By way of Ben I came across this excellent article about the ever growing popularity of SUVs.

It discusses the false perception of SUV drivers that they’re safer than they would be in another car:

Being high and heavy, SUVs handle like light trucks, take longer to stop and, given the same reaction time, will hit a wall or a pole with greater force. But SUV drivers are also less safe precisely because they think they are secure. … As European studies have shown time and again, owners of small cars drive more safely because they sense they’re vulnerable.

SUVs are safer in multiple car accidents, in fact “an SUV occupant is 3.5 times as likely to survive as the other driver”. However something I didn’t realise is that multiple car accidents account for only a minority of road fatalities.

That being the case makes SUVs propensity to roll much more of a worry.

If you’re in a car and you get yourself in an awkward position and you give yourself a fistful of steering wheel, your car’s going to spin round and slide sideways,” explains Richardson. “If you do that in your 4WD, it’s very likely you’ll end up on your roof.”

And as it turns out, when you do roll you’re “almost 50 per cent more likely to be seriously injured than had [you] rolled a wagon or a sports car”.

Good reading if you’ve got 10 minutes.

Two places I’m not from:

Cronulla

Lakemba

F##kwits, the lot of ya.

.. except Chris did get out of Nepal alive … just.

And he took some sweet photos while he was doing it, check ‘em out if you haven’t already.

I think this is my favourite. © Chris Yeoh

A couple of other highlights,
here,
here,
here (holy ####!),
and here,
Ama Dafrickin’blam!!,
awesome arty shot,
and one for mum.

Update: It’s warming up!

Every day should start like this.

There was a freezing rain alert last night, quite the chaos.

Things were pretty nuts on the roads, cars sliding around on the ice everywhere. Despite the alert we decided to head downtown to check out some crazy xmas light action. On the way back we struggled to get over one overpass, the incline and a big patch of ice meant we had 0 traction – but we got up eventually.

A lot of people weren’t so lucky, with nearly 170 prangs overnight and this morning.

We saw a 4WD which had hit the guard rail hard, it might even have rolled given the huge dent in the roof – although the occupants seemed ok. There were numerous other minor bingles, four cars parked perpendicular to the traffic just near the hotel, and Ambulances flying ’round all night. Nuts nuts nuts.

I noticed Chris’ post WRT the relative slowness of gnome-terminal vs xterm.

I’m waiting just now to take Kate’s remaining belongings to her brothers’, so while I’ve got a few minutes I thought I’d investigate myself.

Chris was winging about make clean, which is obviously going to be the worst case. Although that’s interesting, I thought I’d look at an actual compile, so I benchmarked a kernel compile.

~src/kernel/2.6.9-uml$ time make ARCH=um V=1

Obviously konsole on another desktop is sort of cheating. The konsoles, gnome-terminal and aterm are all running transparent. That is with the desktop image showing through but slightly faded towards white. xterm is just using a plain white background. konsole and gnome-terminal are also using anti-aliased fonts, whereas aterm and xterm aren’t.

Chris, being one of the fvwm crowd , likes the speed of xterm, and fair enough. Personally I like to see my pretty desktop backgrounds, and anti-aliased fonts I can’t live without – so I’ll stick with konsole.

It’s good to know though that if I’m running some compile that generates lots of output for no good reason, I should plonk the window on another desktop. I actually do that usually anyway, to stop it annoying me. I use this little script to let me know when a long compile or the like has finished.

#!/bin/bash

eval $@
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
    kdialog --msgbox "Command '$@' in $(pwd) completed." 2> /dev/null
else
    kdialog --error "Command '$@' in $(pwd) failed!" 2> /dev/null
    exit 1
fi
exit 0

And now I’m off to deliver some boxes. One step closer to a sane house!

Parking, Texas style.