James : Rants

The London Fire-brigade has today issued a statement damning the over-zealous Westminster parking attendants. When a fire broke out in Albert Court on Prince consort road this morning, the fire service were on the scene within minutes.

Here one can see the ticket warden issuing the last few tickets on cars unable to get away due to a police cordon.

Unable to reach the window of the fire engine to place a ticket on it, he had erected the following sign:

Within minutes the council were able to begin removing the illegally parked fire engines from the scene. The London Fire Brigade were forced to continuously replace them, keeping a stock in Prince Consort Road:

Parking attendant Mr John Vile issued the following statement:
“Not my problem mate. One rule for all.”

The *most* irritating thing, possibly in the whole world, is the following error:

It occurs immediately after you select some icons and right-click in Windows XP. Normally you know exactly where on the screen you are about to move the mouse to (in this case it was delete, which is about 2 table-inches down) – and you are interrupted. What the hell is the Potential Security Risk clicking on some files? And, actually, how dare it presume that I was unaware of it?
In my opinion this is just the sort of alarmist attitude that lead to the Germaine Greer. What does it know that I don’t? Unspecified by whom?

If you are from Microsoft and would like to apologise for these programmatic outbursts, or specific which security risk I am in danger of, please email me:

:: james at jgubby.com

I would like to introduce a new design of Underground locomotive, the Jams-O-Motive.

Many observant readers will have observed that Underground tube lines have a large cavity underneath the rails. As can be seen from this photograph of a Dock-Lands station, there is considerable space between the top track and the bed:

I realised this evening whilst travelling home that this could be used by people wishing to cower from the might of an oncoming train.

If, for example, a young boy were to fall into the path of an oncoming train, currently he would be offered a safe haven, as shown in this plan view:

To attempt to combat this problem I have added a series of randomly placed spoons to the undercarriage of the existing design. With the addition of what I call the Jams-O-Motive spoon underhangs, this situation is elegantly avoided:

The more astute amongst you may have already wondered: “What if the line ends up over-ground, where there are no cavities? Surely then the under-hung spoons would all break off, or worse, dig into the carefully laid gravel?”

This is of course correct! To prevent this from presenting a problem, the spoon mechanism could be modified as follows:

If you are from Transport For London please get in touch with me to discuss pricing:

:: james at jgubby.com