Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

Fire service attacks parking attendants

Monday, February 19th, 2007

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.

fire_front.jpg

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

fire_road.jpg

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

fire_removed.jpg

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:

fire_pcr.jpg

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

Unspecified Potential Security Risk

Friday, February 9th, 2007

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

unspecified_risk

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

The Jams-O-Motive

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

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

1_jamsomotive

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:

underground_cavity

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

2_cowering

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:

3_without

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:

4_underhang

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?”

overground

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

5_retract

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

:: james at jgubby.com