I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:

Pedestrian Crossings

The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:

• at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
• give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
• give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings

I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?

I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.

What are provisional licence conditions?

As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.

Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.

Rube's just got a lot going on right now, you know? Work's taking all my time, and then there's the family things a man's gotta do.

But we been together long time; me and you, we got history. So maybe we should try and work this out. Together. So what do you say, You Bitch!

Hey, where you going?

A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:

Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.

It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!

Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:

Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.

Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.

I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.

Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.

Now, get out there and kick some ass!

It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.

I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.

But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.

I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.

Well, looks like I don't have to go to school tomorrow.

You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:

Plugs.

When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.

Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.

As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.

The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.

If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.

This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.

I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.

Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.

The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.

So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.

Specifically: I have been using OS X for 6 years and I still have no idea what the equivalent to Linux's `route -an` is. Does Darwin even have that?