Safety Last

Categories: Rants Reviews

My mother doesn't change her car very often: her last change was in 1991, from a thirteen-year-old Fiat 128 to her still-current, Zen-basic, 1-litre Peugeot 205. So basic in fact, that it doesn't even possess a clock, let alone advanced toys like a radio. The upside of this is that it represents motoring at its most focussed and basic, with nothing to distract you from the act of driving – and with such skinny tyres, you can have huge fun at very low and genuinely legal speeds. The late James Hunt used to drive an old Austin A30 van for exactly the same reasons. The Pug also possesses supremely good all-round visibility from narrow pillars and a low waistline. Its absolutely direct handling is a delight and the only downside is its criminally heavy steering, making three-point turns an exercise in forearm-pumping and giving my mother a seriously dangerous left hook. That little Peugeot is now fifteen years old and, despite its only having 25,000 miles on the clock, is starting to show signs of incipient decreptitude.

Random Act of Idiocy…

Categories: Rants

This picture is of a Toyota Corolla, registration number M381 HPG. I took it at about 11:40pm last night, 26th April 2006. The reason I took it (Toyotas being not, by and large, objects of desire) was that the prize git driving it had just overtaken me on the A287 in Wey Hill in a 30mph limit, whilst doing, at a rough guess, 70mph. To make the overtake, he used the oncoming right turn lane to the Midhurst Road. I felt particularly sorry for the poor sod who was entirely reasonably occupying that lane at the time, waiting for me to pass before turning right. Quite how the situation didn't become an expensive and painful snooker shot, I really don't know. And if the driver of the oncoming vehicle (I think a Vauxhall Omega estate) happens to read this and wishes to contact me, I'll very happily join him or her in making a statement to the constabulary. Whether that would serve any purpose or not is another matter altogether…

Dear Ducati…

Categories: Diary Rants

I've owned your bikes since 1982, albeit with a longish break along the way. My current machine is getting a little leggy and, despite its so far consummate reliability, I'm looking for a replacement. But here's my problem: you simply do not make a motorcycle that meets my desires. And a quick glance at your 2005 sales figures suggests that many people feel the same way – your motorcycle revenues worldwide were down 13.1%, with total unit sales down 5.5%. Margins were also down, occasioned by a 40% collapse in the sales of your higher margin Superbike models. The only ranges that increased sales were the Multistrada (up 57.9%) and the new-retro Sport Classic range.

State of the Art…

Categories: Bikes Diary Rants Reviews Rides Riding Tech

Bear with me, will you? I've been running this blog and site since late 1998 and have finally gotten around to migrating it all into my Two Worlds vServer engine, a set-up based on Movable Type content management system plus lots of other bits and pieces, held together with various hackettes (sorry, "ubiquity integration modules) in perl and php. Anyway, most of the raw content is across, but I'm still writing a few scripts to handle images and attachments, hence the sudden lack of photos, incriminating or otherwise. This will be completed very soon, at which point whatever passes for normal service will be resumed.

Richard

Browser compliance: ABM

Categories: Rants Tech

Here's an opinion: The Web is about being accessible to all –  it is not, nor should it be, the domain of any one operating system, organisation or web browser. There are a good set of international standards which determine how information is delivered to and presented by browsers. Most – no, make that, "nearly all" –  browsers are compliant with those standards, within a few degrees of buggishness and interpretation. So making a site work with these is a matter of tweaking by degree, not kind. There is of course one notable exception, and that (again, "of course") is Microsoft: it's browsers display a level of both disregard for standards and are of such a bug-ridden nature that making a site work consistently requires delving into an underworld of hacks, tweaks and rewrites that are sufficient to cause apoplexy or death-by-boredom in any thinking organism.

In order to tread the fine line of compromise between high-handed disregard for poor design and monopolistic practice and preventing the many users of such products from actually accessing these sites, I've gone for the "greatest good of the greatest number" and made everything work fine with most open source browsers and the latest version of Internet Explorer, on Windows and Mac. Those that don't work properly at the moment are Opera and Omniweb. This will be attended to just as soon as possible.

Please do consider this, by preference, an ABM site: Anything But Microsoft. If they ever learn and decide to create standards-compliant browsers, then that's just find and dandy. In the meantime, I look forward to the day when the world's web designers bring a class action against Microsoft, to claim for the time, lives and money lost in trying to make their bloody browsers work. Me, I'm off to ride my motorcycle.

This site has been developed using CSS and XHTML and most of the code will happily validate against these standards, exceptions being CSS hacks to work around MIE bugs/features and some of Movable Type's own code. Tsk.