I have recently been working to a roster that doesn't even bear a passing resemblance to 9-5 or even daylight hours.
That's not a problem - I don't have any particular attachment to concepts of normalcy, and I work well after dark. It's not even the first time I've worked bizarre hours, although it's a lot less physical than serving food and it's a whole lot more regular than the weird, scattered shifts which characterise the various caring jobs.
That regularity, in fact, has given me a fabulous opportunity to investigate sleep patterns.
For a start, regularity breeds regularity. Anyone who's ever tried to sleep in on the weekend after a week of early rising and woken up anyway has had occasion to curse the force of habit. My sleep cycles appear to slip into habit so easily it's downright depressing, not to mention inconveniently inflexible.
For example, I am currently typing this on my phone at 2am, wondering if I'm going to get or need any sleep at all this night.
If I don't it'll be annoying, because it'll be another 25 hours from now before I get another opportunity, and with all the politics I'm going to have to handle in this election run-up, I'm going to need all the sleep I can get.
Which is another thing - how much do I need, exactly?
On a work night I get home at about 2:30am, give or take. It takes at least another half an hour to be ready for bed (I don't like to rush things) and some of that is winding down time after riding home.
I can't usually expect to be nodding off until 3:30.
This is were it gets interesting:
If I have a glass of wine when I get home, I feel happier, sleepier, find it a lot easier to get to sleep and then wake up on or after midday feeling a bit grumpy until I've had tea, food, tea, coffee and sat in the sun until my bones are warm.
If I just try to get to sleep, I'll wake up soon after sunrise, drift off again, and probably be up by 11.
But if I try to read in bed I will recover some energy, realise the time at 4:30, go to sleep and wake up as above but minus an hour which I don't actually miss.
The fourth option, however, is the most interesting.
If I lie in bed and write on this phone - it doesn't particularly matter what, and most of it gets discarded in the light of hindsight anyway - I lose track of an hour, go to sleep at 4:30 and then wake up at 10:30 far too energetic to stay in bed and feeling more restless than I normally do after any normal night.
This intrigues me greatly. Quite apart from being an interesting management strategy, it suggests that whatever mental state I'm in while writing is replacing sleep, and doesn't that just sound too good to be true?
What it suggests to me is a slightly altered state of consciousness - altered compared to my normal, anyway - analogous to meditation. Which probably explains why I've never been able to still my mind whenever I've attempted any form of meditation, and had random running thoughts/daydreams instead. It's just how I'm wired.
What I want to know is: do other writers notice something similar? The phenomenon of any artist, not just writers, losing complete track and conscious sense of time while being creative is well known. But I don't think I've heard of how it affects their sleep patterns, if at all.
And that intrigues me even more.
It is now half an hour of typing with T9 on a phone keypad later, I'm no more tired than I was when I started and it's beginning to look as though sleep just may not happen tonight. Maybe after the sun's up, just to be contrary.
Monday, 19 July 2010
Saturday, 17 July 2010
Motorbike accidents in the media - Part the V12
Knowing that people have put V8 and V10 car engines in motorbikes, it shouldn't surprise you to hear that they've done it with automotive V12s as well. In this case, a BMW V12 in a drag bike, god help us all.
Perhaps the most well-executed monstrosity I have seen for a while, however, is the Millyard V12, a Kawasaki with two Z1300 inline six engines grafted onto a common crankcase to make a 2.6 (or 2.5 with rounding)L V12. Info here, pictures here and video here.
Getting that out of the way, I need to clear a backlog of accident stories again.
Let's see if I can get them in chronological order, this time.
What is with the Mail and their headlines? Also, does it seem wrong to you that "Macgregor" is spelt with only the one capital?
28yo rider, residential neighborhood, thankfully didn't die but did receive head injuries so don't celebrate just yet.
The critical point here is "just before midnight", in winter. Cold, late. Drinking a bit? Dog ran across the road? Cold-numbed? Dazzled by car headlights? Run off road by car headlights?
Three paragraphs does not for a highly informative article make, but they did get a police comment, as uninformative as it was. The headline is really the only thing wrong, here.
First off: Ouch.
This time, the headline is direct and to the point, and then the lead paragraph brings in "sickening". Oh, well.
The 34-year-old was riding his motorcycle at the intersection of Queen Street and Smiths Road at Goodna when he collided with a Kenworth tip truck.
Why, exactly, is the make of the truck relevant?
First off, he was a local, which may have make him a bit cocky and unobservant. Or, the truck stuffed up.
The intersection in question (Google Maps) is major, and a roundabout. Roundabouts should in theory work really well, provided the roads leading in are of roughly equal value, but they introduce so many horror scenarios it's not funny. I'm extremely familiar with this particular roundabout, and it's not my favourite.
The accident happened about 8.20am. Police said the truck driver was unharmed.
Time is probably relevant - rush hour, maybe somebody was running late. Or, the driver of the truck wasn't paying close enough attention and ran over a bike below his line of sight.
However, I am forced to ask again: How exactly could a collision with a bike harm a truck driver?
Touch of over-writing at the start, but a decent article.
This is, typical of a lot of the ABC's short items that don't have a journalist's byline attached, very concisely written.
However:
A man has died after being thrown from his motorcycle on Bathurst Street in Sydney's north-west.
The 56-year-old failed to negotiate a bend and hit a ditch in the road.
Question one: "Was thrown" or "came off"? I'm not sure how I feel about anyone other than owners using language which imbues mechanics with intent.
Secondly, the second paragraph fails on two points: "failed to negotiate a bend" is police-ese not journalism-ese, and what was a ditch doing in the road? Did he fail to make the bend and run off into a ditch, or came around the bend, saw a ditch-sized pothole, thought "OH, SHIT" and been unable to avoid it? Should there, in point of fact, have been signs up? Were there?
Post-mortem will try and determine cause of crash. How, exactly? Short of a heart attack, that's probably a job for accident investigators.
Kudos, however, to whoever tried CPR. Give them a medal, they're a very rare breed.
This article, on the other hand, frustrates the hell out of me. It just leaves too many questions unanswered.
The entire article is:
A 29-year-old motorbike rider has died after a crash in East Brighton, east of Melbourne.
The man hit a parked car after 1:30pm (AEST) today.
A passenger on the motorbike escaped unharmed.
What happened?
I really do question the value of this. It's not enough to make an interesting story, there's not enough detail to inform friends or relatives who may not have heard yet, there's not enough detail to make people sit and up and wonder if perhaps they should keep a wary eye out when they hit the road later.
It's a nothing vignette, existing only to let people know there had been another road accident, and leaving entirely open the baffling question of why someone would hit a parked car in the first place.
Um... Yes? Officer of what?
A POLICE officer from the State Traffic Task Force was injured in an accident on the Ipswich Motorway yesterday.
Oh, right. Police. Why couldn't you say so?
Okay, in all honesty it was probably a reasonable assumption to make and a reasonable headline.
The officer was conducting highway patrols on a motorcycle, which ran into the back of a Subaru sedan on the Brisbane-bound lanes at Redbank – near the Shell service station – about 12.27pm.
Now I, as a motorcyclist who has been pulled over by the police for doing something technically illegal but safe (riding on the verge past near-stationary traffic), am finding it hard not to giggle at this point, with a touch of schadenfreude.
Police officers are extremely highly trained and have extremely good bikes - BMW, Yamaha and Honda tourers that aren't cheap even before all the police gear gets bolted on. Exactly how did he manage that? I'm guessing that if the car did something extremely wrong somebody, a colleague perhaps, but definitely somebody would have booked the driver then and there.
And the Ipswich Motorway is a horribly inadequate road, but midday is not the really busy time.
He didn't require hospitalisation, so it wasn't even a big shunt.
What interests me, however, is that the police have launched a departmental inquiry, not "forensic accident investigators will examine the scene."
Okay, one more:
Ummm... Yes? That's generally what happens.
This story has a byline, and that means we can assume a slightly looser, flowing style of writing, and that's what we get.
This may well be the first article that I really can't fault.
Man lost control in a jump while riding a dirt bike and training for a race, hit a tree, suffered spinal injuries, was taken to hospital. As an added bonus, the helicopter service provided two pictures, although they really don't add all that much except atmosphere.
There aren't any really unanswered questions here. I'm not sure it's of any interest at all outside the circle of locals and dirt bike riders, but it's not a bad little item.
Monday, 12 July 2010
Motorbike accidents in the media, part 11.
Has there been an eleven cylinder motorbike? Possibly, but I can't find it, and for that I am profoundly glad.
This is really getting away from me. I have several stories open in Firefox tabs, several more waiting to be opened, and there's almost a complete row of tabs. At this point, I'm not sure if this represents an increase in accidents or an increase in reporting.
That is a slightly odd headline. Using the indefinite article twice looks like a slightly clumsy attempt at correct grammar, and one which headlines usually ignore in favour of brevity. The headline also doesn't say who was injured, leaving the reader to assume it may have been the driver and the rider.
Actually, no: Two young men on the bike, aged 25 and 20, both received compound fractures.
The five paragraphs in this story contain enough information for three solid paragraphs, and any mention of circumstances, or even the apparently usual "The driver of the car was unhurt", is not included.
There was an odd formatting error in the web page, however.
It feels rushed, both in writing and posting.
Next up, also from the Courier Mail, is Woman killed in Townsville crash between motorbike and truck (June 01).
Interestingly, not only is this article better written, but includes an inline link to the approximate address on Google Maps. Which is, unsurprisingly, a major intersection, although there is no information given about what each vehicle may have been doing.
The interesting thing about this collision is that it was at 11am - everybody should have been awake, and it was no longer rush hour.
In contrast to a great many stories I've covered in this series, this one didn't contain any more information but was better written and presented.
Seven paragraphs here, and surprisingly they're not all wasted - largely because only five of them are dealing with the accident.
6pm - dark, rush hour - a ute was waiting to turn right across traffic from a multi-lane road.
Traffic behind the vehicle was merging into the left lane but the motorcycle failed to merge and crashed into the back of the ute.
I can't really fault this article beyond putting "slamming into" in the opening paragraph.
I do have to question whether the ute had its lights on, and how the rider had a big enough lapse in concentration to crash into the back of it.
Since he was DOA at the hospital, we'll never know.
The last two paragraphs of the story are:
The fatality takes Queensland's 2010 road toll to 107 lives lost, including 20 motorcyclists.
At the same time last year 166 people had died on Queensland roads, 36 of them motorcyclists.
My personal wish is that any politician who gets up and says "This proves that being tougher on speeding saves lives" gets forced to write out "Correlation does not prove causation", 10,000 times or until they cry for mercy.
And if anybody has done an in-depth analysis of all the road-safety factors in recent years, I would love to know about it.
I'll finish with one more article, from the Ipswich-based Queensland Times: Motorcyclist airlifted to hospital, June 28, a headline so terse it's frustrating.
Five paragraphs, the last of which is "A spokesman for RACQ CareFlight said she was in a stable condition."
Essentially, a woman was riding a motorbike by herself at 9.45am on a Saturday morning when she "fell off her motorbike going around a corner."
Near the Maroon Dam probably means the Boonah Rathdowney Rd, which looks rather interesting and is immediately on my list of places to visit one of these days. From the look of the road, I'd say the usual suspects apply: oil, leaves, gravel, running out of talent.
Thankfully she's not dead, but suspected spinal injuries is nothing to be grateful for. I'm wondering why she was taken to the Toowoomba Base Hospital, not Ipswich or even Gold Coast - prevailing winds may have decided the pilot, for all I know.
For a nice change, this article is written in a very readable style instead of over-terse news-ese, and couldn't really include more information without actually talking to the woman, who was probably highly sedated at the time.
Four stories, none of them saying enough but, on the other hand, none of them really getting anything majorly wrong, either.
Sunday, 4 July 2010
You paid *how* much for that bottle? You twit.
The concept of "value" is rather an amusing one.
It should mean what something's worth but it doesn't, or we wouldn't have old sayings like "he knows the worth of everything, but the value of nothing."
What it means is what something's worth, and right there we have the main reason why sticklers for language can't get along with normal people and why the phrase "that's not what I meant" has any legs at all.
Value, then, steps outside of purely commercial, monetary, supply-and-demand, free-market considerations. It's a bit more personal. Or at least, it's a bit more than point-of-sale.
Value, for example, is when that $26,000 BMW motorbike lasts you ten years, three times around Australia and weekly usage.
Value is, to nick an example from Terry Pratchett (bonus points for identifying the character), when a pair of boots that costs you $300 lasts you ten years, and a pair that costs $100, lasts you two years.
But what I really want to talk about, and why I started this otherwise fairly pointless post, is wine.
Immediately there will be people (assuming anybody's reading this), who will be rolling their eyes and calling me a philistine and going off in a flounce, which is like a huff but for people who drink wine without caring about the cost.
You see, wine is one area that, more than most, defies rational discussion. And I don't just mean because it has a history of causing otherwise sane men and women to say things like "creamy mouth-feel" in public and get away with it.
No, it's because of this: One 5L cask of plonk can cost $10, and a bottle of Penfold's Grange Hermitage (or whatever it's called now, since grape names became copywrit) costs upwards of $400 $500 600.
And before you say that it's worth it: No, it isn't. It is worth it only for two very clear reasons: So you can drink the world's highest-regarded red wine, and so that other people can know you're doing it. Sharing with them may also give you a feeling of smugness or even, let's be charitable, genuine sharing pleasure.
But how much better is it, exactly?
Take the catalogue that fell out of today's paper, from a large-scale franchised distributor of retail alcohol.
It helpfully includes ratings for each wine, out of the standard agreed 100.
There is a 1986 Grange, given 99/100. For $699 (breath! It's only numbers!)
Right next to it on the page, something French from 2006 is 96/100 and $899.
Wait, what?
How does that work? On the same "Something rare" page, a 98 is $499, but a 94 is $59.90 (when prices hit three figures, they stop bothering to put cents on).
At the start of the catalogue, on the very first two-page spread, the cheapest bottle is $9.40 and 94. There are 7 bottles more expensive and lower-rated, and one bottle for $119 is 96. Frankly, I know which one I would be buying.
Turn the page and there's an 88 for 11.90 and a 91 for 44.90.
The catalogue continues in much the same vein until we get to my favourite section, the Fortifieds (yes, I'm a Port man from way back).
At this point, we meet the first perfect score, attached to a 100 year-old Tawny for, wait for it and possibly sit down as if you weren't already, $1,000 for a 375ml bottle.
On the same page, a Tokay receives 93 and is $14.90 for 750ml.
Again, I know which one I'd be buying.
There is, in case you were wondering, one more perfect score - a Muscat which goes for $106.90/375ml bottle.
That's little more than 1/10th the price for the same volume of liquid which is, according to the critics, perfect.
At this point may I suggest that some people are, perhaps, getting ripped off?
Normally I would be quite happy to see anybody who can afford to pay $1,000 for a Port or $699 for a Shiraz, do so. I like wine-makers and want them to do well, preferably at the expense of people who can afford it (i.e.: not me).
But this just baffles me.
Beyond a certain point, your taste (and I will admit that everybody reaches this point at a different, um, point) can't tell the difference between one wine and another, higher-rated, wine. People have even done experiments showing that when subjects think they are drinking expensive wines, they rate it higher even if it's exactly the same as the wine they were told was cheap.
That point may mean that someone genuinely can't tolerate a wine of 94 or below, and I feel genuinely (well, sort of) sad for them.
This isn't even a case of "Oh, you obviously can't appreciate the better wines. No. Honestly, there's something wrong with the rating system when $10 bottles score higher than 90 and there is no nicely usable, real-world correlation between rating and price. Caveat emptor and all that, but shouldn't there be some connection between quality and price? Actually, there's something wrong with the rating system when the lowest score on sale in 88.
Plus: If a 95 bottle can be easily had for $20, that means it takes anywhere up to $200 to add each extra rating point. Except, oh look: here's a Sherry which scores 97 and costs $36.90.
People, you are being conned.
I'm not sure who by, exactly, but you are definitely being conned.
Thursday, 1 July 2010
Motorcycle accidents in the media, part the V-10
Wait, what? A V-10 motorcycle?
Yes, I'm afraid so.
At least, sort of.
The Dodge Tomahawk Concept Motorcycle is, natch, a concept. It is also not technically speaking a motorcycle - it has four wheels, just a very, very narrow wheelbase so it sort of behaves like a motorcycle.
It's a lot better executed and more interesting than most massive-car-engine motorcycle concepts but, as with the others, I'm really not sure they should have done it at all.
Moving onto the important stuff.
I'm only going to do one story, because it's a decent length and I end up talking about it quite a lot. (Note for the chronologically confused - yes, I wrote this bit last).
It is another take on a story I addressed last time - the ABC's Man jailed for killing motorcyclist. This one is 70yo jailed for rider's death (Queensland Times - June 10).
This story has a bit more detail. Journalist Felicity Caldwell is a court reporter who goes and sits in the gallery each day, so that's no surprise. She also got quotes from relatives of the deceased, which is macabre but a bit traditional.
AN ELDERLY Ipswich man, who was found guilty of killing a motorbike rider after crossing the road’s centreline in his van, will face the next four months behind bars.
I would have edited that opening paragraph a little for tightness, but it gets the pertinent facts in. Four months, by the way, is the non-suspended part of two years. Truth in sentencing is a whole other issue entirely.
The rider, Joseph Vella, was 39 and died in hospital 7 days after the collision, which sounds unpleasant.
Prospect St where it happened is one of the major streets in a minor town. Google maps only has the major portion on Street View, but it looks as though there's only one crest, and not much of it. Also, hardly an abundance of streetlights.
For added self-referential macabreness, the driver was doings his rounds delivering the QT at the time. That may bring a clue - if he was distracted from the road by checking an address, or stocks, or fumbling for a pen, drifting sideways is only too possible.
But there's this little bit of weirdness:
Sergeant Darryl Morrison told the court he discovered an 11-metre skid mark on the road which was probably caused by Mr Vella braking before the collision.
But one of the first officers on the scene, Senior Constable Gregory Henricksen said he had not seen the skid marks on the night of the crash.
Skid marks on a road aren't that easy to see in low light conditions, but surely your first instinct would be to at least look?
Skid marks, however, reveal one very sad truth: Mr Vella may have been able to avoid or minimise the accident. A speed limit of 60km/h means a closing speed of 120km/h and up and that means precious little reaction time. But if Williams was driving his van only partly on the incorrect side of the road at the time, then there was some leeway for an emergency swerve to the left. And hitting the curb and going for a tumble has more opportunities for survival than hitting a solid wall of approaching metal.
Skid marks are not a good thing. Locking the wheels reduces braking power and removes all ability to steer. That's why ABS is a good idea.
To step out of media-analysis mode for a moment: If you ride a bike or a scooter, then please, please, practice emergency braking and emergency manoeuvres, and get some advanced training. Thank you.
I must, however, ask: Why no skid marks from Williams' van? Was he still distracted when a bike ran straight into him? No matter what options may have been available to Mr Vella, Williams put him in that position and was therefore found guilty.
Mr Vella's older sister thought the sentence was fair:
“While Mr Williams’ actions were negligent, it was one of those things where people don’t think about what the consequences will be,” she said.
“The public prosecutor thought that he would’ve been given a larger sentence if it wasn’t for his health – he’s actually not very well.”
And that just reinforces my opinion that he will be lucky indeed to get his licence back after four years. And if he does, well, that's another discussion.
To sum up, it was a quite well written article with, finally, most of the details I would like to hear with only one omission - what Williams' side of the story was, after pleading not guilty.
One more thing: QT really, really needs to fix their RSS feeds. All you normally get is the headline and that, compared to any other media outlet, is just not good enough.
Tuesday, 22 June 2010
In praise of hackers and modders
(Edit: I called the i8910 the Omnia Icon in Australia. Actually, that's a winmob device. The i8910 is the HD Icon. Which doesn't sound any less stupid.)
Before I start, let's get a little something out of the way, first:
Before I start, let's get a little something out of the way, first:
A hacker is someone who tries to take things apart in order to understand them, and fiddle with them in order to improve them.
A cracker is someone who tries to break things in order to break them for fun and profit.
Right, moving on.
Here's the thing: The world relies upon hackers to advance. Engineers? Hackers, if they're any good. The spirit of "What would happen if..." and "Hey, how does that work..." drives productive creativity and improvements.
Scientists? Hackers, by definition. Hackers of reality and of life.
But the term is a computer one, and it's computer programmers who fiddle who I want to talk about now.
All programmers, if they're any good, are hackers. They want to know how somebody else did that cool thing, they have to chase down bugs in their own code, they're dissatisfied when they see something functioning below-par. They'll sooner spend two days building a replacement than twenty seconds being frustrated.
And they make really cool toys for the rest of us.
Commercial software is built by waged hackers with deadlines and managers. Open source software is built by hackers, some of whom have wages and managers while they're doing so.
And then there's the ones producing not the major product, but the improved version. The one you have to work to get. The operating system that works the way it should have done, if only the company producing it hadn't had commercial obligations or, well, deadlines and managers.
I had a Sharp Zaurus SL5500 for years. It was unabashedly a toy when I got it - a chunky PDA with a QWERTY keyboard and a Linux operating system which satisfied my twin desires of having a cool toy, and being able to type lying in bed. Laptops are too clumsy, too bulky, for lying on your back jotting down thoughts and chasing ideas. Oh, and an ebook reader for Project Gutenberg classics.
Being Linux, an open-sourced system, built using a variety of also open-sourced toolkits and projects, it was only a matter of time before OpenZaurus arose, flexed its muscles, and started producing an alternate, community-built, better-performing, less rubbish software platform.
Okay, buggier as well, but that's the price you pay for development.
I have no idea how many times I reflashed that poor device with new updates, but by the end I could do it in my sleep and it was probably a contributing factor to its eventual, inevitable, demise.
Eventually, however, the SL5500 was replaced with the sexier (black) SL6000, and then the C-series came out with a mini-laptop form factor and a swivelling screen and all the sex appeal that chunky SL5500 never had, and development on the now rapidly aging devices slowed and then stopped, lingering bugs left untreated.
At the same time, my progression through mobile phones landed me at a device with a big colour screen and enough of a java platform to run ebook readers, and then I found a text editor for the phone, and the Zaurus was doomed. The next time I actually tried to turn it on, no amount of hard-resetting, battery-replacing and fiddling would produce the merest flicker of life.
That phone was replaced with a much more powerful one running an open-standards operating system called Symbian with an open-standards interface called S60.
And that brings us neatly to my point, really, because we are now in the realm of smartphones which are more powerful than dedicated PDAs or even laptops of years gone, and one of the defining points of a smartphone is that you can upgrade it.
Which, of course, decent companies do on a regular basis - buy a top-end or even middle-range Nokia and you can confidently expect a new firmware version to bring speed, battery life and functionality improvements every other month for a year or more.
But some don't and, occasionally, others take up the slack.
And then there are those which invite it.
Google's Android operating system is Linux, customised. Which, to geeks and hackers, is like walking into a lion enclosure waving a chunk of dead goat over your head.
While companies pander to network operators and take special note of commercial agreements, hackers cheerfully take the code, rip out the rubbish, port across a cool toy from the next release, drop in something else to fix what everyone except the distributor thinks is a problem, and hey presto! You void your warranty but, frankly, the advantages outweigh that.
If you use an HTC device running Android, you really should be using Cyanogen's replacement ROMs.
Motorola managed to alienate a large community of current or potential users, me included, by preventing this practice on the non-USA Milestone.
It's healthy to have people like this keeping the big boys on their toys.
But let's return to Symbian. The platform, used by nearly everyone but championed by Nokia, who bought S60 and dominated the ecosystem to such an extent that they, in my amateur opinion, damaged its competitiveness, has its roots in 8-bit greyscale devices running for two weeks on a pair of AA batteries, and has been evolving healthily ever since, becoming the most resource-efficient, flexible and potentially powerful of all smartphone systems without, at the same time, really extending itself.
It can support network protocols that are still in the laboratory, but read the international press and you'd get the opinion it's doomed, dead in the water, rubbish, horrible to use, out-dated and slow, part of which relates to S60, which quite frankly is old and has always demanded a little effort to use it properly, and part of which is Nokia being parsimonious with hardware, relying on the efficiencies of Symbian to keep costs down while still providing class-leading functionality.
But then there's Samsung. Unlike Nokia, who cut back on hardware and then spend time and effort optimising the software, Samsung produce truly mighty devices and then just sort of... forget them.
The current king of Symbian, the most powerful and the most impressive, is not the all-singing N97 family but the one-piece Samsung i8910, variously known as Omnia HD (because it was the first phone able to shoot HD video) or, in Australia, the slightly nauseating HD Icon. Great 8MP camera, great stereo speakers taking up each end of the device, great big 3.7" capacitive toughened glass AMOLED screen, 600MHz processor with full graphics acceleration and oodles of RAM.
But the first release had crippling problems, and since then it's had, well, a couple of firmware updates, but not what you'd call love, care and attention from momma and papa in Korea. The C: drive, where the operating system lives, is so small that a couple of system updates fills it. And the discerning smartphone power-user these days demands updates, currency, movement, dammit!
Roll on HyperX. Yes, it's possible to produce custom firmwares for Symbian. Generally, this hasn't been needed, and it's presumably tricky enough that people haven't tried. But for a megaphone like the i8910, hoops were, as the saying goes, jumped through. And even people who normally run a mile from the innocent suggestion that hacking a phone to customise the home screen might not mean the end of the world, have dipped their toe in the water and declared themselves impressed.
I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung sell a few more i8910s thanks to HyperX. I may very well, in the next month or so, be one of them.
Raise your glasses to the hackers and the modders - we wouldn't have got this far without them.
Motorbike accidents in the media: part the .... 9
I really, really didn't think I'd be able to find a 9-cylinder motorbike.
Well, guess what? I couldn't.
There are rumours and hints, the most promising ones centred around another aircraft rotary engine, but I couldn't pin down anything definite. The best lead, complete with photo, turned out to be somebody who didn't check their facts thinking that a monster W3 engine had nine-cylinders. Uh, no.
But, moving on.
The number of stories seems to be increasing. Putting aside my delayed updates, I currently have seven tabs open, some of them dealing with the same incident, and another couple tagged and yet to open. I wonder if this actually represents an increase in accidents, or if suddenly they're more likely to be reported? Hmmm...
From the Courier Mail, from June 4, comes "Speed blamed as motorcyclist dies, passenger critical when bike hits bus at Forest Lake."
There seems to be a definite trend for Courier Mail headlines to get longer without getting any more useful. Personally, I would have started with the death, and left the speed part out of the headline entirely.
A 38-year-old man from Inala was killed when his black Suzuki bike collided with a bus turning from Forest Lake Boulevarde into Grand Avenue about 6pm.
Mentioning the brand, that's rare! He died, female pillion was taken to hospital.
The Forensic Crash Unit is investigating the cause but police said it appears the motorcyclist may have been speeding.
Given the size, visibility and general lumbering nature of a bus, that's likely. However, 6pm in early June is dusk turning into night, and without more details it's hard to tell that the bus driver didn't simply start pulling out and the rider panicked, locking the brakes instead of trying to swerve, hitting the horn, whatever.
There is a little box under the photo which says "The force of the impact can be seen clearly from the damage to the bus", but they must be referring to a different photo. I can't see any damage on the bus, just dirt and age. They may have meant "damage to the bike". The window above the wheel seems to be missing, so maybe the bike hit the rear wheel and the rider went up and through the window.
In which case the most likely scenario is the bike was traveling along Forest Lake Boulevard, which is a major road, and the bus was turning across it. In which case yes, the bike was traveling far in excess of any sane speed. The time it would take for a bus to travel almost all the way across the road is way more than the time it would take a bike to stop from 100, let alone 60.
There looks like there's a lot of information here, but actually: not really.
There is a bonus second entry in this report:
In another serious crash, a motorcyclist suffered multiple fractures after allegedly going through a red light on Kingston Road at Loganlea and running into the front of a car.
The 33-year-old was taken to the PA Hospital with suspected broken legs, pelvis and arms.
The car driver was unhurt.
This is actually a more complete and less frustrating report. It pretty much says everything with no extras and no supposition, and it sadly reads like another case of a dickhead getting caught out.
The article then mentions a single-vehicle car accident and closes with: Queensland’s 2010 road toll now stands at 98 lives lost, 56 fewer than at the same time last year.
Which is surely going to be ammunition for the "speed cameras work" brigade.
For the record: I don't think it's possible to come to that conclusion - there are too many confounding variables and the numbers just aren't big enough. But I Am Not An Ethnographer, and may be wrong.
In summary: not a bad story, but slightly frustrating, not quite enough detail, and frankly the headline is sensationalistic.
From ABC News Online from June 2 comes a six-paragraph story headlined "Man jailed for killing motorcyclist", a sentence guaranteed to bring a glow of sourly retributive "it's about time" satisfaction to any motorcyclist's heart.
Essentially: 70yo man, at Lowood at 1:30am:
The court was told his vehicle was travelling on the wrong side of the road below a crest on a hill when it crashed into a motorbike travelling in the opposite direction, killing the driver.
First of all, Maria Hatzakis, nice economically written and punchy story, but motorcycles have "riders". Only vehicles with more than two wheels have "drivers". The sub-editor really should have picked up on that, as well.
Lowood is a country sort of place, and it's likely there were absolutely no lights other than the vehicles'. Bike came over crest, thought "OH FU..." and crashed, fatally. It is sometimes possible to see lights coming over a hill, not always, and with the spread of lights from vehicles, not with any precision. The driver could also have wandered at the last minute. The driver, remember, was 70.
He has been disqualified from "obtaining or holding" a drivers licence for four years, and I sincerely doubt that he will ever get it back, at that age.
Some of the writing is a bit loose, but actually a nicely comprehensive article.
Also from ABC News Online, from June 5, comes "Motorcyclist charged after police chase".
Now, I've said this before, and I'll say it again: If you're being chased by police, pull over and cop it. There's a slim chance you can challenge whatever they were going to fine you for, but there's no chance if you run away. Evading police is an offence, it's dangerous and you lose any right to plead innocence or mitigating circumstances. You stuffed up: Take the consequences.
And this is why:
In March this year, laws were introduced increasing penalties for people who refused to stop for police.
The change was dubbed Skye's Law after toddler Skye Sassine, who was killed in a crash on New Year's Eve in Sydney's south-west.
Yes, well.
Police say he reached 140 in a 60 zone, they called off the chase after he crossed onto the wrong side of the road, and they arrested him after they found his bike in a driveway.
You see, they have cameras in cars: If they're chasing you, they know your numberplate. They know who owns the bike, and where it should be garaged.
He was remanded in custody.
No sympathy.
This is a tighter-written story, without an author's byline, than the one above with an author's byline. Go figure.
One more, I think, a short one:
From the Courier Mail, "Rescue crew trying to reach motorbike rider who crashed over cliff at Dundas", June 6.
Three paragraphs, of decreasing length. The headline is a little longer than I would allow, but it keeps interest. "Rider crashes over cliff at Dundas" would do equally well. The fact he's still alive and rescue crews are trying to get to him can probably wait for the opening paragraph.
Now: Mount Glorious, 10:40am... I'm sorry, but the only explanation that isn't "he ran out of talent" involves getting frightened by a vehicle, bike or car, speeding the other way. He may have hit gravel or leaves or oil, he may have been doing the speed limit. It's just highly unlikely.
What's astonishing is that the article is so bald it doesn't even mention speed or any suspected cause. Just the barest of facts. Makes a nice change, really.
With that, I shall sign off. Only two weeks behind schedule.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)