The concept of “victim blaming” is not helping

A few days ago, THINK! — a confusingly named education group at the UK Government’s Department for Transport — published this 46-second-long video aimed at cyclists:

Its message is — to quote the caption at the end — “Don’t get caught between a lorry and a left turn”.

Sit the heck down, and watch the darned rugby!

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, to watch a Rugby World Cup match, Pool A, Australia vs. Fiji. Here is what I saw:

Constantly. People getting up, wandering along the rows, getting drinks or hot-dogs, bringing them back, making people in their row stand up to let them past, obscuring the view of people in the rows behind them.

… Or maybe they’re doing web-site registration completely right

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that DeviantArt are getting web-site registration completely wrong by asking for the email address (which you can see as you type it) to be repeated, but not requiring confirmation of the password (which you can’t see).

A lot of people in the comments (both here and at Hacker News) pointed out that I was wrong.

Saying goodbye to Twitter

I’ve been on Twitter for a couple of years now, first as @SauropodMike and more recently as @MikeTaylor. I have to admit, it’s hugely surpassed my expectations. I thought it was a medium for the trivial, but instead I’ve found a wealth of pithy observations, witty asides and links to all sorts of fascinating longer reads.

So now I’m leaving it.

My new bat-plan

My bat-sons and I are very fond of the 1966 bat-film Batman: the Movie (though my bat-wife is not so keen). One of the distinctive bat-features of this bat-film is of course Batman’s tendency to precede bat-nouns with the bat-prefix “bat-“. My new bat-plan is to adopt this verbal bat-tic in my own bat-speech, but using it before every bat-noun.

Centric Events are repeat spammers

Like most people I get a bit of spam in my email, even after GMail’s mostly-excellent filter has done its work. Most of these are at least polite enough to have an “unsubscribe” link at the bottom, and they pretty much always work.

Centric Events, on the other hand, keep sending my their rubbish. They shtick is to sell lunches with sporting celebrities at £2000+VAT per table. I have no idea what made them ever think that I would be interested in doing such a thing. But I do know that there is no “unsubscribe” link in their emails, and that they have ignored at least one email asking them to stop spamming me.

So I am pretty sure that what they are doing is illegal, and I know it’s immoral. Dear Centric: STOP IT.

EasyJet have stolen my money

I needed to book a flight from Bonn to London.  EasyJet had the cheapest flights I could find for the day in question, at €73.99.  So here is what they showed in my basket as I went to make the purchase:

Am I being really stupid here, or is it just a tiny bit mysterious why the total of adding up 73.99 and nothing else comes to 89.99?