Stupid People Part LXXVII

Here's a neat little trifecta: waiting until making the turn before signalling, followed by driving your SUV down the middle of a two-lane street so that nobody can do anything, then ignoring the pedestrian crossing while someone was preparing to cross. Driver of 65388, you're Booked. Silly fella.

Here's another irritant at work: the use of all-caps. It just pisses me off sometimes. I received a message intended for someone with the same name as myself. The twits on the other end never bothered to check if they were sending this high-profile, confidential message to the right person. Anyway, I am busy trying to come up with an auto-reply script to all those people in Lotus Notes when I receive this follow up to tell me that they meant to send it to the other guy. Firstly, Duh. And Secondly, they're all "PLEASE disregard and delete" with all-caps. Okay. I can read. English is my first language. Shouting a word is not going to make it more visible or more urgent to me. It comes across as being bitchy about it. Ugh.

New rule: any e-mail message that consists of all-caps, the misuse of the word "its/it's" or abuse of quotes, i.e. "Thank You", gets sent to the Trash Bin. Stupid users.

My workaround for the blogging problems

It's not Blogger that's at fault for the posting problems, it's my hosting service which seems to time out constantly when attempting to update. I've been able to ftp and log into the control panel without any difficulty, but for some reason the blogging process always hiccups.

So my workaround, until either my host resolves the problem OR I find a new hosting solution, will be to publish my blog updates to my old Northrock account, then manually transfer files to my Beachlime host. Messy, yes, but it'll have to do for now. Unless I move to MovableType or something, which I have considered but need to devote some time towards.

I've gone anal on stupid people

To the rider of BD 147, while your riding skills are worthy of participating in some form of motorcross slalom, actually performing those overtaking-on-the-left then weaving outside other vehicles, is actually dangerous when doing it on a public road! You need to be taken off the road.

If I was the developer of any piece of software, I would want to ensure that my product is described clearly, without any mistakes that could discourage or put off the reader. So, when I saw that the program MultiReplace by Alphyn Software (no, I'm not linking to them) had all manner of grammatical errors in them, I didn't even bother to finish evaluating the program. It's just silly. I'm still pissed off at Madden NFL for using the word "playoff birth" when they needed to use "playoff berth".

Does anybody care about their own driving habits?

As even the Police calls for care when riding cycles in the wake of recent serious road collisions in Bermuda, it would seem that the call for motorists to avoid the "third lane" option has fallen on deaf ears. I saw quite a few people doing this as traffic approached them and they continued on their merry way. Oh well.

How about having some officers actually patrol roads where traffic could be slowed up (for rush hour, construction points, etc.) and bust offenders or at least serve as a deterrent to those who would break the law and more importantly risk the safety of all? Because for all the talk of "warn offenders they may be brought before the courts", I haven't seen it happen.

Thank you, Stuart Hayward, for also noticing this.

And shame on the rider of 800 AD for creating their own extra lane by riding their bike on the sidewalk outside Lobster Pot to get ahead of waiting traffic. Personally if I was a pedestrian I would hold my ground instead of making way for that idiot and others who think that they have the God-given right to drive as they please whenever it suits them.

Racing and Parking

On the Emmy-winning show The Amazing Race(Family Edition), the team that won the episode's leg of the race received the prize of a trip to Bermuda to stay at the Fairmont Southampton Princess hotel. Host Phil Keoghan messed up by saying there was a 9-hole golf course when it's really 18-holes (but all par 3s), but that's okay. A nice little plug to get the island mentioned on network television, I'm sure both the Fairmont Group and the Tourism Board will be pleased. But if Ewart Brown takes credit then I will sock somebody.

In the wake of a few recent serious road collisions, shame on the driver of 24794 for cantering through a red light at an intersection. Why don't people realize that when the light turns yellow, you should at least slow down and at red stop? Yellow should not mean that "you can still go a bit further but hurry up a bit"?

Parking in the city is a real chore. On a bike, you'd think that options would be available but nope. I really hate to think of what will happen when the new large office building opens up across the street and when the Par-la-ville car park is demolished to make way for a hotel or something. The only way to travel may be by helicopter.

I now have a record

Actually, it's just a parking ticket. So it's not really that sexy.

Anyway. Not too long ago, some geniuses at Corporation of Hamilton, or government, I'm really not sure who determines what should happen to a city car park, chose to lay some tarmac over a space containing about 10 bike parking areas. No sign to indicate what was happening, and I don't think it was announced anywhere. I think most of us assumed that they were laying it down to make it smoother for us who had to park there or something (of course that didn't work, if you parked there, the tarmac would melt around your kickstand by midday).

However, people continued to park bikes there without any issue for months. The only reason in retrospect that I could think of as to why they would want to remove the bike bays is if car drivers had problems navigating around that area - in which case maybe they should have removed a car bay or two instead and widen the roadway, but again I don't make those decisions.

I heard a rumour that someone got ticketed for parking there about a week and a half ago but paid it no mind. Surely there was no reason for it, there was no sign indicating that bikes cannot be parked in the area previously marked as such.

Lo! and behold, today I emerge from another hard day at the office and see the line of bikes, at least 9 of them, decorated with those ugly (and sometimes hard to remove) parking tickets complete with bright, bold, yellow, mailing envelope.

It's just baffling, that with new office buildings going up constantly, the powers that be have been reducing the parking space of especially cycle riders. I'd like to see it addressed somehow, but I'm not holding my breath. I honestly do think that there are plans to eventually cordon off any sort of parking whatsoever for cyclists and eventually force them to pay a fee in order to park in the city. This does nothing of course, to encourage people to NOT drive cars into the city and choose public transportation instead. Nothing!