13

Cycling past a couple of traffic cops yesterday armed with a radar gun, one shouted at me:

“13!”

If I’d known I was being clocked I would have at least tried to hit the speed limit.

One rule for everyone?

I really am beginning to wonder about the current parliament in the UK. A story on the BBC reports on how MPs have voted to exclude themselves from the Freedom of Information act – an act that was widely seen as a positive step toward making public bodies more transparent and accountable. What with the recent law to prevent anybody protesting within a mile of the Houses of Parliament, it seems that MPs are increasingly building a legislative moat between themselves and the British public. In my opinion, a government that makes a habit of creating one rule for the nation, and another for themselves is not representing the best interests of that country, and is losing touch with the people. Are politicians really working for their public anymore? Or is the public becoming their enemy?

The colour of an Apple

There’s a good post here about the use of gamma (a unit of luminance) and colour profiles as used by PCs and Macs. It’s really only important if you create graphics for use on the web – the effects can be seen here. The upshot is that if this applies to you, then it’s worth changing your mac gamma setting to 2.2, rather than the 1.8 that is default on macs. Even Apple suggest you do this. You can do it by going to System Preferences > Displays > Color and then selecting the sRGB IEC61966-2.1 colour profile.

Update

So what’s been happening over the last few weeks?

I lost my wallet somewhere in Richmond Park

Someone was kind enough to hand it in to Fulham Police Station

But I’d already cancelled my bank cards.

But at least I didn’t have to go through the ordeal of getting (and paying for) a new drivers license.

I no longer keep my drivers license in my wallet.

At least I didn’t have to wait as long as this guy before getting my wallet back

My Powerbook hard drive died on me, causing me to lose everything on it.

Fortunately I had anticipated this day and had the important stuff backed up on an external HDD.

It took me about a day to get everything back the way I like it, although I’m still finding little useful things that I’m missing.

For example, the custom dictionary in MS Word needs to be repopulated.

And I didn’t back up any of my RSS feeds.

In other news, I’m working on my methods chapter and am running a little bit over schedule. I now plan to get it done by the end of the week.