Why people don’t cycle more
Short answer: because car drivers are arseholes.
Long answer: I’m cycling home, and there’s a pinch point where the kerb on each side renders the road wide enough for one car only. And, since I’m cycling—and because I’m cycling defensively, i.e. taking the lane rather than cowering within a centimetre of the kerb—the car behind can’t get past until the road widens again in about 20m. The **** driving the car beeps.
Beep-beep-beep-beep! Beep-beep-beep-beep!
What am I supposed to do? Not exist? (Hint: the correct answer is, apparently, yes.) Should I stop, mount the kerb, and defer to my master in his automobile? Does owning a car also give you ownership of the road?
As the road widens, the car pulls past me. The driver slows and enquires threateningly:
Do you want to get killed?
Fuck this Nietzschean bullshit.
That’s why people don’t cycle more.
2010-03-11 01:02 UTC. Comments: 9.
A cock-up, not a conspiracy
It turns out that the reason that iPlayer TV downloads aren’t working is not that the BBC have changed anything. It’s just that their system’s broken down again for the second time in a couple of weeks. A page on the iPlayer Help system currently announces: More…
2010-03-08 22:07 UTC. Comments: 5.
iPlayer TV downloads are broken
For all that the BBC is nominally the British Broadcasting Corporation, they’re doing a rather good job of making sure that the only way to receive iPlayer content is through US software companies: Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this traitorous—I’ve never been a big fan of nationalism—but it doesn’t seem particularly helpful to the digital economy of the UK in the longer term. More…
2010-03-07 17:50 UTC. Comments: 18.
More Westminster woo-woo
Since last I wrote about it, several more MPs have pledged their support for the Dark Arts in the form of EDM 908 in defence of homeopathy.
Here’s the updated score card: More…
2010-03-03 00:39 UTC. Comments: 1.
Old sea forts and 6Music
Do you care about old sea forts?
I don’t care about old sea forts. At least, I didn’t until I saw an excellent presentation on the topic at Ignite London 2 tonight. In fact, it was one of the outstanding talks of the evening.
This is a fundamentally important aspect of planning/organisation/curation/whatever you want to call it, I think: giving the audience both crowd-pleasing favourites and unexpectedly brilliant gems. More…
2010-03-02 23:46 UTC. Comments: 1.
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