Nick Jordan

I’m off up North to Keighley in Yorkshire today for a wedding, which takes place tomorrow. This means that there’ll be the extremely rare sight of me in a suit and tie. Scary.

My day began with the discovery that someone had knocked my motorbike over and left it pissing oil all over the road. It’s not so much the knocking it over that makes me angry - accidents happen to all of us. What gets me is the fact that whoever did it just drove off and left it without picking it up and without leaving a note or something apologising and offering to pay for the damage.

Fortunately, the damage seems relatively minor. It’ll need a new screen but that appears to be it. I haven’t tried starting it yet, mind you, because I want to replace the oil that was lost first.

Google Maps has finally come to the UK and it rocks. Hard. I love a good map and this is very good.

Yesterday I took the tube to Covent Garden and spent some time wandering around London’s Transport Museum, which was really interesting. I could have spent hours just sitting in one of the compartments of the old Metropolitan Railway carriage that they have there, soaking up the atmosphere. The trams and buses were a joy, too, but then I’ve always been a sucker for any form of powered transport, really.

The Register reports that the government appears to be introducing a national ID database by stealth. The plan is to force all new passport applicants and, eventually, all those renewing their passports, to provide fingerprints for their database. If I need to tell you why that’s not necessarily a good thing then there’s probably very little hope for you.

It’s a damn good reason, if one was needed, not to vote Labour in the forthcoming election even if the fact of Tony Blair being a liar wasn’t enough. Unfortunately, I couldn’t possibly bring myself to vote Conservative, I’m not too impressed with the Liberal Democrats either and I hate tactical voting. If the Greens field a candidate in my constituency I may vote for them, otherwise I may not be voting at all at this rate.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a very nice little guide to anonymous blogging, called How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else). Personally, I find it far easier to say nothing about work or anything else I wouldn’t want the entire planet to know about but I know from past experience that if you’re unhappy about work blogging about it all helps you to let off steam safely. I’m pretty sure that when I did it a few years ago it helped to stop me from doing something really stupid.

The Observer is reporting that the imminent wedding of Prince Charles to Camilla Parker-Bowles is causing a Republican surge. This can only be a good thing as far as I’m concerned. It’s about time that we ditched the monarchy and became citizens in a modern state rather than mere subjects in an outdated system which supports inherited privilege, something which is clearly unfair and, although I really don’t like the word, undemocratic. I don’t feel any particular malice towards the royal family but I do refuse to bow the knee to them and I strongly object to my taxes supporting them.