Even more me
Diving deeper « About BC and me
Hello, again!
I'm William Leamy, the blogger formerly known as UU Pee-Ell, which you'll know already if you've been following the plot carefully. I live in the leafier part of Cricklewood, the capital of the London Borough of Brent in north-west London in the UK, a region of the European Union. My background is a varied, though far from illustrious, career which includes a stint as a country bumpkin, with a few years each in the catering, outdoor leisure, and creative industries with, latterly, a lifetime as an administrator in the pen-pushing industry. (Not actually a lifetime; it just feels like that!)
I'm a rather shy, retiring individual who guards his jealousy privately, and with absolutely no desire whatsoever for easy publicity. Consequently, I've not posted a photograph of myself on this here blog. Because it's natural for visitors to want to 'see what the blogger looks like', this absence of personal pictorial embellishment is not intended maliciously and visitors should not take it as a slight. I too like to 'see what the blogger looks like' and, to help assuage possible negative feelings, I've posted an image of the original Macintosh computer saying 'hello' on my 'about me' page. I feel there's just one thing worse than the absence of the blogger's photograph, and that's the omission of any image which readers can associate with the blogger. Anyway, I'm still paying for the damage my mush caused to the last camera which attempted to capture it in all it's gory glory!
Subject matter
Bent Council was started in January 2008 and there are just two topics; 'Corrupt Council' and 'Nasty neighbour'. Its purpose is to document the difficulties I have experienced as the victim of a 'neighbour from hell'. In reading the full story of the events in the period July 2003 to May 2004, it is my hope neighbours will understand I was left with no choice but to carry out the unusual actions I did during this period, and that they will see that my concern for their feelings remained a priority. This sorry saga is given context with a full chronicle of events in the period spanning the late-1980s to the mid-2000s in relation to the nuisance behaviour of this family insofar as it affected myself.
By including posts setting out the additional difficulties caused by Brent Council through its failure to deal effectively with the nuisance presented by this neighbour, it is my hope that, by this publicity, I will purge the sense of outrage I feel towards Brent Council. Nothing can assuage the contempt I feel towards the parasitic elements within Brent Council and whom I have identified throughout this site. By identifying them, I hope to flush these parasites from the woodwork and allow their future to rest in the hands of upright citizens within the community. They have shown themselves unfit to be entrusted with service to the public at any level.
The Bent Council tag-line, The bottom-dwellers, means someone living outside agreed standards of decency and refers to the behaviour of Brent Council's 'housing service' from the late 1990s onwards, but it also describes the contempt I feel for those individual employees of this organisation whom I have identified throughout this blog. In doing so, I hope to ameliorate the trauma I have suffered because of the behaviour of both this neighbour and this organisation, and to expose to the world the nature of a 'Council from hell' funded by the hard-earned cash of the residents of the London Borough of Brent.
The content of Bent Council is very serious, but some posts are written in a faintly humorous sort of way; my aim is to write in a way which is entertaining, even if only so in a barely recognisable fashion. Comments are welcomed via e-mail, with my actual e-mail address shown as a click-able link on the 'About BC and me' page. Sometimes, I actually respond to e-mails from readers.
The layout
I've got a strong interest in product branding and have constructed my site such that it has a unique layout in terms of atmosphere and navigation, and have taken great care to establish a solid identity for Bent Council. I've constructed the interface with a genuflection nod to minimalism and which reflects accurately my love of the simple things in life, but without being 'simplistic'. Naturally, I'm keen to show to the world my interpretation of the minimalist aesthetic and use Bent Council unashamedly to this end :-) This also ensures that bandwidth requirements are kept to a minimum, particularly for those visitors who have a dial-up connection.
Unfortunately, Internet Explorer up to version 7 does not render my site acceptably and, in one swell foop, Microsoft Corporation have managed to make a complete dog's dinner of the shining star of my carefully-constructed layout, the fixed sidebar. There actually is a hack available to force these early versions of Internet Explorer to render any element using the CSS1 position: fixed property, but I have no wish to increase my site code with this hack. If you are still using this technological dinosaur, shame on you! Said Corporation's latest version of this browser, IE8, has saved the day and finally supports the peg upon which I hang my sidebar. Unfortunately, I have provided myself with an entry to the world of one William Henry Gates the turd third and his Windows OS, and now am able to code my site so that the fruits of Mr Gates' more unacceptable practices are reduced to an absolute minimum.
No advertising
Apart from a few small graphic images ('buttons') showing the operating system under which run the applications I've used to create the site and which allow me to manage it more easily, and including links to fellow blogosphereians, I don't have paid-for advertising on my blog, for the following reasons;
1 - based upon the reports of those who rely on advertising revenue, the few pennies it earns do not negate the trouble of setting up and managing the individual advertisements and,
2 - more importantly for me, advertising detracts from the minimalist interface I've created.
Furthermore, I find it difficult to accept that blogs can sometimes earn many tens of whatever currency in which you care to think, particularly when those same blogs have nothing of outstanding or unique content with which to attract revenue-earning visitors.
Blogger’s Nirvana
I'm not interested in achieving a 'Google Rank', high or otherwise, and haven't concerned myself with those aspects of internet design which implement the search engine magnets upon which these visitor ratings depend. Does this make me arrogant, or is it me just being me? I like to think so!
Basically, this blog is for my own satisfaction, and to help overcome the trauma of the hell into which I have been plunged by both this neighbour and this Council, and for nothing else. If, in this, others are entertained, enlightened or encouraged, I can wish for nothing more when manipulating this little bit of code which produces so much modern magic.
Related link
BC 2008 WPL · You did ask! · Bent Council
