Every time I go out on the roads I play Russian Roulette. Why is it that huge container trucks keep pace with me on the national routes at 100km/h? Aren’t they supposed to be speed limited to 80km/h? Why is it that on the 50km/h stretch of road into Blackpool I’m routinely overtaken by motorists and lorries doing 60km/h and more? Why was I overtaken on a dangerous bend yesterday by someone who crossed an unbroken white line into the “fast” line and swerved into my lane right in front of me again when he was blocked by a slower driver? Where’s the social stigma of speeding?
Fear of penalty points has worn away. Maybe motorists should be locked up overnight for bad driving.
Raiméis comments on the death tole on Irish roads so far this year. 50 dead and it’s only the start of February. That’s an awful carnage.
United Irelander also has several links to other bloggers talking about this terrible waste of life, and links to statistics from the Gardai going back to the year 2000.
Who can you complain to? Try Minister for Transport, Martin Cullen TD at minister@transport.ie
Muhammad vs. the Holocaust
This morning, like a lot of people, I heard that an Iranian newspaper is looking for cartoons about the Holocaust. Reaction from Israel was expected, but where are the riots and demonstrations in Europe? Maybe later when people have had their breakfast.
Haven’t seen the comics yet? face of muhammed has ’em and a quick look at technorati returns many interesting posts:
- This is the kind of thing they should have done from the start rather than destroying stuff.
- The Bigger Picture from an article by Victor Davis.
- Yay! Someone who’ll be devoting “a few days to violent protesting, burning flags, torching embassies, and chanting death threats.” Finally!
- And Dugg says that “Arab newspapers already lampoon Jews, Christians, Europeans and the Holocaust on a daily basis. Having a contest on the subject would be sort of like the MoveOn.org having a contest to lampoon the President of the United States.”
Then there’s the hipocrisy of a peaceful religion acting violently against anyone who criticises them.
Later… Andrew Sullivan writes that it’s your taboo, not mine and, “Freedom means learning to deal with being offended.” (via)
Be careful, it’s a crazy ol’ world out there.
BMW M3 Coupe for 10,000 Euro
You can now buy a used BMW M3 Coupe for only 10,000 Euro! The peach paint comes at no extra cost!
PMO, some cosmetic damage due to having a cheating husband. Best offer secures. Idiot put car in my name.
(via)
Irish Blog Awards – You can start voting now!
Damien announced this evening that voting is now open for the Irish Blog Awards. I’m nominated in 3 sections:
- Best Personal Blog (this blog)
- Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere (for WordPress)
- Best Photo Blog (for In Photos)
If you’re familiar with the Irish B(l)oggersphere you’ll know a lot of the names, but if you’re not, follow the links to at least a few of the blogs and have a good read. Then decide who’ll get your vote. Vote for me if you think I deserve it!
Thank you to those who nominated me, I’m going to have a peek at the other entries now!
Rate My Post!
From a few brief searches on Google in the past I found that nobody had done a decent “Rate This Post” plugin for WordPress. This evening I went searching again, and came across the Post Star Rating plugin by O Doutor! It’s in Spanish which may cause some problems for English speakers but I figured it out so it can’t be *that* hard. 😉
After a bit of tweaking, I have it running on In Photos and it appears to work ok! That is, when I clicked the stars it worked, I haven’t stress tested it yet!
Who Cares Most
Scott Adams has some great advice for getting on in a relationship: The WCM Method. 🙂
My Name Is Yu Ming
What language would you learn if you were coming to a little country called Ireland? My Name Is Yu Ming is a film about a Chinese student who learns Irish so he can start a new life in Ireland. Unfortunately most Irish people don’t speak Irish..
Even if you don’t speak Irish you’ll get a kick out of this great little film as it’s subtitled. Go watch it! (Thanks Donal!)
CorkBlogs.com Goes Live
Donal noticed that Corkblogs.com is live!
It’s not aggregating many blogs yet but that should improve with time as it comes from the Irish Blogs people who did such a great job on that site.
Donal listed a few of the Cork blogs he knows about and I added a few in a comment. Know any more?
The Bearded Ray D'Arcy
Are you wondering what Ray D’Arcy looks like with a beard and after a shave, with a moustache? Take a look.
Sorry Ray, doesn’t suit you at all!
PHP Optimization and Security tips and rant
Andrew van der Stock’s criticism of PHP’s security model. What security? Global request arrays go some way to making applications safer but there are obscure functions and settings which can trip up developers. (via)
PHP Optimization Tricks from Ilia Alshanetsky has one gem I didn’t know about – the ctype extension. It’s somewhat limited but would be faster and less resouce intensive than a regular expression to do simple checks.
While I’m blogging development stuff, here’s mention of a vector drawing library in Javascript!
Yes, newer browsers have SVG support but this will work in older browsers and newer. Cute.