Rants and ramblings of a lecturer
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Go get yourself some music…
If you like what you hear, give Tom some money :d
This story really made me chuckle a little today.
Basically a guy on a bike had been regularly passing a speed camera above the posted limit, but it was one of those cameras that face the front of the vehicle. Because motorbikes don’t have number plates on the front, this guy thought that he was safe, and at one point even felt cool enough to flick the ‘V’s at the camera while doing 105mph.
This annoyed the local Bedfordshire constabulary, to the extent that they identified the model of the bike with the assistance of BMW, then trawled the DVLA registration database to find out that there were only three of that model of bike locally in the area. (A reasonable assumption from the repeat offences)
They then proceeded to look at each of those and identified Philip Coffey by his leathers and the extra headlights that he had added to the bike.
He was given a years ban from driving for the 10 offences, was let off the 72 penalty points given the ban, and was fined £900 and ordered to pay £600 costs. Of course, as he made his crust by driving buses, he’s lost that job as well.
Now I do consider myself lucky to live in a county where there are no fixed cameras – we have mobile units, but they’re in published locations, and pretty sensible ones if you ask me, well except for the one at Southgate junction, which usually has stationary traffic at any times when I’m going through it. We also have some of the best biking roads in the country, but then most people already know that as attested by the 300+ bikes on the prom every weekend during the summer.
Mind you, auntie beeb has been scaremongering again with her typical tabloid reporting on Week In Week Out this week. They appear to enjoy finding the most extreme, irresponsible arseholes and promoting their antics on television, giving a very distorted view of the biking community.
They also appeared to present a picture which indicates that the number of fatalities was on the increase over a number of years, yet BikeSafe Dyfed-Powys indicates a reduction in fatalities over a number of years.
And one last thing that has been annoying me for a while now:
(Apologies for the rubbish photo)
It has been vandalised, but it keeps reappearing. Apparently it’s a birdbox…come on – what self respecting bird is going to nest in that thing, that close to the road.
Wolverine
One part ronin warrior, one part animal, and one part psycho. A surrogate father to an orphan girl one day, public enemy number one the next. You are, yes, the best there is at what you do… and what you do isn’t always nice.
Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman are off on a bike trip of a lifetime again – this time it’s the Long Way Down from John O’Groats to Capetown.
Good luck guys, I’m looking forward to another great TV series from this one.
I’ve just booked my GSX in for it’s MOT, so it’s ready for a bit of a trip later on this summer, but I’ve still not decided where… Never mind – I set out for a 2000 mile trip last year with only a weeks planning, and that went great (apart from the camera dying)
After a few weeks of instability on the PowerBook, I got pretty fed up with rebooting it so often. I know – Macs don’t need rebooting – they’re really reliable – all that guff.
Well I’d pretty much diagnosed the problem being with the hard drive, it was fairly obvious that the Mac would crash when certain files were accessed, and I’d been getting pretty paranoid about doing backups so if it did die completely, I could resurrect my data.
Today I bit the bullet and bought a new 120GB hard disk, and spent a hour disassembling the PowerBook, and installing the new drive, then had all the fun of re-installing MacOS, and migrating all my old apps and settings over.
Oh well, at least it’s done now, and I’ve got twice as much drive space as I had before.
Oh, and hard drives really shouldn’t rattle when you rock them from side to side. :-S
I also managed to straighten out the bent piece of case that kept popping out the power plug, so it should charge better now.
The Probe is dying… I’ve been spending too much recently to keep it going, so I’ve traded it in for something a bit more family friendly.
Ford Mondeo (not quite that model, as it’s got a manual box), which is 5 years old with 50,000 miles on it.
Hopefully this will mean lower maintenance costs for a while, but still be as much, or even more fun to drive as the Probe, but of course I’ve still got the bike for big fun.
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Your Brain is Yellow |
 Of all the brain types, yours is the most intellectual. You crave mental stimulation, and your thoughts tend to very complex. Your thoughts tend to be innovative and cutting edge, though many people don’t understand them. You tend to spend a lot of time thinking about science, architecture, and communication. |
I’ve written before about my dislike for certain countries ideas about security, and I picked up a link to Stupid Security blog from Joe.
I started reading about Peter Kaiser’s experiences dating back to 2003 when he got refused entry to the USA. This guy is a UN aid worker, holding three passports, on his way to Chair a meeting about aid at the UN, and was refused entry.
Mark Shuttleworth also has a tale of how he now gets detained every time he enters the USA
I’ve had one or two brushes with immigration in the past, once being detained for a while re-entering Singapore from Malaysia, and once re-entering the UK from Dubai – “You have a beard, are you a Muslim convert” – ooh that makes me feel so confident in the security of our country if that is the line of questioning of British Immigration officials.
Standing in line for immigration entering the USA a few months ago, I felt somewhat nervous. Fortunately, there was no problem other than the obligitary hour long wait, which almost caused me to miss my connecting flight. Oh, and the over zealous security on the way out of the country. It wasn’t actually much quicker getting back into the UK when my flight landed – at least they get one right in the USA – if you’re a citizen you’re given priority at immigration. When I landed, everyone went through together, which resulted in very long lines and waits as it appeared that half the desks weren’t manned most of the time as well.
This guy had a real problem when he came back into the UK, mind you he did appear not to have all the paperwork that he should have in place.
Yes, I am off travelling again later this week, but this time I’m only off a short distance to the Isle of Man, and I’m taking the ferry – some of my colleagues suggested that I might fly, but apart from the nastiness that causes in the upper atmosphere, I think the ferry will be more enjoyable, and I get to take my car to somewhere with no national speed limit.
Of course, I should be taking the bike, but due to double booking with the Corris Railway training weekend, I will be away from home for a reasonable time, and will have to be taking railway related paraphernalia, plus I don’t really trust the weather at this time of the year.
I did start the bike over the weekend, after a couple of months it needed the battery charging – yes I know I’m a fair weather biker, but hey, I can be so why not? I still need to do a service on it, and then it’ll be ready to get back on the road regularly for the summer.
Enough brain dump for now.
For more information on how to set up the Cisco VOIP phones on an Asterisk server, and a hint or two on where to find the firmwares have a look at Adi’s World who points you at the right 6.3 firmware file to search for – this file will upgrade directly from a version 3 firmware phone, where the version 8 firmware fails.
I finally got round to joining the Free Software Foundation Europe today, so I’ve got a new email address.
If you think that it’s going on here, then I’m afraid not, what with the amount of spam this blog already receives.
I’m looking forward to getting my OpenPGP card through the post, and getting it interface with the Mac.