The Rule of the Road

Here in Britain we drive on the left. That isn't new, it has been the rule of the road for over 100 years. It means that if you drive on the wrong side of the road you are breaking the law.
The law is usually interpreted as allowing overtaking, provided it is done safely.
In the last couple of months my wife and I have both been forced to pull off the road to avoid oncoming traffic. That is not driving safely, it is aggressive, dangerous and illegal.

Similarly driving across a mini roundabout with the circle on your left is also dangerous and illegal. Even driving over the central circle is a crime punishable by points on your licence and a fine of up to £1000.

Inland Revenue madness

Yesterday I received two revised tax codes from HMRC. I now have to waste money calling them, on an 0845 number, or on postage.
The two codes are different, but arrived in one envelope. There is nothing to suggest that one supersedes the other, just two different numbers.

East Kent buses

I live in a town called Deal, on the Kent coast. It is served by 4 Stagecoach East Kent bus services, which go to Canterbury. Most meander slowly through the countryside, which is quite enjoyable, but incredibly slow.
None of these services connect with other bus services, whether provided by East Kent of another operator. I classify connections as services that are scheduled to arrive at a common point at about the same time and wait for each other.
This makes travelling very difficult, for example a trip to Ashford and back, 30 miles away, took 8 hours!
I've commented on this to Stagecoach and they replied that the routes I mentioned weren't their 'most popular routes'. I'm not surprised.
The most irritating thing about their timetables is that buses from Dover to Folkestone usually leave 1 minute before the bus from Deal is timetabled to arrive. It's a moot point, because the service between Deal and Dover is notoriously unpunctual. When I had to use it regularly I would leave an hour earlier than I needed to and even then sometimes I had to call and apologise for being late.
Another example is the trip to Westwood Cross shopping centre in Thanet. It's 13 miles away and takes less than 30 minutes by car, but 90 minutes by bus, if the Dover to Ramsgate bus reaches Sandwich on time.
Is it any wonder that most people use their car in preference to Public Transport?

SouthEastern Trains

South Eastern Railways are con artists. Their first action on being granted the franchise to run rail services in Kent was to increase all journey times by three minutes. That was their solution to the poor punctuality record of their predecessors Connex South East.
Rail services in Kent are probably the worst in the country, the network is congested and antique. It suffers from its location in the most populous area of the UK, which makes it extremely difficult and expensive to expand. The Victorians built the railways in Kent as cheaply as possible. Successive governments starved the railways of investment and we suffer the consequences.
The South Eastern timetable hasn't changed for the better in the 50 years since the lines were electrified. Electrification dramatically reduced journey times for everyday travel, from Deal to Charing Cross, from an average of over 3 hours, before 1959, to less than 2 hours by 1967. The improvement has been whittled away until it now takes 2 hours 9 minutes, or more, unless one pays extra and uses the HS1 service.

UK Alternative Vote Referendum

Yesterday I received a leaflet from the Electoral Commission explaining how the proposed alternative voting system would work. The leaflet explains how the process will work in such a way that 99% of people reading it are going to vote against the reform.
The example shows that the candidate who starts with the most votes, though not a clear majority wins the election. There are several more steps than in the current 'first past the post' system, but according to the brochure the result is the same.
In practice in many cases the person who starts with a majority will not end up winning the election. The new system would be fairer, than first past the post and that has to be a good thing.
I dislike the Conservatives, because I think that they are out of touch with reality. Labour aren't much better, they just want to form the government and if that means aping the Tories that's what they'll do, again.
I will vote Green, though I know that they won't win. My other choices will be other minority parties. Each time a candidate is eliminated, the alternatives will be rewarded with more votes.
In some cases this will be enough to tip the balance against the ruling party, even if it doesn't I will feel more satisfied than if my first choice party lost its deposit.

ebook complaints

I'm a great fan of ebooks and have been for about 8 years. My Dell X30 pda had Microsoft Reader on it and I downloaded and read many books on it.
Last November I purchased a Sony Pocket ereader (PRS-350), which is amazing. The screen is electronic ink, so it's clear and uses so little power that a battery charge usually lasts for weeks. The minus points are:-
* the ridiculous stylus, which is so flimsy that it broke after a couple of months;
* Sony's useless Library Software, which only recognises the ereader occasionally;
* and the lack of a backlight. I can manage without the backlight, because it would reduce the battery life.
Kent Library Service has a number of electronic books that one can borrow for 21 days, so I haven't needed to buy any books yet. These include best-sellers soon after they are published, like Lee Childs' 61 Hours.
This brings me to my complaint. The ebooks are full of errors, I can't remember the last time that I read a paper book, which had spelling mistakes and other typographical errors, but most of the ebooks do.
It's almost as if the electronic version of the book is produced before the final version of the manuscript. I recently read a book called Shards of a Broken Crown, by Raymond Feist. This has so many mistakes that it's difficult to follow the plot. Amongst them is the variation in the way one of the characters (Jimmy Jameson) name is spelt. Sometimes it's Jamieson, Jameson, or Jamison.
The other problem with ebooks is DRM (Digital Rights Management), which is supposed to stop piracy. It is a pain in the neck. Adobe Digital Editions software keeps ignoring my ereader, which prevents me downloading ebooks to it. Adobe's solution was to do a hard reset on the ereader, which temporarily cured the problem, but meant that I had to recopy all of my books.
When you consider that most booksellers charge MORE for electronic books than paperbacks, this is wholly unacceptable. Ebooks are the future of publishing, but DRM issues and bad editing will not persuade people to buy.

N.B. These comments only apply to my experience with the blue Sony Pocket Reader (PRS-350). I will happily write a review, if anyone would like to lend me any other sort of ereader.

Advertisements

At the top of his page are some adverts for Amazon. They are supposed to be relevant to what I write, but something isn't working.
If you click on one of them I receive a minuscule amount of money, so it would be better if they were more targeted.
The 2010 World Cup is going to start in South Africa in a few days, which probably explains why one of the ads is for a football video game.
I have absolutely no interest in football. At least not in the so-called game where young louts are paid stupid amounts of money to appear on a patch of Astroturf. I will happily watch a match if I know at least one of the players personally.
Football is not the most popular sport, despite all the media hype it attracts. It is the easiest sport to watch and therefore the most difficult to avoid watching, as it consumes many hours of the TV schedule.
TV is the reason why football is crap. They pump stupid amounts of money into the industry, even when the matches are boring nil-nil draws. Personally I would pay teams a bonus for good behavior and sportsmanship and fine them huge amounts for bad behavior on, or off, the pitch.
I've heard people justify the excessive amounts of money paid to sports people, because they can only work for a few years. That's illogical, because other people can only work for a few years, but they don't receive million pound salaries. I was told by a recruitment agent 20 years ago, that he wouldn't waste his time trying to find me employment in one of Scotland's big banks. He said that they never consider anyone over the age of 35, so why wasn't I paid millions, if my career was brutally terminated at 35 years of age like thousands of other IT staff?