Just read an interesting article on Wired.com. Apparently one of Hillary Clinton’s latest campaign ads uses a clip of Barack Obama that has been darkened to make his skin look blacker.

Check it out for yourself in the videos below:

Campaign Ad

TV Debate

Wired even took a screenshot from each vid and placed them side by side to make it easier:

Is it just me, or does his face appear to be shorter and wider as well? Not being racist here, but the darker the skin colour, usually the rounder the face shape. Obama has quite an elongated face in all the previous pics I’ve seen, but here I can see a definite difference in face shape on the image on the right.

What do you think?

Looks like Blognation may not be around much longer. There’s been rumours of non-payment of wages for months now, but finally Oliver Starr has had the guts to go public on all this. Oliver doesn’t think that his letter will stay up on Blognation for long, so he’s asking bloggers all round the world to republish his letter, so here it is:

AN OPEN LETTER TO SAM SETHI

Please Note: This is an open letter to Sam Sethi, Founder and CEO of Blognation. I have elected to write this letter after having been one of the principal Blognation authors since August of this year. In all that time I have not received the pay promised in my contract nor the reimbursement promised for expenses incurred on behalf of Blognation during this period. I am not alone. Every other Blognation author is in the same unsavory situation.

This open letter details in very broad strokes the reasons why I have lost faith in Sam. It makes specific statements as to the veracity of things Sam has said or written as well as things he has failed to do. I do not say these things lightly. Every statement made in this letter can be backed up with verifiable written material from email correspondence, Skype chats, or SMS messages.

The final paragraphs are obviously my opinion and do not necessarily reflect that of the other bloggers that are still members of the Blognation team. For a more detailed history of this sordid story, one includes a considerable amount of the actual Skype chat dialog as well as many paragraphs from dozens of email messages, please visit my new home on the blogosphere, owstarr.com (http://owstarr.com), my new email will be oliver@remove-this-first-owstarr.com

Lastly, this post is likely to be removed very shortly after I post it so please, make a screen capture, download it to an off-line reader, copy and paste it into a document or repost it on your own blog(really). At the end, this is a cautionary tale and the victims are the people that have worked for months on the content many of you have enjoyed but for which Sam Sethi has yet to (and may never) pay.

Oliver Starr

trainwreck.jpgSam,

In case you are wondering why my sentiments towards you have so dramatically changed over the past few weeks I will be as clear as I know how to be.

I don’t appreciate it when people lie to me and I detest it when people lie to me repeatedly, especially when it is obvious that they are lying and have been given an opportunity to come clean. It insults my intelligence when someone lies to me over and over when it is obvious that this is what they are doing and I don’t enjoy having my intelligence insulted.

What you should know about me, Sam, is that I am a truly loyal friend. Ask Marc. I’m the sort of friend that will stand in front of you and take the force of the blow, go to jail, give up my last dollar…there are few limits to what I would do for a real friend. The counterpoint to that is that my friendship and loyalty come with a price. That price is honesty. That price is respect. That price is integrity. I don’t expect my friends to be perfect - God knows, I am far from perfect myself. I don’t even expect my friends to be willing to go to the same lengths for me that I would for them. But I expect…no I DEMAND integrity in the relationship.

When I extend friendship and exhibit loyalty towards someone and they trod all over the respect I have given them it psychically injures me and when I extend the courtesy of a second chance, a pass, and someone that I have treated with friendship and respect ignores me and continues to treat me as if I am a moron it angers me a great deal. It also kills any respect I might have for that individual, destroys any feelings of loyalty, and crushes any sentiments of warmth, sympathy or understanding.

When Nicole was attacking you who had your back Sam? When people first started squawking about the extended delays in payment, who got in touch with you privately to see what he could do to help? Who volunteered their network of connections to aid in raising funds? Or offered to have their good name included in your business plan to help you present a stronger team to prospective investors? Who was the person introducing you to his contacts at companies like SpinVox to help you get more sponsors for Blognation?

I didn’t ask you for anything more than for the truth. The simple, unedited, unembellished, unvarnished truth. I wanted to know the real situation with the funding. I wanted to know the real situation with the funds on hand and I wanted to know the real situation with regards to the payments you said were on the way. That’s it Sam. That’s all I asked you for. Politely.

Te begin with, you told me lies.

When I was in the UK you actually said - to my face no less - that you had already “banked” the funds from the first investment and that you had capital on hand sufficient to cover the operation’s expenses for the first full year.

Then, after I returned home and payments that had been promised failed to arrive and you started hedging about when those funds would actually be coming. I grew concerned so I called you up and got you on the phone.

Do you remember what you said?

You told me that the deal had been “signed” but that the VC was taking some time to complete their process to fund the account. You told me that according to your attorney this process was possible to complete in “four days time” but that because the VC was in the midst of some other deals and that since we were not their sole priority it could take as long as a couple of weeks.

Personally, I thought this sounded a bit peculiar since I have pretty substantial experience from both sides of a VC deal and I’d never heard anything like this before; but then, I considered you a friend and I trust my friends so I told myself that this must be some kind of UK custom that was simply different than how things are done in the US.

Of course this wasn’t anything remotely resembling the reality of the situation and that became clear when the letter you wrote to Wilkins or whatever his name is surfaced. Had the deal been signed and funding eminent, the VC might have found the letter upsetting and been upset with you for failing to divulge something of possible consequence to them but it would have been very difficult for them to have washed their hands of the deal.

Not having signed a deal however this was a very good reason to cool considerably. After all, at a minimum the VCs must have felt that this letter exhibited some very poor judgment on the part of a CEO in whom they were considering an investment. More significantly it demonstrated that the individual appeared to lack a certain amount of self control and this could have the potential to manifest in other surprising and problematic ways. Third, the threat of legal action, action which could at a minimum impede the progress of a company into which the VC was considering an investment was very evident from this communication and might even have been deemed likely.

Even with all these facts before us, you still maintained that things were moving along smoothly. At about this time, since it was clear to everyone that major funding was not happening any time in the next few weeks (and by now had been delayed from the end of September to the Middle of October to October 30th to November 15th to the end of November (maybe)) you told everyone that you were going to take a loan out against your personal assets and make interim payments to everyone.

At this time you told me that you’d be sending me 2000 pounds and I waited for several days, checking the bank each day and even calling the bank a few times to see if any incoming wires could be seen. As you know nothing came in because nothing had been sent.

Others were starting to make noise about this and several of them, Marc included, spoke with me. It seems you had essentially made the same promise to everyone based upon the claim that you were taking a note out against your home to provide cash for interim payments. You made both public statements that funds had been sent and you made private statements to me, too. Here’s an example from our Skype chat:

Oliver Starr “stitch” 5:03 AM
sam are the wires going out today?
Sam Sethi 5:16 AM
yes

That is pretty much as unequivocal as you can possibly get and yet…days go by and still no wire, still no check…still no funds forthcoming in spite of your words above. That is NOT OPTIMISM Sam, that is LYING.

At what point, I began to wonder, does Sam not understand the difference between wanting something to happen and actually making it happen? I asked myself this because you routinely tell people you will call or even that you are actually calling and yet the phone fails to ring. Similarly, you sent a “tweet” that you were “at the bank” implying to all recipients that you were there for the purpose of wiring us some of the money that is owed yet no one received anything.

You made commitments to provide a certain amount of money in the promised “interim payment”. The sole recipient of any funds to date has been Ewan and he’s received half…HALF of what you promised most people and even less than half of what you had promised me. Saying you’re sending 1500 quid and sending only 750 is not telling the truth Sam. I hate to break it to you but you need to get a much more solid grip on reality because the one that you have appears to be tenuous at best.

At any rate, as I think I’ve probably provided enough detail above to illustrate my point, the simple deal is that you squandered my friendship by lying to me over and over again. You disrespected me and my intelligence in the same way. Your inability to own up to your false claims, your broken promises and your refusal to accept responsibility for putting myself, my friends and many other people in a bad situation is another reason why my feelings for you have gone from friendship and respect to distrust, disrespect and zero confidence.

I won’t lie, Sam. I was impressed by your speaking engagement in the UK. You seemed to have it together and I really did believe that this was a project on track to succeed. The only difference between then and now is the mountain of bullshit that you’ve managed to shovel in between us with your inability to tell the simple honest truth.

Frankly, I don’t understand this kind of lying behavior at all because I am clearly not like you. If anything - and Marc can doubtless attest to this - I tend to be a bit too available with the truth. One thing I am not is a particularly good self-censor. Since Marc isn’t here to suggest otherwise or to inject a modicum of additional restraint you’re getting the real nitty gritty accounting of why I went from your ally to someone that holds you in esteem about equal to that in which I hold another blogger with whom I have had an association…

I want you to consider that for a moment as we’ve talked at length about my prior experience and how I was treated and what I am being forced to do about it. I never thought that you would treat me in a manner even remotely resembling the way XXXX treated me but by failing to be honest with me and failing to come clean given multiple opportunities to do so that is exactly what you’ve done.

Incidentally, I’ll have you know that I turned down a VP of Biz Dev position at a top Silicon Valley startup because they felt that blogging for Blognation would put me in a conflicted situation and I told them I didn’t want to leave Blognation as I had made a prior commitment there. It wasn’t the highest salary I’ve ever had or been offered but it was a lot better than what I’m making at the moment and would have done a good deal to defray the losses of the last four months where I received no pay since all I was doing was working on Blognation and of course you know how much that’s made me…

Of course it is important to mention that you’ve also promised multiple times to reimburse me for my out of pocket expenses but as you well know that hasn’t proven to be true to date either.

So… that’s a pretty ugly litany of yours up there; lies, more lies, still more lies, exaggerations, evasiveness, manipulation, usury, fraud even - honestly Sam I think there’s a good chance that what you’ve done is actually criminal not just pathological and antisocial - perhaps even psychotic behavior. Sorry to have to recount it - I never would have expected that I would have had to write anything like this to you. It goes to show that you just never know people until you’ve been down the road with them a few miles, huh?

I know you probably think that I’m the king-hell rat bastard mother-fucker of all time about now, but the truth, Sam, is that I’m no different from anyone else on the BN team…no different that is except that I actually have the sack to say what I’m thinking. Bottom line Sam, you fucked up. Not because the money didn’t come when you expected, but because of the lies you told when you said that it had come…

You made promises that people took to the bank and then you defaulted on them leaving everyone that trusted you to face the consequences. I am not kidding when I say that there are people on Blognation that probably won’t have a Christmas thanks to believing in you. There are people that are going to be late on car payments and there are people that are going to have to think twice before they go to the dentist because they are out some $10, $20 or even $30,000 dollars of income that they were expecting, for which they HAVE A CONTRACT and for which you have an obligation because you told us that you had the money when in fact you never really did!

Is this getting through to you loud and clear? I know I’ve repeated myself enough times here that I’m starting to sound like I’m brain damaged but then I thought my other emails were pretty clear and they never even elicited a response from you in spite of them being far, far more cordial; understanding, even.

But I’m through being understanding. You need to understand what it is you’ve done and what you ought to be doing to make it right.

As I see it, your chances of raising funds from a VC as the CEO of Blognation are in the very slim to none category. Not only are VCs highly unlikely to invest in a company such that a large part of their investment must be used to satisfy debt, but the fact that every single blogger is in a position to sue the company (or you personally) for breach of contract would send even the bravest VCs running for the hills. Add to this the fact that you aren’t presenting a management team, have never shown me the presentation or business plan or executive summary (in spite of telling me you’d send them straight over), and cap it all off with the Wilkins correspondence and the fact that you’re going to have to explain why key people are leaving and you would have to be named Merlin to make a deal go through.

Nevertheless (and in spite of apparently starting with a new VC which as you well know would take months in the best of situations) you still haven’t suggested to anyone that it is likely or even possible that they might need to find another source of income because things might not go as planned. That’s pretty freaking selfish if you ask me. You’re basically going to fuck up others quite badly but you don’t care and that’s not only evident, it is what at the end of this diatribe, is the thing that more than anything else has cost you my support and friendship.

Even today, you continue to make false promises and to lie about the potential deal that you claim to be negotiating. Why, for instance did you say that the deal was done and that the they were investing $600,000 for 18% of the company only to come back later and post a note from one of the deal brokers that described a deal of $250,000 for 25% of the company. And what happened to the original $500,000 that you said to my face you had “banked” that was for 25% of the company at an impossible $2.2 Million valuation?

Don’t you realize that you’ve completely screwed with people’s live here? People who have families and real bills to pay. People who don’t have a spouse that works at Microsoft or wherever, people that are going to be seriously, seriously hurt by your actions.

My god, Sam; you have some nerve. In spite of all the demonstrated lying - lying I’ll add that is conclusively demonstrated by virtue of the numerous archived Skype chats and the many dozens of emails you’ve sent to me and the other bloggers. Demonstrated even in your updates to your entire team. How do you think you’ll build trust and loyalty among your people when you’ve proven yourself to be absolutely untrustworthy and disloyal?

Or do you even care? I myself suspect you don’t. I think this whole Blognation scam is all about one thing; Sam Sethi’s ego. You got tweaked by Michael Arrington last year and now you’re hell bent on showing up at Le Web with a dozen bloggers to back you up; your triumphant return to the scene of your demise - that’s right, you’ll show Mike and Loic and the world that no one fucks with Sam Sethi. You’ll show them that you’ve built - in less than a year - a blogging empire with bloggers from all over the world reporting 24 hours a day on all the topics the tech world wants to read about. You’ll talk about your advertising play and your new media properties, you’ll boast about your wine cellar and the possibility of hiring some huge name bloggers to round out your team.

I’m sure this will be punctuated by haughty tweets with what you think are big-brained ideas - your obvious effort - to be one of those smart cool kids who launch companies like twitter or Wua.la. You’ll probably stay at a very nice hotel in Paris and encourage all your bloggers to do so too.

And to get them to do so you’ll have convinced each and every one of them to pull the funds from their own dwindling bank accounts because the funding is in… and only has to be held by the bank for just a few more days…

Yes, I’m sure that Paris will be triumphant for you except for one teeny, tiny, itsy, bitsy little detail. Trivial in your mind but oh so important in the real world. Your big return, your blogging network, the content in every post, and nearly everything you’ve said or written about Blognation; it’s all based upon lies…

And when that dirty truth leaks out - there won’t be anywhere on earth you can run where the truth won’t find you. (not to mention the lawsuits that are sure to follow close behind)

Sincerely,

Oliver Starr

About effing time!

The Road Safety Authority announced that new rules will come into force for learner drivers from midnight on Monday 29th October. These new rules include:

• The provisional licence is being replaced by a learner permit to emphasise the fact that the holder is learning to drive.
• Existing provisional licences will continue in force until their expiry date after which the holder will be issued with a learner permit.
• A holder of a second provisional licence/learner permit for a car must be accompanied at all times.
• The accompanying driver must in respect of any licence category hold a full licence for the category for at least two years.
• From 1 December 2007 a learner motorcyclist must wear the letter L on a yellow fluorescent tabard.
• From 1 December a provisional licence/learner permit holder must hold the licence/permit for six months before taking a driving test.

Typically, the airwaves and blogs are filled with people on their 2nd, 3rd & 4th provisional licences complaining about how unfair this is for them. They won’t be able to drive to work, no one in their family holds a full licence, why wasn’t there more warning, etc, etc…

Pure and utter bullshit!

If you are on your 2nd provisional licence, then you held your 1st provisional for 2 years before that. Even with waiting periods of 33 weeks (that was Sept 2006, they are now down to an average of 23 weeks - source), you would have had 3 chances to sit their driving test (remember that people could have applied the day they got their provisional up until this announcement):

2 years = 104 weeks / 33 = 3.1

Also according to the RSA, 20% of test slots are being lost due to cancellations or people not turning up!

If you haven’t had the common sense to apply for your test, do lessons and pass it within 2 years, then I really don’t want you to be on the same roads as me! And if you’ve failed your test multiple times, then seriously, how do you think you are possibly qualified to be out driving on the roads unaccompanied?

If you rely on your car to get to / do your job, then get your employer to write a letter stating that driving is a requirement of your job. Send this to your local testing authority and you should get a test date within 2 weeks. I know of several friends that have done this. Sit a driving lesson every evening for those 2 weeks with a GOOD driving instructor and then you should pass - simple as that.

UPDATE: Not that any of this matters, because Noel Dempsey (Minister for Transport) said today:

The Minister believes that sensible Garda enforcement of that type will mean that for an initial period of a few months, Garda efforts in the main will be aimed at cautioning and advising unaccompanied drivers of the new legal requirements.

I was skimming through my news feeds today and spotted one “Man quizzed after dismembered body find“. A rush of adrenaline hit my heart and I was suddenly catapulted back to December 1999.

Working in the Student’s Union at Paisley University one Friday evening, I picked up the phone when it rang. It was J, a ‘life-time’ student who I’d known for years. He asked for someone specific, but they weren’t on duty and therefore not easily findable. “Turn on the TV”, he instructed me “they’re looking for Beggs for the murder of Barry Wallace - the limbs in the loch guy!”. “What?” I replied, stuck for words. I couldn’t grasp this - we knew Beggs as a slightly ‘creepy guy’ but how could he have coldy murdered and dismembered someone?

It was the last Friday night of the Autumn term, most people would be returning home in the next day or two. The Union was jammed, as I dived for one of the remotes and turned the TV over to a news channel. Sure enough, he was right - police were now looking for a man that I knew as a quiet post-grad student - in one of Scotland’s biggest and most macabre murder investigations. Friday evening and the university was closed, so the phone in the Student’s Union began ringing with press queries within the hour. I answered the phone numbly, repeating “no comment” over and over until after midnight.

We had all been monitoring the case in the papers, it was the biggest news in Scotland at the time. Police divers on a training exercise at Loch Lomond had found bin bags containing a severed forearm and leg. Further searching turned up the torso and missing limbs, but there was no sign of the head. Nine days later, a woman out walking her dog on the beach 60 miles away found a bag containing a human head - police later ascertained that it had been dropped from the Troon - Belfast ferry. The body showed signs of sexual assault.

Our interest in the case suddenly turned overnight from curious skimmers to reading every word in depth - this was now someone we had been acquainted with, spoken with. I’d had several close contacts with Beggs - I had been sitting on the Sports and Social committee that year and had been instrumental in rejecting the funding application for the ‘extreme sports’ club he wanted to start - I felt it was too much money for the benefit of too few students. He’d also given me a lift down to the ferry one evening earlier in the term - as a student we were always eager to save any cash when possible…

It turned out that he had been convicted of murder and mutilation in the past, but had his conviction overturned (on a technicality if my mind doesn’t fail me). He was then jailed again in 1991 for a brutal razor attack - the man he attacked jumped out a window in order to save his own life. How did we let a man with a record like this teach at our university, when most of the attacks involved younger men? More questions were raised than answers.

Beggs heard that police were looking for him when listening to the radio in his car. He immediately fled the country and an international manhunt was initiated. Two weeks later he walked into a police station in Amsterdam and gave himself up. He was refused bail and in autumn 2001 the trial eventually went to the Edinburgh High Court where Beggs was found guilty and jailed for life, with a recommendation to serve at least 20 years.

Kirsty Scott and Gerard Seenan for The Guardian wrote a clear, descriptive account of the case.

Yup, and it’s Communications Minister Eamon Ryan yet again!

Breakingnews.ie reports today that Minister Ryan has postponed ‘indefinitely‘ the effort to create a system of postcodes for Ireland. Quoting from Breakingnews:

Two reports have already been compiled and an extensive public consultation process has been carried out.

However, reports this morning say Minister Ryan has now ordered another round of public consultations and has yet to decide if and when the system will be introduced.

Fer fuck’s sake!! Are you serious? Most of the first world countries in the world have a system, why not grab one of theirs and copy it? We managed to create one of the best vehicle numberplate systems in the world (IMHO), base it off something similar to that. It would make life easier for everyone, especially for all the geeks like me who are constantly ordering stuff off the internet and having it delivered by courier companies.

Why bother with another round of public consultation? The government should just grab their balls (if they have any) and introduce it. Eventually people will realise that An Post can deliver a letter quicker if it has a post code and they will start using them. Don’t worry about the fact that some databases can’t handle the extra entry - even if the benefit cheques are sent out without post codes, they will still get delivered, just like they do today - if I send a letter to someone in the UK and don’t know their post code, I just don’t put it on the letter - it still gets to them!

€15 Million is nothing in terms of the annual budgets of this country - but if people think that it is still too much, then get teams of students from different universities to make it their project for next semester. Projects get shortlisted and reviewed by a consultant from the UK Post Office or similar and the wining one is chosen. The simple cost remains to create a database of the new entries against the old addresses - surely there would be an Irish startup out there that would be willing (calling John Handelaar or similar) and then a massive mail merge to send them out to every house and apartment in the country. If it’s in the interest of An Post, then they should deliver them for free - makes their job easier in the long run….

Nokia have announced a battery recall for some BL-5C phone batteries manufactured between Dec 2005 and Nov 2006. In very rare cases the affected batteries could potentially experience over heating initiated by a short circuit while charging, causing the battery to dislodge.

Since so many people carry Nokia phones, I though it might help to post the link below which provides you details on how to check if your battery comes from the affected batch. Remember to look closely to spot the difference between ‘zeroes’ and the capital letter O – it can be hard to tell. Also think of sending the link on to anyone you know that uses Nokia phones.

Nokia Battery Replacement Check Website

There have been a lot of articles in the press this week about the British Army presence finally being retired from Northern Ireland (NI) after 38 years. Readers of the blog will know that I now live near Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland, but I was born in and grew up in NI until the age of 18. I’m now 29, so if you do the calculations, you can see that the Army was present for all of the years I spent living there.

Over the years (and especially in the 1980’s) when we talked to family and friends that lived abroad, they often asked ‘how can you live there in the middle of a war-zone?’ They were used to only seeing the press coverage of attacks and negative news of the conflict that was euphemistically called ‘the troubles’. Even people living in the Republic of Ireland, a mere 100 miles or so from this ‘war-zone’ held the same opinions. Each time a bomb went off in Belfast (15 miles from where we lived) we were guaranteed to receive a phonecall from a relation in Dublin to just check ‘if we were OK?’.

Most people know that the island of Ireland has been divided into two countries since 1921. Heading back in time, Ireland was forcibly occupied by the British under King Henry II starting in 1171. For a brief history lesson on more recent times, let’s turn to Wikipedia:

An armed rebellion took place with the Easter Rising of 1916, and the subsequent Irish War of Independence. In 1921, a treaty was concluded between the British Government and the leaders of the Irish Republic. The Treaty recognised the two-state solution created in the Government of Ireland Act 1920. Northern Ireland was presumed to form a home rule state within the new Irish Free State unless it opted out. Northern Ireland had a majority Protestant population and opted out as expected, its in-built majority choosing to remain part of the United Kingdom, incorporating within its border a significant Catholic/Nationalist minority. Disagreements over some provisions of the treaty led to a split in the Nationalist movement and subsequently to the Civil War. The civil war ended in 1923 with the defeat of the Anti-treaty forces.

Following this, the ‘troubles’ really started in the 1960’s with large civil rights protests, that eventually led to the creation of paramilitary groups such as the Provisional IRA who were protesting ‘the British occupation of the six counties’ (being the territory termed Northern Ireland). Over 3000 people died as a result of the conflict over the next 30 years.

Reading the last two paragraphs you might see why people developed negative opinions and believed that we were in the middle of a full-on civil war, scared to leave the house. The real story is that the majority of the conflict was confined to certain areas or certain times of the year (parade season for example). Things were certainly different living in NI compared to living elsewhere, you did have to have a healthy sense of self-awareness and be determined to not put yourself in trouble.

As a teenager, we were rarely allowed to go into Belfast without adult supervision, as incendiary devices were still common in large shops. Walking into a shopping mall, your handbag or purse would be searched (usually half-heartedly) and walking down the street the young soldiers would train the sights of their guns on the bottoms of cute girls and follow them as they walked. There were no rubbish bins/trash cans on the street in Belfast for years, as they could be used to plant bombs. We were encouraged to simply drop our trash on the street and it would be cleaned up later - and it’s a habit that’s proved hard to break for a lot of locals.

When I traveled to Israel earlier this year, I was reminded of all these themes when I saw Israeli soldiers at every bus stop, along with large concrete bollards to prevent the bus queues from being rammed. Civilians carried guns (this was the most worrying to me), but only if they had been licensed and passed an annual test. My bag was searched on entry to every shop and to enter the hotel I had to show my room key. None of this shocked me in any way, I treat it the same as the security queues at airports, there for my benefit. And I was careful not to walk anywhere by myself, and was mainly accompanied by locals.

It’s strange however, that something that seems almost normal and familiar to one person can shock another - plenty of people have informed me since that they would not travel to Israel because of these daily activities, they were too scared.

Back to NI - the shame about all this is that some people are still scared to travel there, even though the troubles have ended - but just look at what they are missing:

North Coast 1

North Coast 2

A few months ago I was in the car with my hubbie, heading down to Laois on the motorway. On Irish roads we see a lot of tailgaters, and I noticed about five cars traveling very close together. A car pulled out in front of this chain to overtake, but was traveling much slower than the group of five. They all had to brake quite hard and I thought that the guys at the back were about to run into the others. This gave me an idea, but more about the background first…

Most people don’t think of the time needed to both react and brake when traveling at speed. After a bad multiple-car accident that happened in thick fog earlier this year, the hubbie did some calculating of just how quickly you cover distances and how quickly you can stop. He was shocked by the calculations and realised that a lot of people drive too close to other cars in this country.

There are a couple of things that never seem to be taken into account in the reaction time calculations, firstly non-road distractions and secondly braking force.

Let me explain… A good reaction time is under half a second, but that’s only if you are fully concentrating on the road. In modern cars we can easily be distracted by onboard computers, lighting a cigarette, tuning the radio, changing a CD, even looking at your kids in the rearview mirror - next thing you glance back at the road and there’s brake lights and you’re approaching them quickly and you have to slam on your own brakes.

The second point I’d raise is the fact that there is no indication of just how hard the car in front is braking. The brake lights are a binary system, on or off - the exact same whether you are just tapping the brakes lightly to adjust speed or braking hard to avoid an accident or incident ahead.

So back to my idea - I turned to George and mentioned that surely it would be a good thing if the additional brake light at the top of the rear windscreen worked on a graduated basis. For example if there were five sections to the light and the heavier the braking the more of them that lit up - all five lit being a full emergency stop. George wasn’t keen on the idea and pointed out that different cars brake differently and that you could never get the manufacturers to agree to a standard.

Well, now a company in America has released SuddenStop. It’s a license plate frame that can calculate G-forces, and when you suddenly decelerate its LEDs go nuts, flashing brightly for three seconds and alerting the driver behind you. There’s no wiring and anyone that can handle a screwdriver can install it in about two minutes.

The battery should last for 15,000 hours and as a nice touch, they’ve added a test button so that you don’t have to get your mate to drive behind you while you brake heavily to test that it’s working.

I think it’s a great idea, and it’s a shame that it’s only available in the US at the moment. Of course US license plates are normally affixed with a surround and they are metal, compared with the plastic that we use in Europe. But I’m sure that some young entrepreneur will find a way to build this into EU reg plates in the near future - and it would be a great and cheap way to make our roads a little safer…

News out this week that Northwest airlines and Southwest airlines in the US are now accepting PayPal for ticket purchases on their websites.

While my immediate reaction was ‘Cool! An extra layer of security’, my next thought was ‘What happens to your insurance?’ You’re covered for issues with purchase on most items on your credit card, but I don’t believe that anything similar will apply if you purchase via PayPal?

What do you think?

From an article on the BBC website today:

There are calls for the European Union to ban the making of cars that can go at more than 101mph (162km/h).

The proposal comes in a report to the European Parliament on EU plans for a law to curb CO2 emissions from cars.

MEPs will vote on the plan this autumn but the BBC has seen an early draft of the report, which will be released to parliament later this month.

Its author, British Lib Dem MEP Chris Davies, says 101mph is 25% more than the top speed limit in most EU states.

What rubbish is this? My 1999 1.6l Ford Focus can go faster than that. My hubbie’s 1998 1.5l Honda Civic can certainly go much faster than that. And what happens in Germany? There are unrestricted sections of Autobahn there where you can drive as fast as you like - what will the next suggestion be - tachographs and GPS tracking systems in all new cars to ensure they never exceed 120km/h???