Toms View of the World

An article on ICWales today highlighting the fact that the M4 in Wales is the most dangerous stretch of road in the UK for “tailgating”.

Now, Tailgating (the act of not leaving a sufficient gap between your car and the one in front) is indeed dangerous, but the article neglects to note the causes of tailgating, often BMW drivers who want to be driving at 30 over the limit trying to “barge” their way past people who are legitimately overtaking a slower vehicle at the speed limit, of course, the vehicle being overtaken is often sitting in the middle lane at 60mph while there is nothing in the left lane…

The police should get out from behind their speed cameras, get back to patrolling the road, and pull-over the middle lane hoggers and tailgaters. Make blatent “lane hogging” a pointable offence and conditions on the UK’s motorways should improve dramatically.

Latest progress, and in the ten days since my last post those little plants are just shooting for the sky…

Nobody’s made any sensible guesses yet…

Now, suddenly, it seems that the sport of Parkour (also known as Freerunning) has turned up a few times in the last few days, firstly, the spectacular film “District 13″ (which, if you put up with the subtitles, boasts some amazing action), and then in the BBC’s Top Gear - which included a race between a Pug 207 and a couple of UK Freerunners…

Amazing to see what these guys can do - even if that site does spoil the illusion, as the race apparrently took 4 days to film… not the 30 or so minutes that are supposed to have elapsed. It’s still spectacular

Not content with a superb service, Last.FM have been updating stuff again - the biggest change is the new player software - along with a new dashboard.

Cool.

Any other Last.FM’ers out there (and I know there’s at least 2 of you) how about recommending some music my way!

There’s a great page on the IAM website - a series of tips to help you become a better driver, covering everything from how to deal with tailgaters, the best techniques for bad-weather driving, the meaning of road markings etc.

The focus here is on making drivers more aware of the world around them, and to teach them far more about how to ensure they have a “safety buffer” - so even if someone else is being a moron, you have room to react and recover without having a crash.

Something I would like to do one day is join the AIM, do an advanced driving course, and become a better driver. But it’s expensive