New, Harsher Penalties for using Mobile Phone while Driving

18:06.35 - Monday 5th March 2007   (Link to This Entry)

As you may or may not have heard on the news recently, the penalty for using a mobile phone while driving has increased from a £30 fine to £60 and 3 points. Get caught four times and you win a pushbike, so to speak.

So I spent half an hour digging through the piles of ("Interesting" - K.) crap I've accumulated over the years and found my old Plantronics 3000 Bluetooth headset, or hands free thingy. I dusted it off and stuck it on charge and it works just fine. In fact it works better with my K610i than it ever did on my k750i, which would frequently cut out halfway through a conversation, and which was the reason I threw it onto the pile in the first place.

Of course, all this legislation is a load of wank when we already have such laws as "Driving Without Due Care and Attention" - a law that lets the police bust you for anything, not just mobile phone use. Applying your makeup? Check! Fiddling with the stereo too much? Check! Eating an Apple? Che- oh wait...

But no, the Labour government loves making new laws. It's almost as if they're on performance-related pay or something. K was telling me just last week that they've introduced a new law for every day that they've been in power. However did we cope without them? The country must have been in downright anarchy.

But I digress. Get yourself a Wireless Hands-Free thingy for use while driving. Don't use them while walking around town, however, because they tend to make you look a bit of a pillock.

Cheapo Compass via Froogle

18:14.24 - Monday 5th March 2007   (Link to This Entry)

Something else I just remembered. I decided to buy a compass for my forthcoming jaunt up Ben Nevis but I didn't actually want to spend any money. Mooching around Froogle I found one from Iron CLad Outdoors for the princely some of £1.00 including postage.

Oddly enough I can't find the same item if I go through their website, which leads me to suspect that the offer is a leftover from a recent Froogle promotion which has been forgotten about. Maybe, maybe not, but if I get a compass for a quid, I'm not going to complain. As it happens, I had £1.60 in my PayPal account and they take PayPal, so double-bonus!

Why buy one in the first place? Well although there's a path up to the top, it's entirely possible to forget which way you approached the summit once you're up there, especially if it's foggy cloudy. A quick squiz at the ol' needle once the path ends will give me some clue as to which way to go in order to get back down. It's either that, or wait for someone else to turn up and see which direction they came from.