I woke up this morning to see this being retweeted by a few people I follow:

Even if I was to let my usual net-cynic side take over and decide there's a good chance it's a made-up story there's no getting away from the fact that this is a story that isn't in isolation. I hear this sort of thing time and again; especially from people who have to deal with the fallout from this first hand.

This is something that is happening, in 2015, in the country I live in.

I wish it wasn't.

This is why I find Labour's accusation of lying so damn annoying and frustrating. For a short while I simply decided that that was that. They're as corrupt as the rest of them and only in it for the money. This was made even more clear by how often they kept trumpeting the new member numbers. It's all about the numbers -- all about the money.

But then I saw this video:

and got to thinking that perhaps, just perhaps, some change for the better is actually happening inside Labour. Perhaps I should give the organisation the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps, if I contacted the membership team and asked why they'd decided I was lying, they'd give me the information and I could sort things out.

So I did. I wrote to them. I sent this to them, via the form on their website, on 2015-09-28:

On September 5th 2015 I received an email from you accusing me of having lied when I sought to become a supporter, with a view to applying to be a member after seeing the results of the leadership election. This was a rather hurtful event and one I wrote about here: http://blog.davep.org/2015/09/07/labour-said-no-thanks-to-my-support.html

Having watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYNPzJgV8TI I find myself in the odd position of liking the message of a party that, at the same time, accused me of something without evidence.

Given this I'd like to get to the bottom of what happened, hopefully find out what evidence was used to make the accusation and, perhaps, get an apology so that I can seriously consider joining and supporting what is happening.

I look forward to your reply.

I, of course, gave all my full details -- the email address I'd used, my home address, my full name, etc. All the information that I'd given when I signed up as a supporter. From what I could tell they had everything they needed to be able to check and give an adequate reply.

It took a while but I finally got a reply. This email came through on 2015-10-06:

So that seems pretty clear: a non-answer to my question and they're asking for another £10 on top of the £3 they already have off me to find out what evidence they have that meant it was okay for them to take my £3 and then accuse me of lying.

What's the betting that I'll spend that £10 and get a non-answer?

What's even more infuriating is that I'm not actually asking for information they have on file about me, I'm asking for clarification for something they've already told me.

It's really hard not to view this as a simple bait and switch.

So now I'm left wondering what to do next; trying to decide if I just give it up as a bad job and accept that, really, nothing has changed and they're as bad as ever. Corbyn might well be talking a good game but, under that cover, it's still just another money-grabbing organisation that wants power and very little change.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a creature of habit. Once I get used to something I find it hard to change. In many areas of my life there has to be really compelling reasons to change something. I've found that this is the case with my Android Wear watch.

When I first got it it took me a couple or so days to find a face that I was happy with and, in the end, I went with Pujie Black, along with a colour scheme I set up myself (called RGB, for obvious reasons).

Today though I stumbled on Krona Sunlight. This face really got my interest. Part of the reason is that, while what I'm wearing is normally called a "watch", I don't see it as a watch (just like my phone isn't really a phone). It's a wearable Android device that gives me handy info at a glance and lets me set reminders and things without even having to reach for my phone, tablet, Chromebook or desktop machine.

This face fits perfectly into that.

While it lacks the battery information (edit to add: it doesn't lack battery information, it's just an option that is off by default), and second time display, that Pujie Black has, it more than makes up for it with the rather fantastic display of weather and sunrise/set information -- especially how it displays temperature.

This was enough to not only have me buy a copy, but also to switch to it. I'm going to be sticking with it for the next couple of days to see how I feel about it and see if I miss any of the other information.

This might be a little bit of change I can cope with.

Apparently that famous Apple obsession with design doesn't apply to the time display on the OS X login screen (the wake-from-sleep password confirmation one anyway):

I've never noticed it before. I'm not sure if this came about with the upgrade to El Capitan or not. But now I've seen it I can't unsee it.

Almost a week ago (yes, I have being meaning to write something down about this and have kept failing to do so) my iMac told me that there was a new version of the OS waiting for me. While this is doubtless no big deal for most Mac owners, this was interesting to me because it's the first time I've experienced an OSX upgrade since I got the iMac.

The download took a while and, while the install had a couple of curious bumps along the way, nothing seemed to actually go wrong.

The two main things I noticed were that it seemed to take the installer an absolute age to close down all running apps before it got to doing the installation. The other was that Mac progress bars seem to have a very odd way of calculating things. Often it would tell me that there was (for example) 28 minutes to go, it'd stay like that for 20 minutes, then drop 5 minutes, then appear to finish very soon after.

Mostly though I just left it alone and let it do its own thing. While the whole process took quite a while, it came back just fine (if I'm fair I'm not sure it took much more time than when I upgraded my laptop from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10).

The changes and improvements aren't really that obvious. I think I would say that the machine feels a little quicker in places, but nothing I can really put my finger on. One of the things I do like is the new split-screen facility for full-screen apps. While I don't use the full-screen facility that much I have found the need to split the screen before.

Some of the other improvements I've read about seem to involve things I'm never going to use: either improvements to Safari (Chrome all the way for me), the Mac Mail app (Gmail all the way for me, with Kiwi for Gmail being my client of choice on the iMac) or various iOS-oriented things which are of little use (while I do own an iOS device it's not one I use much).

Overall the thing I'm taking away from this is that the upgrade was smooth, nothing was obviously broken or changed in a way that was confusing (unlike some Windows or ChromeOS updates I've experienced in the past) and I didn't have to do anything that required much in the way of knowledge to keep it all going.

Doubtless that won't always be the case, such is the nature of OS upgrades.

While on the phone earlier I was doing that thing you often do when chatting with someone where you don't have to concentrate on something in front of you: I was randomly clicking around stuff on a machine. In this case I was faffing around on my iMac.

One of the places I landed was in the About dialog, looking at the support details:

Out if idle curiosity I clicked the "OS X Support" link, which opened my browser and took me to Apple's website. Only.... it didn't take me to a part of the site that was that useful to me:

Yes, for reasons best known to Apple or my iMac, I apparently need my help to be in Spanish. O_o

I could understand this if I had my system set to Spanish, which I don't:

About the only "non-standard" thing I have in my setup is the date, which I've set to ISO 8601 style rather than the usual UK style. I even experimented with changing that to the default on the remote chance that it was tickling some sort of odd bug in OS X.

So, yes, another wonderful example of Apple stuff "just working" and being good for mortals. Well, for interesting values of "working" anyway.

I've never been a member of a political party. Ever. The main reason is I'm not that much of a "joiner" and I tend to dislike making compromises on subjects that actually matter. I have been a member of political causes in the past but even those I've had to leave because of the struggle I felt when it came to being associated with actions I disagreed with (yes, I am looking at you National Secular Society). While there are plenty of causes that I support, either in spirit or in actual donations, I almost never actually join up.

I've also been a fairly flexible supporter of candidates in general elections. While my politics are very much what you'd call "left" my voting patterns tend to be related to how suitable I find a candidate from the parties that I find I have a lot of overlap with in terms of stated aims. Unsurprisingly, for all of my voting life, this has been a case of selecting from Labour or LibDem candidates (with the odd look at the Green candidate). When doing so one of the major factors in making the choice has been tactical voting given that, for most of my life, I've lived in (what normally appeared to be) Tory safe seats.

But, for many reasons, I've always felt an important connection to Labour.

Possibly one of the best moments, in political terms, was that night in 1997, as I drove back home, down the M3 from London, listening to the radio, hearing Tory after Tory fall and realising that, for the first time in my (politically concious) life, I was going to enjoy the benefits, we were all going to enjoy the benefits, of a Labour government. This was such a sweet victory after having really felt the defeat of 1992.

The Blair horror show that followed was.... horrific. I don't think I've ever felt as let down by an organisation as I did by that Labour government.

Fast forward to this year and I was really hopeful that, perhaps, Labour would be back in government, and this time, lessons would have been learnt. I wasn't as enthusiastic as before but I was cautiously optimistic.

Sadly, it wasn't to be.

After this happened, and looking around me and seeing where we were now and where we were heading, I found myself thinking that, perhaps, this time, it was time to break my "no joining" rule. I started to seriously consider joining Labour, lending some sort of support, somehow being involved and taking part.

That's when I first noticed the whole business of being able to take part in the Labour leadership election by being a supporter. This seemed like the perfect way to dip my toe in, see how I felt about being associated in some way, get a feel for how things worked and, perhaps, depending on how it all went, actually join.

So I paid my £3.00 and looked forward to the process that was to follow.

I then waited, and waited, and waited, and then on Saturday this happened:

In other words.... I got purged.

And a couple of events before this have me wondering and a little suspicious of how this went down.

I'll make clear here though: my application to be a supporter was 100% genuine. As I say above, this was a first step on a road that I felt might actually end up with me joining a party -- something I've never done before. It wasn't something I did lightly. It was something I did after conversations with a couple of other people where the conversations were about genuine concern with how our country is shaping up right now.

Even as late as a week before I got the above email I was having a conversation with my nephew who, I'm deeply proud to say, is a very politically-aware teenager (far more than I was at his age) and is actually a member of the Labour Party. The conversation was about how I was starting to trust the party again and how I was even considering joining depending on how events went.

My application wasn't some joke thing, wasn't done on a whim, wasn't done to try and skew any result. It was done because it was something I cared about and wanted to explore further.

Anyway, come late on last week I'd had no sort of ballot email and, prompted by a couple of emails from a couple of the leadership campaign groups, I filled in the form to ask them to hurry it up. I think it was late on Thursday evening (2015-09-03) or early Friday morning (2015-09-04).

A little later on Friday this happened (Anroid twitter):

Same follow as seen from Tweetdeck:

I've no idea who @polycarponkundi is but it seemed clear from their timeline that they are a Labour supporter or even member and that they are a strong supporter of the Liz Kendall leadership campaign.

I didn't think too much of the follow; it seemed like an unusual coincidence that I'd chase up my ballot email and then someone apparently involved in the party would follow me, but coincidences happen.

Then, the following day, I get the letter telling me to sod off. Suddenly the coincidence seems less of a coincidence. I go and check the profile and notice that they've even unfollowed me, just a couple of days after the follow.

Note the lack of "follows @davepdotorg" in the profile?

Very odd.

Right now I'm not drawing any firm conclusions about what happened, and I have asked them what the follow and unfollow was all about. It would be unfair of me to decide the events were connected without asking first.

All of this though has made something clear to me. Labour have decided that they never want my support, ever again. I have it in writing. Well, sort of.

What I actually have in writing is an email that says "we're taking and keeping your £3.00 and we're calling you a liar while we do this. If you want to prove that you're not a liar you need to actually join us, actually send us even more money. Oh, and by the way, we're not going to tell you what evidence we have that you're a liar, so ner."

Thank you Labour. At least I know where I stand now. You can safely assume that you'll never have my support ever again.

Ahh, Google, knower of all things that can be known about me, tracker of all things that can be tracked about me, controller of my phone and even my watch, able to use Now to suggest stuff I need to know even before I need to know it.

Tell me again what promo that 10GB was from...

I seem to have somehow messed up my left hand. I'm not sure what the problem is yet, I'm speaking to the doctor and have had an x-ray to check out one possible cause, but the simple fact is that my left hand has an issue. Sometimes the arm is painful, pretty much all the time a couple of fingers are near-numb. One unfortunate side-effect of this is that I'm finding typing rather uncomfortable. Except, that is, when I'm typing in my iMac.

Given that the vast majority of the typing I do is on my Windows 7 desktop machine I decided it was time to look at getting a new keyboard, one that was as comfortable to type on as the Apple keyboard. Given that I really needed to be in a position where I could actually try the keyboards out I headed off to the local PC World.

Long story short: none of the Windows-oriented keyboards I tried did it for me. None were as comfortable as the Mac keyboard. I tried a few a couple of times and then suddenly had an idea... Apple do a full-size keyboard and, from what I've seen in the past, it does work with Windows, after a fashion. So I went to talk to the Apple guy, checked they had one in stock, handed over £40 and headed home again.

Having now worked with it for a couple of days I think this might be one of the best keyboard purchases I've ever made.

It's not ideal, of course. The keyboard isn't designed to work with Windows, it's designed for the Mac. But for the most part I'm finding that it's not confusing and I'm adapting just fine.

I had to go searching for an unofficial layout that I could install (one that's actually old enough that it doesn't even say it supports Windows 7) and installing that seems to have cured a few issues. The issues I do have remaining are:

• Depending on the application I'm in, @ and " are swapped. Really, I'm not kidding. In SublimeText @ and " are the right way round; in Skype they're the wrong way round. I suspect that this might be down to the fact that I need to restart applications so they take up the new mapping (a reboot of the machine might be in order here).
• The keyboard has no marked insert toggle key. There is one, it's the 0 on the numeric keyboard if you have (also missing, but with a mapping) numlock turned off.
• Alt and Win are the wrong way round. The Cmd key acts as the Win key and it is in the same position as Alt is normally in. I'm actually adapting to this pretty quickly.
• Apple hates the # key. Much like I have problems typing # on the iMac, the same issue exists when typing on Windows too. Whereas on the iMac I have to use Alt-3 to get a #, on the Windows machine I have to use Ctrl-Alt-3. Not ideal but it works.

They're the main issues I've discovered so far. It's possible that there are other niggles waiting for me but, hopefully, there's workarounds for them too. Mostly though I'm finding that the small adjustments I have to make to how I work are worth it given just how comfortable this keyboard is to type on.

I really do wish there was a Windows-oriented keyboard that had the exact same build quality.

I've never really liked Facebook. I forget exactly when I ended up on there -- perhaps 2009 or so -- but I can remember exactly who to blame. It was all the fault of Rich Daley. On an atheism-oriented BB that has long since fallen off the net he convinced me that it was "X for adults" (where X was a popular early social network whose name totally escapes me now) and I fell for it.

And I hated it.

But I stuck with it.

I stuck with it until September 2011. I realised that after a few years of using it I still found the site confusing, ugly, unfriendly (in terms of design) and somewhat invasive too. On top of that I'd made the common mistake of allowing anyone I'd ever run unto on the net add me there and so the contact list was huge and out of control -- I didn't really know who most of the people were. So I deleted the account.

Back then there was, as I recall, no explicit delete option, or to do the delete thing you had to deactive and wait 14 days, or some such thing. I know that I followed the advice in the docs and did whatever was required to have my account totally deleted.

This week, at the urging of friends, I finally decided to create an account again. I initially tried to create the account using the old email address (well, actually, a variation on it that would appear to be the same to systems that understand the significance of a + in an email address) but it told me that the address was in use. Which was a worry.

So I created the account using a different address (my actual "main" address this time, as opposed to my Google address) and set about setting it up.

In doing so I tried to tell it that I wanted to associate my old address with this new account and, again, it refused, telling me there was an active account for that address.

I then went and checked and, sure enough, there was my old account, still there, all the data, nothing had changed!

Fucking Facebook!

These days, however, it does look like there are very clear instructions on how to actually fully delete an account, so I've tried again for the old account. It's another 14 days of deactivation but with an actual promise that, yes, this time, they'll delete all my shit.

They better.

Meanwhile... I have a shiny new Facebook account. And I still find it confusing, ugly, unfriendly (in terms of design) and somewhat invasive.

Oh goodie! An update for Adobe Creative Cloud on the iMac!

Oh! Improved update experience too! I really must install this then...

Well fuck.