Anyone want to guess if there are 16-cylinder motorbikes out there? Drop me a line if you find one.
A brief four articles today, to catch up to mid September:
We start with a rare report of a non-fatal collision, from August 27, the Courier Mail giving us Woman hurt in crash between motorbike and lorry at New Farm.
Another CM story, another tedious headline.
There is a weird atypical quotation mark in the last paragraph.
"Woman motorbike rider" is clumsy, "she collided with a truck" needs supporting evidence, and I would be interested to know who was going where, who had right of way and what the truck was doing at the time.
Not a particularly well written article, a hurriedly edited one, and overall unsatisfying.
From September 7, the CM also gives us Motorcyclist killed in car collision at Finnie, outside Toowoomba
I can only assume they have a reason for these headlines. There must be a reason.
Six paragraphs, all quite tight and concise but with one clumsy and poorly placed comma, the last paragraph an update on the yearly road toll figures.
Collision between car and bike, 30yo male rider died at scene.
The Toowoomba-Karara Rd is a bit winding, so all the usual country-road risks apply: suspect edges, casual attitude to driving, temptation to go faster than the road affords, loose or compromised surface, etc.
A concise news article, with little information but no randomly thrown quotes or assumptions, either.
From September 9, the CM also gives us Man dies in scooter crash in South Brisbane
A headline that could be improved, but at least this one isn't trying to be a paragraph unto itself.
Eight paragraphs, two different quoted sources, a bit of information and a very oddly worded intro: "A man in his early 20s has died after an accident involving a scooter". What? Was he riding it, or not? Was he a pedestrian?
Further down we are forced to assume he was riding, and appeared to have collided with a power pole.
Bizarrely, he may have been travelling with another scooter at the time. So where, pray tell, did they go? And who called the ambulance?
Most odd.
The article could have been tighter, but the comment below it is a classic - sincere, concerned, stating that the law is ridiculous because riding "these things" doesn't need a bike licence whereas young motorcyclists are restricted by tight laws.
Unfortunately, the article didn't say what type of scooter it was, and he may have had a bike licence. The laws restricting beginner riders don't guarantee good training and don't prevent you getting your hands on something quite capable of getting you in serious trouble, and without knowing a lot more about the accident there is no way of telling that any licensing or training would have made a blind bit of difference.
One more, from September 16 and, yes, the CM again (deep breath): Motorcyclist killed after losing control of bike while overtaking on Bruce Highway at Chevallum (breath out)
I would like to point out that the RSS headline was "Biker killed while overtaking". Sigh.
Ten paragraphs and a call to send in tributes. One other odd quotation mark.
This time, a photo, showing a bike a bit sporty and with considerable rear-end, not front-end, damage, which supports the claim he lost control before hitting the truck, and a spot where I would not have been trying to overtake at all - two lanes and a corner with impaired visibility.
Finally, we have enough eyewitness reports for a decent article - he was seen overtaking other vehicles and "braking heavily" (subjective) before losing control.
Nowhere in the article does it say he hit a truck - just in the photo caption. What the? Wasn't it most likely that impact which killed him, not tumbling along the road?
"Speeding by the motorcycle was a significant factor", Sgt Crowley said. Which seems justified, but he may have been exceeding the speed limit or may have just been overtaking in a stupid manner but inside the speed limit, or may have judged it well then hit a spot of diesel oil on the road.
Also: "was seen overtaking vehicles in the left-bound lane". Left relative to what, exactly?
We finish with some human-interest background profile stuff.
This article was decently written in a very local-paper manner, but it desperately, desperately needed more editing.
Tuesday, 21 September 2010
Monday, 20 September 2010
Motorbike accidents in the media - Part 15
I shouldn't need to say this, but: No, I don't know of any 15-cylinder motorbikes.
It's been three weeks since my last post - where did they go?
Before I start: I have, in the past, abused (with love) the Queensland Times for their RSS feeds, which consisted of a headline and then a description field filled with a copy of the headline. They have now fixed that, and have a proper, informative, good RSS feed again. Well done.
Today we have four different takes on the same story - the death of an 18yo who hit a truck on the Brisbane Valley Highway west of Brisbane at 5.50am (AEST) on Friday August 27.
In purely alphabetical order we have:
From the ABC News Online: Motorcyclist killed
A pithy title, no? The article describes three separate accidents. The last one is a motorised skateboard, for extra dark-humour value.
Three paragraphs for the bike accident, with a police comment and a note that emergency crews are there and the highway is partially closed.
Nothing to say against this article - I'm guessing it was written from a traffic updates-style radio list.
From the Courier Mail: Teenage motorcyclist dead after collision with truck near Ipswich
Once again, another long CM headline.
Much more informative, concisely written, only a few instances of sentences straining at the seams to fit facts in, one misplaced comma, useful details of what the road closure diversions are, and an unattributed "Excessive speed is considered a factor in the crash."
At 5.50am the highway should have been fairly open, however the Brisbane Valley Highway is one of those two-lane country roads that winds up hill and down dale, trees up to the edges and driveways and towns popping up at random intervals, so dodging somebody else is difficult at best.
That note about speed is my only issue with this otherwise well written article: Why? Looking at the description, the fact that a truck could pull out of a driveway far enough for the bike to hit its trailer suggests that, yes, the bike was going too fast for the conditions. Possibly over a crest, possibly around a corner, possibly just being stupid.
But forgive me for not even slightly trusting an authority who says "Excessive speed is believed to be a factor" without some sort of justification, and that should be noted by the reporter and inserted in the report. "Police say the motorcyclist's inability to stop may have been due to excessive speed" would be good. Just "Yes, he was probably speeding." sounds far too much like towing the party line and jumping to easy assumptions in the face of inadequate information, and it is the job of journalists to hold authority figures honest and make them explain themselves.
Finally, from the local QT: Motorcyclist dies in crash.
The ABC said "about 6am", the CM said "about 5.50am", the QT said "about 5.45am." Um...?
Two paragraphs, which really didn't warrant the use of the word "horrific" in the lead. The second paragraph also looks like three which were joined together by poor formatting. Speaking of poor - "riding a motorcycle, which collided with a truck" is not only my pet peeve of attributing intent to that which is inanimate, but is one of the most egregiously misplaced commas I've yet seen.
I'd also be interested to know if the QT has an opinion about "a" or "an" before "horrific", but that's just a matter of interest.
A poorly written article, but I can't really quibble about the contents.
But wait, there's more!
The very next day, the QT had a proper full-length treatment: Teen dies in bike smash
This time, a definite time of 5.40am, and details including name of the rider and where he was going.
Some casual language, which looks odd but that may just be me, but some good use of the police spokesman and a nicely, classically constructed article let down a little by a couple of instances of poor subbing ("SHE told him", for example).
And, ha-ha, a direct quote from Snr Sgt McCrae: "We don't know if speed was a factor or why the truck driver didn't see him." Up yours, jumping-to-conclusions.
Unfortunately, the article says "the motorcyclist travelling south-bound". He was understood to have left his home south of the crash site and was on his way to work north of the crash site. Um, whoops?
If he was going north, towards Fernvale, but the truck had pulled out of a driveway heading towards Ipswich, which is south, then either the truck pulled across his lane into the south-bound lane, or swung all the way into the north-bound lane in order to exit its driveway. Either scenario left the rider nowhere to go around, leaving braking as the only option. Hmm...
This is otherwise a well done article, very neutral and free from editorialising or judging.
Moving on to a non-fatal collision this time, the CM gives us Woman hurt in crash between motorbike and lorry at New Farm.
Another CM story, another tedious headline.
Speaking of formatting, there is a weird atypical quotation mark in the last paragraph.
"Woman motorbike rider" is clumsy, "she collided with a truck" needs supporting evidence, and I would be interested to know who was going where, who had right of way and what the truck was doing at the time.
Not a particularly well written article, and an unsatisfying one.
It's been three weeks since my last post - where did they go?
Before I start: I have, in the past, abused (with love) the Queensland Times for their RSS feeds, which consisted of a headline and then a description field filled with a copy of the headline. They have now fixed that, and have a proper, informative, good RSS feed again. Well done.
Today we have four different takes on the same story - the death of an 18yo who hit a truck on the Brisbane Valley Highway west of Brisbane at 5.50am (AEST) on Friday August 27.
In purely alphabetical order we have:
From the ABC News Online: Motorcyclist killed
A pithy title, no? The article describes three separate accidents. The last one is a motorised skateboard, for extra dark-humour value.
Three paragraphs for the bike accident, with a police comment and a note that emergency crews are there and the highway is partially closed.
Nothing to say against this article - I'm guessing it was written from a traffic updates-style radio list.
From the Courier Mail: Teenage motorcyclist dead after collision with truck near Ipswich
Once again, another long CM headline.
Much more informative, concisely written, only a few instances of sentences straining at the seams to fit facts in, one misplaced comma, useful details of what the road closure diversions are, and an unattributed "Excessive speed is considered a factor in the crash."
At 5.50am the highway should have been fairly open, however the Brisbane Valley Highway is one of those two-lane country roads that winds up hill and down dale, trees up to the edges and driveways and towns popping up at random intervals, so dodging somebody else is difficult at best.
That note about speed is my only issue with this otherwise well written article: Why? Looking at the description, the fact that a truck could pull out of a driveway far enough for the bike to hit its trailer suggests that, yes, the bike was going too fast for the conditions. Possibly over a crest, possibly around a corner, possibly just being stupid.
But forgive me for not even slightly trusting an authority who says "Excessive speed is believed to be a factor" without some sort of justification, and that should be noted by the reporter and inserted in the report. "Police say the motorcyclist's inability to stop may have been due to excessive speed" would be good. Just "Yes, he was probably speeding." sounds far too much like towing the party line and jumping to easy assumptions in the face of inadequate information, and it is the job of journalists to hold authority figures honest and make them explain themselves.
Finally, from the local QT: Motorcyclist dies in crash.
The ABC said "about 6am", the CM said "about 5.50am", the QT said "about 5.45am." Um...?
Two paragraphs, which really didn't warrant the use of the word "horrific" in the lead. The second paragraph also looks like three which were joined together by poor formatting. Speaking of poor - "riding a motorcycle, which collided with a truck" is not only my pet peeve of attributing intent to that which is inanimate, but is one of the most egregiously misplaced commas I've yet seen.
I'd also be interested to know if the QT has an opinion about "a" or "an" before "horrific", but that's just a matter of interest.
A poorly written article, but I can't really quibble about the contents.
But wait, there's more!
The very next day, the QT had a proper full-length treatment: Teen dies in bike smash
This time, a definite time of 5.40am, and details including name of the rider and where he was going.
Some casual language, which looks odd but that may just be me, but some good use of the police spokesman and a nicely, classically constructed article let down a little by a couple of instances of poor subbing ("SHE told him", for example).
And, ha-ha, a direct quote from Snr Sgt McCrae: "We don't know if speed was a factor or why the truck driver didn't see him." Up yours, jumping-to-conclusions.
Unfortunately, the article says "the motorcyclist travelling south-bound". He was understood to have left his home south of the crash site and was on his way to work north of the crash site. Um, whoops?
If he was going north, towards Fernvale, but the truck had pulled out of a driveway heading towards Ipswich, which is south, then either the truck pulled across his lane into the south-bound lane, or swung all the way into the north-bound lane in order to exit its driveway. Either scenario left the rider nowhere to go around, leaving braking as the only option. Hmm...
This is otherwise a well done article, very neutral and free from editorialising or judging.
Moving on to a non-fatal collision this time, the CM gives us Woman hurt in crash between motorbike and lorry at New Farm.
Another CM story, another tedious headline.
Speaking of formatting, there is a weird atypical quotation mark in the last paragraph.
"Woman motorbike rider" is clumsy, "she collided with a truck" needs supporting evidence, and I would be interested to know who was going where, who had right of way and what the truck was doing at the time.
Not a particularly well written article, and an unsatisfying one.
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
There is no such thing as a "will of the people"
I have tried to avoid this. I really have.
Commenting on this farce of an election.
It's certainly more interesting than anything that happened during the actual election campaign itself, leaks included.
And, bizarrely, it's shown Bob Katter to be a reasoned, considered man of noble principles and not (only) the half-crazed loon the city-centred rest of Australia thought he was.
But there is one thing I can no longer keep silent about (yes, there was a point, I was getting here, honest).
"The Australian people spoke."
May I just say: Piss off.
What is this "Australian people" of which you speak?
"Australians managed to engineer the only result which made sense." How? By colluding? Sorry, I don't remember getting instructions to vote this way so the result would go that way.
This idea that the outcome of millions of individual decisions reflects a group-think is old-fashioned, very wrong and, in my view, deceptive, discourteous and probably disingenuous as well. It's a convenient shorthand but it reflects sloppy thinking and it shouldn't be used.
The result is the result of many factors, possibly including a protest-vote which may have been influenced by a belief that Labor would win anyway so it was safe to do so. Possibly including a genuine sense of dissatisfaction with the major parties and a turn to minors, yet I notice the major parties did still manage to win 145 out of 150 seats (at present counting). Possibly including a genuine lack of compelling electioneering which resulted in people defaulting to party lines and sorting out the swinging voters into who they really do lean towards.
I don't know, and frankly I don't care. What I do care about is that we stop saying "the will of the people" was expressed, or "Australians wished" or "The electorate decided" or, more appropriately, "the electorate failed to decide".
This member of the electorate made a decision. So did millions of others. Independently of all save maybe family members or friends. And the result of all of those independent decisions, when filtered through an electoral system incorporating preferences, electoral boundaries and a system of government predicated upon a mini-democracy of seats voting along party lines, is a hung parliament.
There is no "will of the people" involved. There is the consequences of the wills of the people.
Termites build geographically aligned mounds without a guiding intelligence. Flocks of birds or schools of fish stay together without traffic control. Ants find and exploit food by each individual ant following a hierarchy of simple rules, not a grand centrally-coordinated master plan.
Please don't take the easy way out of thinking and accuse me of insulting voters' intelligences: I wish to point out that simple rules, expressed many times, produce complex outcomes.
The "will of the masses" is an illusion, albeit a very powerful one. It is a ghost arising out of the machine. It is pareidolia of politics. It is a chimera constructed from millions of individual inputs, each one meaningful, together adding up to a result which is not meaningful, it simply is.
Both major parties failed in their bid to convince a sufficient majority of voters across a sufficient majority of electorates to vote for them. This is the real and only message here.
If we work backwards from that, asking why not, we may begin to pick apart the reasons, we may begin to find the policies that, through popularity, reflect a majority of opinion.
But please, for the love of whatever deity, faith or otherwise vow of passion you believe in, don't put the cart before the horse and think that "Australia" "passed judgement" or that "the electorate wanted this". I suspect you would find, if you could survey all individual voters, that instead of being satisfied with this outcome they're alternately annoyed, sick of it and apathetic.
Don't ask if the electorate would pass a Turing test - not because it might not, but because it's the wrong question to ask. "The electorate" is only intelligent if an ant heap is intelligent. It's just far, far more complicated and difficult a job to engineer a result from a collection of voters than to engineer a result from a collection of ants.
Probably.
Commenting on this farce of an election.
I was not an angry voter, but I was not an undecided voter either.
I was disappointed by Kevin Rudd's managerial style after being elected, but pleased by many of his policy initiatives. I was disappointed when he caved on emissions trading, but more by his failure to more vigorously pursue the carrot approach of incentives to manufacture clean power plants combined with a nicely predictable timeline to phase out the manufacture of dirty plants. I was disappointed by the way he was deposed, but didn't feel personally betrayed by it since I, as a voter, don't remember ticking a box saying "I want Rudd as PM", it was just a consequence of the way we all voted, and maybe a factor in it as well. I'm not that impressed by Julia Gillard, frankly, but she has done some good things.
On the other side, I am personally disgusted by a lot of what Tony Abbott believes and find him, as an individual, to be just a bit creepy. I don't like many of his colleagues either, but then again I don't have much respect for many Labor parliamentarians so I suppose that's all right.
In actual fact, I maintain that the only two major figures who got through the entire campaign with dignity intact were Malcolm Turnbull and Bob Brown.
I was disappointed by Kevin Rudd's managerial style after being elected, but pleased by many of his policy initiatives. I was disappointed when he caved on emissions trading, but more by his failure to more vigorously pursue the carrot approach of incentives to manufacture clean power plants combined with a nicely predictable timeline to phase out the manufacture of dirty plants. I was disappointed by the way he was deposed, but didn't feel personally betrayed by it since I, as a voter, don't remember ticking a box saying "I want Rudd as PM", it was just a consequence of the way we all voted, and maybe a factor in it as well. I'm not that impressed by Julia Gillard, frankly, but she has done some good things.
On the other side, I am personally disgusted by a lot of what Tony Abbott believes and find him, as an individual, to be just a bit creepy. I don't like many of his colleagues either, but then again I don't have much respect for many Labor parliamentarians so I suppose that's all right.
In actual fact, I maintain that the only two major figures who got through the entire campaign with dignity intact were Malcolm Turnbull and Bob Brown.
The simple fact is that I have progressive social views, a strong sense of social justice and a firm belief that the job of a government is to govern, lead and develop not sit back and let private enterprise do it for them, so I am constitutionally inclined, if forced to choose between only the two majors, to pick Labor.
But I'm not impatient or annoyed or upset by the outcome. I'm more interested by this hung situation than I could have been by any other outcome. This horse-trading currently going on as the two parties sit just short of majority and three traditional conservatives plus one (now Adam Bandt has formally sided with Labor) are desperately courted by two leaders who would prefer to ignore their existence, is the best show we've had in politics since Rudd spanked Howard (not literally, we should be so lucky) at the last election.
But I'm not impatient or annoyed or upset by the outcome. I'm more interested by this hung situation than I could have been by any other outcome. This horse-trading currently going on as the two parties sit just short of majority and three traditional conservatives plus one (now Adam Bandt has formally sided with Labor) are desperately courted by two leaders who would prefer to ignore their existence, is the best show we've had in politics since Rudd spanked Howard (not literally, we should be so lucky) at the last election.
It's certainly more interesting than anything that happened during the actual election campaign itself, leaks included.
And, bizarrely, it's shown Bob Katter to be a reasoned, considered man of noble principles and not (only) the half-crazed loon the city-centred rest of Australia thought he was.
But there is one thing I can no longer keep silent about (yes, there was a point, I was getting here, honest).
"The Australian people spoke."
May I just say: Piss off.
What is this "Australian people" of which you speak?
"Australians managed to engineer the only result which made sense." How? By colluding? Sorry, I don't remember getting instructions to vote this way so the result would go that way.
This idea that the outcome of millions of individual decisions reflects a group-think is old-fashioned, very wrong and, in my view, deceptive, discourteous and probably disingenuous as well. It's a convenient shorthand but it reflects sloppy thinking and it shouldn't be used.
The result is the result of many factors, possibly including a protest-vote which may have been influenced by a belief that Labor would win anyway so it was safe to do so. Possibly including a genuine sense of dissatisfaction with the major parties and a turn to minors, yet I notice the major parties did still manage to win 145 out of 150 seats (at present counting). Possibly including a genuine lack of compelling electioneering which resulted in people defaulting to party lines and sorting out the swinging voters into who they really do lean towards.
I don't know, and frankly I don't care. What I do care about is that we stop saying "the will of the people" was expressed, or "Australians wished" or "The electorate decided" or, more appropriately, "the electorate failed to decide".
This member of the electorate made a decision. So did millions of others. Independently of all save maybe family members or friends. And the result of all of those independent decisions, when filtered through an electoral system incorporating preferences, electoral boundaries and a system of government predicated upon a mini-democracy of seats voting along party lines, is a hung parliament.
There is no "will of the people" involved. There is the consequences of the wills of the people.
Termites build geographically aligned mounds without a guiding intelligence. Flocks of birds or schools of fish stay together without traffic control. Ants find and exploit food by each individual ant following a hierarchy of simple rules, not a grand centrally-coordinated master plan.
Please don't take the easy way out of thinking and accuse me of insulting voters' intelligences: I wish to point out that simple rules, expressed many times, produce complex outcomes.
The "will of the masses" is an illusion, albeit a very powerful one. It is a ghost arising out of the machine. It is pareidolia of politics. It is a chimera constructed from millions of individual inputs, each one meaningful, together adding up to a result which is not meaningful, it simply is.
Both major parties failed in their bid to convince a sufficient majority of voters across a sufficient majority of electorates to vote for them. This is the real and only message here.
If we work backwards from that, asking why not, we may begin to pick apart the reasons, we may begin to find the policies that, through popularity, reflect a majority of opinion.
But please, for the love of whatever deity, faith or otherwise vow of passion you believe in, don't put the cart before the horse and think that "Australia" "passed judgement" or that "the electorate wanted this". I suspect you would find, if you could survey all individual voters, that instead of being satisfied with this outcome they're alternately annoyed, sick of it and apathetic.
Don't ask if the electorate would pass a Turing test - not because it might not, but because it's the wrong question to ask. "The electorate" is only intelligent if an ant heap is intelligent. It's just far, far more complicated and difficult a job to engineer a result from a collection of voters than to engineer a result from a collection of ants.
Probably.
Nokia N97 mini: SlideIT and LightNotePad
(Prescriptus: I finally fixed Blogger's formatting bizareness: There is a button for "remove formatting", which finally returns things to nice, simple HTML. I have no idea why, after I copied the text from a plain text file, it was messy, complicated and wrong HTML in the first place.)
Part of the challenge faced by smartphone manufacturers is how to get text from the user's mind onto the screen. The N97 mini has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but it's only really average in quality and sometimes you just can't be bothered.
There may also be better options.
So let's look at this, shall we: How do we get text into the phone, and where do we put it?
Like the somehow more famous Swype, you draw a line connecting the letters of the word you want - in order, obviously - and the software works out what the word is. It's like supercharged predictive text. You can also tap out words and then add them to the dictionary from the keyboard instead of having to drop into another dialogue first.
And it works really well and I'm not sorry I paid for it - although I wish it had dropped in price before I paid up. There are paths that cover quite a lot of words and there are subtleties of usage which you learn over time to improve prediction, but you can also tap out letter-by-letter and be offered predictive suggestions as well as the option to add or delete that word from the dictionary. These blog posts were mostly written using SlideIt.
It is, indeed, very shiny and quite the most relaxed way of entering text I've ever used on a small screen. But its integration with the system leaves something to be desired.
When called it doesn't resize the window you're entering text into but floats over it instead, which inevitably means that it's going to end up covering the text, and quite quickly.
Luckily, there's a button to switch it between top and bottom of the screen, which is a functioning workaround but still feels like a last minute "Oops, we really should fix that!" kludge.
However when you switch the phone to landscape mode the SlideIT interface changes to have its own entry area and replaces the application itself in the same way the system keyboard does.
Unfortunately, although the keys are nice and big in this mode, it introduces an extremely annoying performance bug. The screen has a visible refresh rate. You have to wait for words to be drawn on screen before entering the next one, and gods help you if you want to change the system's selection - it deletes the old word one. Letter. At. A. Time, then draws the new one in.
So, of course, I added it.
The next time I needed it, it had disappeared. I had to add it again. And again. It has become a saga in its own right.
The final problem is that it doesn't work with the two programs I most often need text entry in - Gravity the uber Twitter/Facebook/Google Reader client, and LightNotepad the barely-adequate-but-best-choice text editor (see below). Which leaves me at the T9 entry. And that's really, really annoying.
On the the whole however it really is a very cool system, and really would make the difference between me living with a touch only device and me throttling someone.
Then there's DEdit. If you have a non-touch Symbian device, stop looking now. Jbak's text editor is incredibly powerful and has more features, keyboard shortcuts and options than I got close to using.
And it has one very, very useful feature. It can remember your location in a file, and go back there when you next open it.
This makes it an almost complete basic ebook reader if you're desperate, and is invaluable if you have large files.
And it doesn't work in Symbian with touch. Jbak's other invaluable tool the TaskMan task manager does but DEdit hasn't been updated in a while and I'm afraid he may have lost interest in it.
Or, probably more likely, it would be a huge effort to make all the keyboard hotkey combinations work on touch and he hasn't, or hasn't finished, or won't.
I was most upset when I found out I would have to search for a replacement.
Without paying slightly stupid sums of money for a mobile office suite, which would be complete overkill not to mention potentially less actually useful, I only really found one alternative - LightNotePad. The "light" part may refer to its inability to handle files greater than 200kb, which goes beyond short story territory into small novel.
It's fairly basic. It has a find function, a page down button but page up using the green key (which launches the phone dialer at the same time, whoops) and, very useful, the ability to set a bookmark for the file.
No undo, however, which is slightly annoying.
You may think I'm being a bit obsessive with this bookmarking feature but navigating through a file on a small screen can become tedious in the extreme and you can save yourself an enormous amount of time by not having to do so.
And besides: there's ebooks. (quick note to say; on Symbian, if you do want an ebook reader: ZXreader. It's a Russian site, so use Google Translate or something. I use Google Chrome or Chromium, which detect the non-English and offers to translate it for you, very seamless).
I started off being astonished there was such a small selection, but I'm forced to concede I shouldn't be. The number of people who want a text editor on a handheld device and don't want it to read Microsoft formats is, in all honesty, very, very limited.
Dammit.
Part of the challenge faced by smartphone manufacturers is how to get text from the user's mind onto the screen. The N97 mini has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but it's only really average in quality and sometimes you just can't be bothered.
There may also be better options.
So let's look at this, shall we: How do we get text into the phone, and where do we put it?
Text entry
Take the very shiny SlideIT keyboard.Like the somehow more famous Swype, you draw a line connecting the letters of the word you want - in order, obviously - and the software works out what the word is. It's like supercharged predictive text. You can also tap out words and then add them to the dictionary from the keyboard instead of having to drop into another dialogue first.
And it works really well and I'm not sorry I paid for it - although I wish it had dropped in price before I paid up. There are paths that cover quite a lot of words and there are subtleties of usage which you learn over time to improve prediction, but you can also tap out letter-by-letter and be offered predictive suggestions as well as the option to add or delete that word from the dictionary. These blog posts were mostly written using SlideIt.
It is, indeed, very shiny and quite the most relaxed way of entering text I've ever used on a small screen. But its integration with the system leaves something to be desired.
When called it doesn't resize the window you're entering text into but floats over it instead, which inevitably means that it's going to end up covering the text, and quite quickly.
Luckily, there's a button to switch it between top and bottom of the screen, which is a functioning workaround but still feels like a last minute "Oops, we really should fix that!" kludge.
However when you switch the phone to landscape mode the SlideIT interface changes to have its own entry area and replaces the application itself in the same way the system keyboard does.
Unfortunately, although the keys are nice and big in this mode, it introduces an extremely annoying performance bug. The screen has a visible refresh rate. You have to wait for words to be drawn on screen before entering the next one, and gods help you if you want to change the system's selection - it deletes the old word one. Letter. At. A. Time, then draws the new one in.
The grammar model could also do with some work: it automatically capitalises the first word after a full stop, but not after exclamation marks. At least, not always. Generally, when it feels like it.
It also insists upon capitalising the first letter of some text fields but not all, and refuses to let you capitalise in the middle of a word, both of which make entering decent passwords impossible. You have to disable it, even on the N97 family where the hardware keyboards don't work, by launching a separate application - you can't do it from within the keyboard interface itself.
It would have been nice if they had put the word "Symbian" in the dictionary for the Symbian version.
And one more thing - I CANNOT get it to give me "this". At first I thought I was just being a victim of a particularly common path, but then I found out that said word wasn't in the dictionary. "This," wasn't in the dictionary.
It would have been nice if they had put the word "Symbian" in the dictionary for the Symbian version.
And one more thing - I CANNOT get it to give me "this". At first I thought I was just being a victim of a particularly common path, but then I found out that said word wasn't in the dictionary. "This," wasn't in the dictionary.
So, of course, I added it.
The next time I needed it, it had disappeared. I had to add it again. And again. It has become a saga in its own right.
The final problem is that it doesn't work with the two programs I most often need text entry in - Gravity the uber Twitter/Facebook/Google Reader client, and LightNotepad the barely-adequate-but-best-choice text editor (see below). Which leaves me at the T9 entry. And that's really, really annoying.
On the the whole however it really is a very cool system, and really would make the difference between me living with a touch only device and me throttling someone.
Text Editors
As far as I'm concerned, every computing device needs a text editor. It's the ultimate basic tool. With a basic text editor you can write letters or emails away from a word processor or an email client, replace a note book, take phone numbers or addresses or other contact details easier and usually faster than using the device's contacts application, and even use it as an ebook reader for device agnostic formats like pain text or html.
So what's available on Symbian? Stuff all, actually.
The built-in Notes application can handle large quantities of text, but that's about it. There's no find, no undo (which has already made my life unpleasant) and this is how you get files in or out to work on them:
- In: open in the built-in file manager (or select "Open with system" in Xplore), which thinks it's dealing with an email attachment and asks if you want to save it to Notes.
- Out: you can't "export", you have to "send". Yes, send via bluetooth, MMS or email, but not actually dump it to a text file on the phone's file system. Yes, you have to email it to yourself.
Then there's DEdit. If you have a non-touch Symbian device, stop looking now. Jbak's text editor is incredibly powerful and has more features, keyboard shortcuts and options than I got close to using.
And it has one very, very useful feature. It can remember your location in a file, and go back there when you next open it.
This makes it an almost complete basic ebook reader if you're desperate, and is invaluable if you have large files.
And it doesn't work in Symbian with touch. Jbak's other invaluable tool the TaskMan task manager does but DEdit hasn't been updated in a while and I'm afraid he may have lost interest in it.
Or, probably more likely, it would be a huge effort to make all the keyboard hotkey combinations work on touch and he hasn't, or hasn't finished, or won't.
I was most upset when I found out I would have to search for a replacement.
Without paying slightly stupid sums of money for a mobile office suite, which would be complete overkill not to mention potentially less actually useful, I only really found one alternative - LightNotePad. The "light" part may refer to its inability to handle files greater than 200kb, which goes beyond short story territory into small novel.
It's fairly basic. It has a find function, a page down button but page up using the green key (which launches the phone dialer at the same time, whoops) and, very useful, the ability to set a bookmark for the file.
No undo, however, which is slightly annoying.
You may think I'm being a bit obsessive with this bookmarking feature but navigating through a file on a small screen can become tedious in the extreme and you can save yourself an enormous amount of time by not having to do so.
And besides: there's ebooks. (quick note to say; on Symbian, if you do want an ebook reader: ZXreader. It's a Russian site, so use Google Translate or something. I use Google Chrome or Chromium, which detect the non-English and offers to translate it for you, very seamless).
I started off being astonished there was such a small selection, but I'm forced to concede I shouldn't be. The number of people who want a text editor on a handheld device and don't want it to read Microsoft formats is, in all honesty, very, very limited.
Dammit.
Sunday, 29 August 2010
Motorbike accidents in the media - Part 14
No, I don't know of any 14-cylinder motorbikes, either.
Also: Yes, I know the formatting is a little strange. I don't know why, it's Blogger's fault.
Something strange happened.
Stories dried up.
I'm not sure if I just missed a lot, or if there really was a late-winter lull, or if suddenly they weren't being reported, but August was a barren month for motorbike crash stories.
Then, suddenly, they appeared again.
So hear we go. Again.
I shall begin with a story from the Courier Mail, way back on July 26.
It is called, wait for it:
Also: Yes, I know the formatting is a little strange. I don't know why, it's Blogger's fault.
Something strange happened.
Stories dried up.
I'm not sure if I just missed a lot, or if there really was a late-winter lull, or if suddenly they weren't being reported, but August was a barren month for motorbike crash stories.
Then, suddenly, they appeared again.
So hear we go. Again.
I shall begin with a story from the Courier Mail, way back on July 26.
It is called, wait for it:
Motorbike rider killed after hitting 170km/h before slamming into car and crashing through sound barrier on M1 at Ormeau
I have mentioned the CM habit of excessive headlines before, but this is just a joke.
Also: sound barrier? I'm guessing they mean a concrete barrier to prevent houses near the motorway getting all the noise, but the term does have one other meaning. Ambiguous is not good.
The opening paragraph is:
AN allegedly speeding motorcyclist has paid the ultimate price, after slamming into a car then catapulting into sound barriers on the Pacific Motorway at Ormeau last night.
Is this news, or editorialising? Or script-writing perhaps?
Spot the distinction between the headline's "hitting 170km/h" and the opening paragraph's "allegedly speeding". Spot the useless euphemism of "ultimate price". Spot the equally useless verb forms "slamming" and "catapulting".
Rewrite: AN allegedly speeding motorcyclist has died after hitting a car and sound barriers on the Pacific Motorway at Ormeau last night.
See? Says just as much but doesn't waste time, space or punctuation.
Second paragraph: informative and brief.
Third paragraph:
His large high-powered road bike was spotted prior to the crash travelling northbound on the M1 at estimated speeds of between 160 and 170km/h.
This is trash journalism, it really is. If you know what the bike is - put it in. If you don't - leave it out. Saying "large high-powered" not only begs for an "and" or a comma - both of which should be telling you to consider rewriting a news sentence - but is meaningless. A Honda Goldwing is "large high-powered". A BMW K1200LT is "large high-powered". They are also both luxury tourers ridden by wealthy retirees. Come to that, a Range Rover is "large high-powered".
Not only but also, it is possible to hit speeds in excess of 170km/h on bikes that are "small" and, comparatively speaking, "modest powered". In fact, it's more likely on a small bike. Superbikes these days are the size of yesterday's supersports.
My bike is heavier than a sports bike and wasn't super powerful in 1982 when it was launched, but it still has a listed top speed of greater than 200km/h.
Next point: Estimated by whom? Police, who at least have some training, or other motorists, who can't be relied upon to spot bikes at all unless they're speeding, and generally can't judge their own speed let alone someone else's?
That entire sentence can be usefully distilled down to: Other motorists said he was speeding as he headed northbound on the M1.
The final five paragraphs, three of them about the accident and two about the road toll, are brief and to the point. Only the paragraphs dealing with the motorbike are poorly written and should never have been delivered by a competent journalist, let alone passed by a halfway decent editor.
I don't often say this, but that article was rubbish.
Okay. We can trust the ABC not to do that, can't we?
Now if that doesn't grab your attention, I don't know what will.
The gist is that it was off-road, on a farm, and she ran into a cow. The bike and the cow then fell on her and she is alive and being treated for serious head and back injuries.
The first point to make here is that there is no way to write about a cow falling on someone without suppressed laughter. It's just an inherently funny thing to happen, unless it's you or someone you know.
Getting that out of the way: "four-wheel bike". Pedant hat on for a second: A "bike" is from "bicycle" which is from "bi-cycle" which translates as "two wheeled". It's a "quadcycle". Repeat after me: "Quad. Cycle. Quadcycle."
Right.
Getting that out of the way, there's nothing I can say to fault this. Not sure how she managed to have a quadcycle fall on her unless she ran up the side of the cow and it flipped, and not sure how she managed to hit it unless she was, to use a technical term, "larking about".
But the article was brief, to the point, and clear.
Finally, we have one article from the CM again, from August 18:
Motorbike rider dies after losing arm and leg in Bundaberg crash
Strangely, this appeared in the RSS feeds twice, under different headlines. They've done this sort of thing before. Not sure if it's because article publish automatically and somebody then changes the headline, or what the story is.
Unfortunately, the opening paragraph adds exactly two pieces of information and one adverb: "horrific", "died in hospital" and "overnight".
The actual information is in the second paragraph, which gives us where and how, but also gives the bike credit for causing the crash of its own free will.
The rest of the article isn't too bad, with reasonably succinct sentences and a logical flow, although I have issue with this:
A Department of Community Safety spokesman said the man suffered "traumatic injuries" that included the amputation of an arm and a leg.
If the injuries really did include amputation, the journalist should have rewritten .
I'm intrigued by the comment that speed hasn't been ruled out as a factor but there were "inconsistencies" with that theory, but if it was still under investigation there probably wasn't any more information available at the time.
It's actually a reasonably complete article, and not bad.
At this point in the year the main factors uniting all stories so far have been sloppy or incomplete reporting, and euphemisms. Things like "his bike clipped a guard rail" can be forgiven as standard practice, but "paid the ultimate price" should have been repaid with corporal punishment.
If you want to write like that, go and work for a tabloid.
If you want to comment on the Courier Mail, keep it to yourself.
Thursday, 26 August 2010
Nokia N97 mini: Pity they stopped before finishing it
After two years and no little agonising (look back over this blog's archives if you really want to know) I ended up, thanks to a ridiculously cheap contract which is technically cheaper than buying it outright, but amortised over two years, I have a Nokia N97 mini (Nokia site).
The main reasons for buying, apart from the price, being that it has a good camera, OK speakers, mature OS that I already know, the almost certainty of regular firmware upgrades into the next year, and doesn't actually fall down on any criteria, whereas all other contenders fell down badly on at least one or two criteria.
Not great, but pretty good everywhere.
And that's how it presents: Not the smoothest, fastest or prettiest, but consistently powerful and has so much functionality built in it's almost complete out of the box.
But, me being me, I just have to start picking holes the moment I pick it up and turn it on, and have to keep finding holes the longer I use it. See my "Notes from the N95" series if you doubt my nit-picking tendencies.
I shall, for the moment, draw a veil over the time taken to refresh each screen or to change between portrait and landscape and back, because if I start mentioning that I may start crying, and I want to finish this.
Some of the Mini's problems are obvious, like not having a sunlight friendly transflective layer on the screen. But would you really expect charging to be a problem?
It is.
I have a powermonkey, a rubberised little beast of an external power source which made my infamously small-batteried N95 approximately twice as useful and became indispensable to me.
It doesn't work with the mini.
I was to discover that both the N97s are "notorious" for being "picky" with chargers, some people having trouble with genuine Nokia accessory chargers.
This does me not a happy bunny make.
Powermonkey, however, are brilliant. I sent them an email saying "Got one, love it, doesn't work with my new mini, is this a known problem?" they sent an email back asking for my address so they could send me a new microUSB tip, in case that's the problem. No demand for proof of purchase, just "here, have a new tip, see if that works." Customer service win.
It's long postage from the UK to Australia, so I haven't received it yet.
I shall now mention the stereo ear buds that came in the box. They are, in all but one crucial respect, rather nice. In fact, much nicer than the set that came with my N95.
They have little rubber cups over them that fit really well in your ears and effectively isolate you from the outside world ( although my God does eating toast echo in your head), the cords seem stronger and the control is a very attractive unit, as opposed to the ugly chunk of the N95's unit. And when I plugged it in, I got a message saying to use the phone microphone. Not an actual full hands free, then?
Specific moments of fail (or, on twitter, #fail):
Double the RAM. It really is that simple. The screen is unnecessarily annoying in direct sunlight, the lock switch is a little cheap, it could have done with at least one more firmware generation before being released - possibly three.
But the single biggest issue with it is performance, and we all know that the single best way to improve performance of any computer is - more RAM.
It just runs out too damn easily. It has 128MB, and that is just not good enough. It has about 40MB free after booting, and that drops pretty quickly.
The benefits of the most mature and sophisticated multi-tasking mobile device operating system start to disappear when applications running in the background start closing down every time you run something interesting in the foreground - the HOME SCREEN keeps crashing, and that's just stupid.
If Nokia had given this thing 256MB, it would have made the WORLD of difference.
As it is, it feels like yet another own goal, nearly-there effort. And that bites when you're a customer trying to use it the way it could be used.
Next time: third-party software.
The main reasons for buying, apart from the price, being that it has a good camera, OK speakers, mature OS that I already know, the almost certainty of regular firmware upgrades into the next year, and doesn't actually fall down on any criteria, whereas all other contenders fell down badly on at least one or two criteria.
Not great, but pretty good everywhere.
And that's how it presents: Not the smoothest, fastest or prettiest, but consistently powerful and has so much functionality built in it's almost complete out of the box.
But, me being me, I just have to start picking holes the moment I pick it up and turn it on, and have to keep finding holes the longer I use it. See my "Notes from the N95" series if you doubt my nit-picking tendencies.
I shall, for the moment, draw a veil over the time taken to refresh each screen or to change between portrait and landscape and back, because if I start mentioning that I may start crying, and I want to finish this.
Some of the Mini's problems are obvious, like not having a sunlight friendly transflective layer on the screen. But would you really expect charging to be a problem?
It is.
I have a powermonkey, a rubberised little beast of an external power source which made my infamously small-batteried N95 approximately twice as useful and became indispensable to me.
It doesn't work with the mini.
I was to discover that both the N97s are "notorious" for being "picky" with chargers, some people having trouble with genuine Nokia accessory chargers.
This does me not a happy bunny make.
Powermonkey, however, are brilliant. I sent them an email saying "Got one, love it, doesn't work with my new mini, is this a known problem?" they sent an email back asking for my address so they could send me a new microUSB tip, in case that's the problem. No demand for proof of purchase, just "here, have a new tip, see if that works." Customer service win.
It's long postage from the UK to Australia, so I haven't received it yet.
I shall now mention the stereo ear buds that came in the box. They are, in all but one crucial respect, rather nice. In fact, much nicer than the set that came with my N95.
They have little rubber cups over them that fit really well in your ears and effectively isolate you from the outside world ( although my God does eating toast echo in your head), the cords seem stronger and the control is a very attractive unit, as opposed to the ugly chunk of the N95's unit. And when I plugged it in, I got a message saying to use the phone microphone. Not an actual full hands free, then?
Specific moments of fail (or, on twitter, #fail):
- system settings and email settings both appear as an application called " settings", which makes life interesting when you're trying to assign a shortcut and you have to choose from a text only list;
- in old S60 3rd Ed, settings dialogues that had multiple pages had visible tabs. In 5th, there are tiny little arrows instead, very easy to miss. Fail;
- this is more a design thing: when you select a text field to edit with the soft keyboard, what you get is the keyboard replacing the application you're in with its own sort of scratch buffer, instead of just popping up and resizing the application. You get the full amount of existing text and I suppose it neatly deals with the problem of badly designed applications, but it looks incredibly amateurish;
- The screen lock switch. Easy to use, but the cheapest and tackiest piece of design and manufacturing on the whole device. It actually rattles;
- it gives you a message to "unplug charger from wall to save power" whenever you unplug phone from charger. Annoying enough. But, it gives you the same message when you unplug a USB cable. Can't it check, and realise that would be a stupid message to give?
- there is no transflective layer on the screen, making it all but invisible in bright sunlight. News flash, Finns: some of us live in countries with bright sunlight, and would like to be able to use your phones outdoors. Particularly the rather excellent camera you provided, which can't be properly aimed if we can't see the screen;
- I think I have just diagnosed one of the worst offenders of lingering-even-after-dead RAM hogging. Nokia's own Podcaster. The one they declined to donate to Symbian. I wonder if I've now found out why? I was having hideous problems with running out of RAM to the point where the only way to get the image gallery to load was to reboot. And everything has improved suddenly, and the only change I can identify is that I switched to the development, official Symbian Podcatcher, which is also better designed and nicer to use;
- The home screen keeps crashing, and needing to reload. Please note, it has received two firmware updates since release, already, and it's still happening.
Double the RAM. It really is that simple. The screen is unnecessarily annoying in direct sunlight, the lock switch is a little cheap, it could have done with at least one more firmware generation before being released - possibly three.
But the single biggest issue with it is performance, and we all know that the single best way to improve performance of any computer is - more RAM.
It just runs out too damn easily. It has 128MB, and that is just not good enough. It has about 40MB free after booting, and that drops pretty quickly.
The benefits of the most mature and sophisticated multi-tasking mobile device operating system start to disappear when applications running in the background start closing down every time you run something interesting in the foreground - the HOME SCREEN keeps crashing, and that's just stupid.
If Nokia had given this thing 256MB, it would have made the WORLD of difference.
As it is, it feels like yet another own goal, nearly-there effort. And that bites when you're a customer trying to use it the way it could be used.
Next time: third-party software.
Thursday, 5 August 2010
Motorbike accidents in the media, part 13
If there has ever been a 13 cylinder motorbike I really don't want to know about it. (Actually I do, but I hope there hasn't been!)
The Courier Mail are keeping up their habit of long headlines: "Car mounts footpath in rush hour, injures pedestrian and motorcyclst in Fortitude Valley" (July 21).
Three paragraphs, but bad formatting makes it look like two at first. It doesn't say how exactly the two cars, motorbike and pedestrian were involved, which is surely the big question. I mean - what? Surely the police would have some idea what happened if it was during rush hour?
Unless, of course, by the time police got there through rush hour traffic it had been so long that nobody could remember.
Oh yes, and: "motorbike-rider"? Really? That doesn't fit any hyphenation rule I'm familiar with!
Slightly shorter headline from the CM from the same day: "Police seek witnesses after black sedan hits motorcycle in Mackay" (July 21).
The second paragraph desperately needs reworking to get rid of the commas, but the entire piece reads far too much like a mildly reworked police media release.
Mind you, there is a potentially amusing note that the black "SS or SV6" Commodore (and don't tell me you were even slightly surprised by that), "may have panel damage to the front right handside." For bonus points, kick the editor who posted that without fixing it.
There isn't really much I can say about this apart from saying that somebody should have rewritten it so that it wasn't quite so obviously a massaged media release. All it says is what the police are prepared to say, how they are prepared to say it.
From guess who, another long headline: "Harley-Davidson rider killed by Toyota Camry as he turned into driveway at Jimboomba" (July 23).
Okay, they hyphenated it correctly, but once again I am forced to ask: Why are HDs always identified in copy, when other brands very rarely are? Do journalists get a kick-back from HD marketing, or something? And why haven't I been told?
I could also go into the attribution of action to the car not the driver, but I've done that before. It's stupid, and unhelpful.
As an interesting insight: This story first hit the Mail's RSS feeds as "Man dead after motorbike accident", and then again as "Harley rider killed by Camry". Exact same copy. Hmmm...
Eight paragraphs, five about this story and then mentioning another couple of accidents.
I think this one's worth quoting in full:
POLICE are baffled by a fatal motorcycle crash at Jimboomba, southwest of Brisbane, in which a 64-year-old riding a Harley-Davidson bike was killed.
Now that's weird. They name HD, but find it necessary to add "bike".
Police said the man was turning into a wide, sweeping driveway on Cusack Lane, when he was struck from behind by a Toyota Camry towing a trailer.
Apart from the extraneous comma, that just screams a driver who was not paying attention. There is simply no excuse for running into the back of someone who has not just slammed their brakes on in an emergency.
The Courier Mail are keeping up their habit of long headlines: "Car mounts footpath in rush hour, injures pedestrian and motorcyclst in Fortitude Valley" (July 21).
Three paragraphs, but bad formatting makes it look like two at first. It doesn't say how exactly the two cars, motorbike and pedestrian were involved, which is surely the big question. I mean - what? Surely the police would have some idea what happened if it was during rush hour?
Unless, of course, by the time police got there through rush hour traffic it had been so long that nobody could remember.
Oh yes, and: "motorbike-rider"? Really? That doesn't fit any hyphenation rule I'm familiar with!
Slightly shorter headline from the CM from the same day: "Police seek witnesses after black sedan hits motorcycle in Mackay" (July 21).
The second paragraph desperately needs reworking to get rid of the commas, but the entire piece reads far too much like a mildly reworked police media release.
Mind you, there is a potentially amusing note that the black "SS or SV6" Commodore (and don't tell me you were even slightly surprised by that), "may have panel damage to the front right handside." For bonus points, kick the editor who posted that without fixing it.
There isn't really much I can say about this apart from saying that somebody should have rewritten it so that it wasn't quite so obviously a massaged media release. All it says is what the police are prepared to say, how they are prepared to say it.
From guess who, another long headline: "Harley-Davidson rider killed by Toyota Camry as he turned into driveway at Jimboomba" (July 23).
Okay, they hyphenated it correctly, but once again I am forced to ask: Why are HDs always identified in copy, when other brands very rarely are? Do journalists get a kick-back from HD marketing, or something? And why haven't I been told?
I could also go into the attribution of action to the car not the driver, but I've done that before. It's stupid, and unhelpful.
As an interesting insight: This story first hit the Mail's RSS feeds as "Man dead after motorbike accident", and then again as "Harley rider killed by Camry". Exact same copy. Hmmm...
Eight paragraphs, five about this story and then mentioning another couple of accidents.
I think this one's worth quoting in full:
POLICE are baffled by a fatal motorcycle crash at Jimboomba, southwest of Brisbane, in which a 64-year-old riding a Harley-Davidson bike was killed.
Now that's weird. They name HD, but find it necessary to add "bike".
Police said the man was turning into a wide, sweeping driveway on Cusack Lane, when he was struck from behind by a Toyota Camry towing a trailer.
Apart from the extraneous comma, that just screams a driver who was not paying attention. There is simply no excuse for running into the back of someone who has not just slammed their brakes on in an emergency.
The bike rider, Robert Walsh, died at the scene and the 68-year-old male driver of the car was unhurt.
It's amazing how people inside big metal cages are unhurt when colliding with small vehicles like bikes, isn't it?
It's amazing how people inside big metal cages are unhurt when colliding with small vehicles like bikes, isn't it?
His 66-year-old passenger was taken to Logan Hospital suffering shock and chest pains.
Heart problems, I'm betting.
The Forensic Crash Unit is investigating.
I should hope so. Preferably by taking the driver into a small room and asking pointed questions.
Full credit to the Courier Mail for embedding Google Maps links in this story.
This story needed more editing, fewer cliches and a quote from the police explaining the "baffled" part, but hadn't been too badly written to begin with.
I think that'll do for this episode. Three items, one media outlet, three excessively long headlines.
Heart problems, I'm betting.
The Forensic Crash Unit is investigating.
I should hope so. Preferably by taking the driver into a small room and asking pointed questions.
Full credit to the Courier Mail for embedding Google Maps links in this story.
This story needed more editing, fewer cliches and a quote from the police explaining the "baffled" part, but hadn't been too badly written to begin with.
I think that'll do for this episode. Three items, one media outlet, three excessively long headlines.
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