long, boring day that turned out to be! The juror citation letter said come in at 10, but call the helpline after 5pm the day before for more information. The phoneline says come in at 10.30. I arrived at 10.30, joined the queue of other people clutching letters, while we waited outside the designated court for 10 mins. We all filed in and sat down, all 60 plus of us, and the Clerk of court gave a 5 min brie...

Well, 4 days after I’d been told my material would be taken off that site…it was still there. So I sent a further email saying if it was not removed immediately, I would be taking the matter up with their ISP (and many thanks to the peeps who commented, and gave me the info on how to do this if I needed to). And I got a reply: Hello, As we have informed you before, we remove the details. Don't worry. We have stopped updating this section about 2 years before. So we are checking the credentials of the articles section with design dept. Surely we will remove it shortly. Then, a follow up a few hours later: Please check it, its removed. And lo and behold, it is indeed gone…yay! However, all that other content from other people/sites, harvested in 2008 is still sitting there. But telling all those people is a bigger job than I can take on...

It's called "A Big Boy did it, and ran away", aka "It wisnae us, Guv" This is the text of the (to give them credit, admittedly fast) response I got from the website that was using my blog post, as mentioned previously : Dear Sir, Apologies for the issue. Thanks for your information. we will remove the same. It was happened by our operators who has posted about long back. We got permissions from the authors that time. Some of the posts they have put like this. Best Regards Venkat Sure So, according to them, it was posted on their site a while ago (I'm assuming in 2008, as that's when the posts lifted from me and others were created), and they got permission from the authors at that time? Well, unless I have changed personality since 2008*, I never gave that permission, so that's no real excuse. And...as of now, my content is still there. How long exactly should it take to remove my content? How long should I give them, before moving from S...

And, as many of my posts can prove, I'm no insightful writer, or awesome, world-shaking thinker. I know my level, and it's kinda low :) But I do write this blog, and it is all the product of my own, random mind. I don't blog on legalish/bookish/techiesh stuff anywhere else, and I've never done a guest blog post elsewhere either: anything I write as "Jennie Law" is here, and only here. It may not be of any great intellectual value, I get no financial benefit from it, but it is mine, all mine. So when I found that someone had come to my blog recently via a link on another site, to an old post from 2008 about ebooks, I wondered why they were looking at such old stuff, and who was referring to it. I followed the link back, and I found that the entirety of the 2008 post on ebooks is available on the site where the visitor originated from, with a link at the bottom to my blog post . The company is SGD Networks , which appears to be based in India, and has nothing ...

...you know, where I've been since I last posted about going to Australia. Well.... Would you believe me if I told you that I'd somehow ended up wandering in the port in the early hours of the morning, and accidentally stumbled into a shipping container, which somehow locked itself behind me? * And that after hours of banging on the walls and shouting to no avail, I fell into an exhausted asleep, only to be woken up when I felt the container swaying gently around, before being jolted across the floor when it thumped down suddenly? Soon after that, I heard the ringing and clanging bangs of other containers being placed around and above mine, trapping me in the centre of a pile of huge metal boxes. I was enclosed in a container-made cage, on what I had to assume was a ship, bound for an unknown destination with its registered cargo. Plus the addition of an unauthorised, accidental stowaway. With no way out of the metal box, I just had to resign myself to settling in and waiting, ...