Strawberry Fair is cancelled.

So Strawberry Fair is cancelled this year. Whatever the reasons given, it seems fairly obvious that both the council and the police have never been the greatest fans of what should be a celebrated event. Since coming to Cambridge 8 years ago I’ve always loved the Summer calendar of events that make Cambridge a great place to live and work. As a properly free festival that is always a pleasant day Strawberry Fair is something to be proud of. No event is ever trouble free but rather than cancel such an event surely public servants, the police, should work with the organisers to improve it, not produce sufficient difficulties to cause it to be impossible to happen. The video debacle that the police produced to try to ban it (released on Youtube) and now their appeal against the council’s recommendation that they have their license are significant obstacles for a paid commercial event to overcome, never mind a free one. People say that if you live around the common then you undergo plenty of ‘bother’. Strawberry Fair has gone on for forty years. Only people who have lived there longer than forty years have the right to complain!

For work related reasons I am missing the beer festival this year and now this has gone. So my summer in Cambridge will be ever so slightly worse off!

Alfred: A Quicksilver replacement?

Alfred is a new app launcher (and as with the best of those apps it is much more) for OS X. It’s currently in beta, that you can sign up for at their website.

Ever since Raj pointed me to Quicksilver it’s become a pretty essential tool on any Mac I use. However, development has dropped off over the past few years and whereas it still works perfectly now if there’s any major OS update it could be that it breaks. Scary! It’s to Albert’s credit that after a week of using it it’s slipped straight into my workflow without hardly any interruption or even being noticed!

Nice!

What’s also cool, although location only relevant for property programmes, is that the guys are local (to me in Cambridge that is!).