Skip to main content

This is a road, not a rally, and you are NOT Colin McRae

So snow has come round again, and once again trying to get anywhere is a nightmare by the sheer lunacy of the average British driver. I am constantly amazed by the things people do in an effort to get from A to B, and am never surprised when they either drive through a wall or abandon the vehicle in disgust.

So here are a few handy hints for you all, based on what I've observed in the last couple of weeks:

  • You are not a rally driver, and you are not a drift racer. Spinning the wheels and trying to drive your car like a speedboat is a fast-track into a wall. Or somebody else.
  • First gear is your enemy. Even a little bit of gas will cause your wheels to spin, and spinning wheels means no traction. No traction means you've lost the battle already.
  • So you want to set off up an incline? That's fine, but sticking it in first, revving its arse off and dumping the clutch will result in you sitting there like a muppet while your tyres dig a nice hole in the ice. Go slow and steady, allowing the wheels to grip rather than smoothing out the ice making it impossible for anyone else.
  • Momentum is your friend. If you've managed to find grip on a bad stretch of road and you want to actually make it to the top, stopping to let people through is a recipe for disaster. The people behind you won't thank you either. Just keep going and everyone will get where they need to be. Cause a blockage in the middle, and everyone is stuck.
  • Brakes are great, except when you don't want to lose traction. Go slowly and roll to a halt, making sure you are not in a position to end up in a skid because your vehicle is still doing thirty but the wheels aren't moving.

Common sense stuff, you might think, but it's depressing how many people try to navigate around the roads like they're in bumper boats. "Point the wheels and MORE POWER!" No, thanks. Leave that nonsense to Top Gear, and let's all just get where we're going (or not) in safety. Thanks.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fairy Lights

Street lights at night can be very pretty. For someone who lives close to the centre of a large city, skirting round the edge of the town centre can provide a host of beautiful views at night. One advantage to using a wide open lens when taking these pictures is the capture of bokeh, or creative blur. An extreme example is shown to your right; a mass of coloured circles that roughly represent the city they are part of. A more subtle example, of course, is in the picture of the day at the top of this post. The lights cluster around the top of the leaves like fireflies, obviously part of a cityscape but at the same time abstract. The extreme out of focus image is a blurred version of the picture on the left. A view over Sheffield from Pitsmoor, looking up Netherthorpe Road and up to the university. Even when the buildings are focussed (roughly; I'm still practicing) the lights take on the shape of the lens's aperture. I try to incorporate some foreground focus wh...
4 comments
Read more

In which I complain that coding standards are a waste of time

Just kidding. I'm not going to rail against coding standards. No, I'm going to rail against the absolute and dictatorial enforcement of coding style guidelines, to the point where a single misplaced curly bracket can fail the code review of a thousand line project before it's even started. I'm going to rail against the fact that many people these days don't actually know that coding style guidelines and coding standards are not the same thing. Coding style guidelines are not coding standards. Coding standards are rules on how to construct software. Rules that have practical and defined benefits. Rules than can be proven to assist in the structured and correct building of code. For example: Do not perform database access in the constructor. All database access should use the framework's DAL. Do not rely on complex instantiation instructions; provide a factory method. Do not inherit from a class in a different module or library; only encapsulate. Avoid sin...
2 comments
Read more

DeCSS on Ubuntu 9.10 and later

It used to be the case that enabling DVD playback on Ubuntu was a case of installing ubuntu-restricted-extras and that was that. Unfortunately DMCA nonsense in the US has buggered that up for all of us and so now there's an additional step. So, without further ado, here are the commands that need to be run at a command line: sudo apt-get install libdvdread4 sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh Voila! DVD playback a-la Ubuntu.
2 comments
Read more