Toms View of the World

Well, I got very very bored last night, and resorted to watchnig a small amount of Big Brother…

Oh dear…

I was watching the live feed rather than the heavily edited “highlights” show, but even so, what a bunch of airheads! I don’t know how they’re going to cope with 13 weeks of each other, I couldn’t stand most of them for 13 minutes.

How can this have survived into a 7th series - how does anyone find this in any way “entertaining”?

This is a design which I’ve been tinkering with over the years - Excelsior - which started out life as a steel coaster, and has evolved with NoLimits into a wooden twister.

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As a victim of neighbourhood noise in the past, I’m pleased to bring your attention to this website:

http://www.noiseactionweek.org.uk/ - advice on how to avoid being a noise nuicense, and advice on what do you if you’re a victim…

Warning - this site does not play nice in Firefox, and the survey doesn’t fit in the very limited size of the window in any browser… not a great lesson in site design, nor as an advert for the company responsible - however it is an important message regarding consideration.

If only this were true

DEPT OF TRANSPORT INITIATIVE - MAY 2006.

Information Release.

There is concern over the current driving standards in England, so the Department of Transport have devised a scheme to identify poor and dangerous drivers.
This system will allow all road users to recognise the potentially hazardous and dangerous ones, or those with limited driving skills.
From the middle of May 2006 all those drivers who are found to be a potential hazard to all other road users will be issued with a white flag, bearing a red cross. This flag clearly indicates their inability to drive properly.
These flags must be clipped to a door of the car and be visible to all other drivers and pedestrians. Those drivers who have shown particularly poor driving skills will have to display two flags: one on each side of the car to indicate an even greater lack of skill and limited driving intelligence.
Please circulate this to as many other motorists as you can, in order that drivers and pedestrians will be aware of the meaning of these flags.

Thank you for your co-operation.

Department of Transport.

Thanks to Alan on the Rideas forum for bringing this to my attention

According to this post on CableForum, I’m not the only one having serious DNS problems tonight…

Now, following a discussion on the ECC mailing list, I decided to see what Expedition GeForce would look like as a wooden coaster. This was actually fairly easy, as the NoLimits simulator includes GeForce as a steel coaster anyway, so converting it to a wooden coaster wasn’t particularly hard.

The layout had to be tweaked a little to resolve the fact that a wooden coaster with the walkways and handrails is wider than a steelie, but the end result can be seen here…

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I’ll say here from the start, I didn’t watch the whole thing this year, but did catch the end, when the winning band gave their encore performance… and of course, have been reading up on the very unusual winners…

Looking like extras from Lord of the Rings, “Lordi” produced one of the most unusual Eurovision winners for years - none of the traditional meaningless pop ballads and love song, but a heavy metal rock track, Hard Rock Hallelujah which has to be one of the most distinctive eurovision winners ever, and if we’re lucky will change the face of the competition forever.

The victory is a vote against empty soul-less pop music across Europe - the winners had something distinctive, and put on a real show.

Lordi on Last.FM
Flickr Images of Lordi
The bands website
BBC News story