Small, small world

Not many people won't have heard about the big crash on the motorway near where I live. What reminded me that this is a much smaller world these days was the sad news that a friend of a friend lost his life in the incident.

I didn't know him personally but from the love that's been shown via Facebook, he is already being sorely missed.

I doubt we'll ever know the exact cause of the accident and it would be wrong to speculate without knowing facts, although people are blaming fireworks. Assigning blame would also be wrong here, although I believe accepting some collective responsibility is appropriate. Driving standards have collapsed lately (I know I road-rage more than is healthy) as people are getting a sense of invulnerability from modern cars that are built far tougher than when I learned to drive.

People have joked that the best safety device to go in a car would be a spike protruding from the steering wheel, I'd compare that to a Rover Metro loaner car I had. I drove that really slowly ... not because it couldn't muster much pace but because I knew from its swiss cheese construction that it would disintegrate if a juggernaut breathed on it.

What's really sad is that even with reminders of how dangerous the roads can be, people are still :
Driving way too fast,
Tailgating,
Saying "70mph is too low a limit for motorways" (badly wrong)
Not driving with any consideration to people around them,
Driving without due care and attention (that goes for those who use mobiles in the car too)
And many more sins shared by drivers these days.

Another sign of this being a small world is that I drove down the bit of motorway where the accident happened just a fortnight before.

Other (happier!) stuff :

Pumpkin* finally has all the bits that will go into making it a fully equipped PC :-) It was missing a conventional hard disc due to the floods in Thailand making hard disc prices go through the roof. A 1TB drive was £45 before the floods, the same drive is now £110, with that going up £5 today. When ultra rapid inflation hits, it's always worth a little bit of shopping around to see if you can take advantage of retailers who aren't keeping up with changing prices.

*(yes - I called it Pumpkin. Seemed fitting for something born on Halloween)

Cue a trip to BestBuy who are sadly closing down in UK. It would have been good to see them stay in retail here to keep PCWorld & Currys honest. (No chance of that with Comet). Anyway, I picked up a 1.5TB drive there for £72 today. More than pre-flood prices and it's an older model but still fits the bill :

It will have plenty of space,
It's not as quick as a current model but still quicker than the 250GB in the machine at the moment.

I can also assign 500GB of it to a Linux drive for playing with later :-). It's been a while since I looked at Linux and I'm hoping it will allow me to run some old Windows games that refuse to work in Windows 7. I just need to have a look at installation options, plus I'll need to move some stuff from the old drive to the new one. But - it means I can do now some of the stuff I was holding off on, like getting cheapie Office programs on the desktop.

Oh - rockets are fun. We had a Crazie fireworks evening on Satuday, with BionicDwarf, Cyberkitten and I all with our Mad Scientists hats firmly stapled to our heads. We also had the Craziequeen in attendance who had locked away her Health & Safety hat for the evening too. (Could have been handy due to bits of firework raining down on us). We literally had a blast, although I suspect we shall be avoiding rockets in the future. Why ?

Most were fine. However :
1 rose very slowly in "Houston we have a problem" style, barely getting to the treeline before going bang. The tree was still smouldering an hour later.
Another had been sniffing the alkyhol. It went up 10 feet, decided it was afraid of heights and promptly exited stage left before exploding in someone's garden. Oops.

Right - time to continue the Mass Effect campaign I started last week :-) But :

Always remember the fallen. Their sacrifice means nothing if we do not learn from it. Drive slower, get there safe.