Apparently it's been a while since I've driven on a proper motorway (the M54 really doesn't count)
Went up to Worcester yesterday, which involves small amounts of the M5. Which, unlike the M50 and M54, has three lanes and therefore a middle lane.

Seriously, why do people sit in the middle lane all the time? It's really stupid and really annoying. But quite fun when the middle lane is full of traffic and doing about 40 and the fast lane is going at 50 and I'm the only car in the slow lane and I'm happily going past everyone... continue reading »

I've put my decorations up. This is really not a big deal, as I have 6 of them and I only fished them out of their usual hiding place because I was bored. Plus only two of them are even remotely 'christmassy' (a snowman and a reindeer). The rest are, well, rubbish. That thing in the photo is not-so-lovingly referred to as 'festive chicken', for the simple reason that it really isn't.

Of course there is a reason behind me owning these things, which involves well meaning people giving me accessorize vouchers. I hate that shop! Full of overpriced crap, and... continue reading »

Well, the good news is that I finall got kubuntu to install! Off the live cd - only difference this time is that I unplugged my usb hub. hmm. But it installed quickly and painlessly and without nuking my /home and /fat partitions, so that's good.

Bad news is that far too many things aren't working. Sound (meh), USB anything (wtf, this isn't win98!) and more annoyingly, internet.
Having a computer with no network connection is actually quite useless, given that 90% of everything I use it for involves the internet. Not even got php/apache/mysql installed yet... continue reading »

Driving home tonight I turned off the A49 (as I always do), got to the little humpback bridge that is best not taken above 30mph, and almost* went flying into the back of another car that was stopped there with its indicators and reverse lights on. oookay then.

At that point I also noticed a large tree - looking slightly more horizontal than trees usually do - about 3m above the road. Plenty of space to drive underneath it, but I figured this guy must have stopped because there was other stuff blocking the actual road. So rather... continue reading »

So some Russian blokey got poisoned by some Polonium-210 and it's all over the news.
This has slightly pissed me off - not because of what actually happened, because radiation poisoning is not something I'd wish upon anyone - but because of the threat of mass hysteria from people who don't know what they're talking about.

Polonium 210 is an alpha source. Alpha particles, also known as helium nuclei, are fat bastards with a pathetically small range. They can't penetrate skin (or anything else for that matter) and a few cm of air will... continue reading »