daynemay

For those who worry about this sort of thing, we are alive and well in Los Angeles.

(a copy of a complaint I just lodged on the Yellow Cabs website. Yes, this makes me a grumpy old man, but I live in hope that a little well-placed grumpiness plus word of mouth can make a difference.)

On a recent visit home to Brisbane, I saw a Yellow Cab repeatedly swerving, tailgating and changing lanes without indicating. The cab had no passengers, so the behaviour cannot be explained by the request of a rushed passenger.

When I repeatedly rang the “Yellow Cabs values professional driving” number on the back of the cab (1300-131924), I received no answer, not even a recorded message.

The details of the incident were:
Cab #: 968
Date: 26 December 2008
Time of Day: Around 6:00pm
Location: Airport Drive, Brisbane

The poor driving bothered me. But the sticker was a blatant lie – Yellow Cabs do not even value professional driving enough to provide a messaging service at that number. This is why I will no longer be using Yellow Cabs when I am in Brisbane.

Great article on snipers and sniping, and the R&D going into the art, via the always engaging Bruce Schneier.

Heavy .50 … guns can pepper an area randomly with bullets from as far off as 7400m

“Randomly” doesn’t sound all that helpful to a sniper, until you look at the kinds of rounds he might soon be firing…

fin-stabilized projectiles, spin-stabilized projectiles, internal and/or external aero-actuation control methods, projectile guidance technologies, tamper proofing, small stable power supplies, and advanced sighting and optical resolution technologies.

…which adds up to…

the snipers of tomorrow [lurking] four or five miles from their targets, illuminating them with targeting lasers and then squeezing off a casually-aimed smartslug to home in inevitably on the pointer dot.

I won’t bother prefacing this blog entry with an explanation of what “Weatherbot” is. Regular readers (all three of you) already know, because I carry on about it at length. Anyone else, see older posts on the topic.

I bashed out some recent alterations this weekend, because the Weatherbug API was giving too many potential matches for location names:

Weatherbot: You said ‘brisbane’. Did you mean ‘Berwick-upon-Tweed, United Kingdom’?.
Me: Guess what? I didn’t.

Try it for yourself, if that sort of thing takes your fancy. The old code is still sitting around somewhere.

The new version uses the simple, albeit unofficial, Google Weather API. It can now be accessed via the usual channels. Apologies if recent instability left you in a state of uninformed terror, but you can rest easy now, knowing that Weatherbot is out there once more. Just don’t try using it to find the weather in Trondheim…