The scene outside my window doesn’t look anything like this picture, but all over town there’s complete chaos as roads are blocked and drivers struggle to get up and down hills. At it’s thickest, the snow is maybe two inches deep but that seems to have been enough to cripple us and confine everyone to town.

As I mentioned last time it snowed and everything stopped, surely as a technologically adept society we should be able to deal with a bit of snow – especially snow that has been forecast for the last few days. It’s not July, people, snow isn’t that much of a surprise, surely?

Formula One has been in the headlines a bit recently, with the Renault F1 team being found guilty of ‘race-fixing’. Flamboyant Flavio Briatore has been banished, possibly forever, Pat Symonds is out for five years and the team has a suspended two year ban.

It’s a very serious situation and needed to be dealt with severely, but I don’t think that it has been. Nelson Piquet Jr, the third point on the triangle, has basically got away scot free – given immunity from prosecution for providing evidence. But why should he? The whole situation only came to light after Piquet was dumped from the Renault F1 team for not achieving results. He attempted to play the hard man and blackmail Flavio to regain his place and when Flavio told him where to go, he threw his teddy out of the pram and went to the FIA.

But the whole thing could not have happened without his involvement and his complicity. If he wasn’t happy about doing it, he should have gone to the FIA at the race last year. But he didn’t. Instead, he risked his own life and that of spectators and marshals and then kept quiet about it all.

And Max Moseley’s contention that parent company Renault should not be punished, as it was not their responsibility? Sorry, that doesn’t wash either. Ultimately, they are responsible for everything that their employees do – whether sanctioned by them or not. The team, the parent company and all of the individuals directly involved should have been banned with immediate effect.

Of course, the reasons they weren’t are commercial ones. If you exclude Renault from F1, then a number of other teams are going to be unable to compete because they won’t have engines. And then Bernie and Max’s little money-spinning empire comes crashing down around their ears.

On the face of it, though, that wouldn’t be all bad – having seen Bernie’s tap dance today when being ‘interviewed’ by the BBC at the qualifying session for this year’s Singapore race, my opinion of the man has not improved – we need someone straight running F1,

1. Apparently, 40% of all Twitter traffic is babble. As Stephen Fry has eloquently stated, that’s the point; Twitter isn’t supposed to be great debate or interesting chat, or even adverts for companies – it’s supposed to be a way to tell the world what’s happening in your life at this moment. Of course, that’s also the reason lots of people think it’s a complete and utter waste of time.

What bothers me about the report is that someone has gone to the trouble to analyse Twitter’s traffic in the first place. What, exactly, was the point of that?

2. It was the Eastbourne Airbourne show last weekend. Surprisingly (well, for the Council anyway – not for anyone with any common sense) now that it’s free again, the event was packed.

What I saw of it was pretty good, but the overall impression seemed to be of an event that doesn’t know where it’s going, isn’t as big as it used to be and isn’t amazingly well run. There seemed to be lots of commercial opportunities going begging, for instance.

Given that the show loses upwards of £70,000 each year – and over £360,000 last year when they tried to charge for it – someone really needs to take it by the scruff of the neck and kick it back into shape.

Either that or get rid of it for good. After all, the only connection Eastbourne has with planes is that it was bombed in the war…..

3. The man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing has been released from prison today, on compassionate grounds – he apparently has cancer. I imagine that a number of the victim’s families may feel that, actually, he should die in prison and you can shove your compassion up your arse.

4. Given all the furore over recent times about MPs expenses, you’d think that they would have learned their lesson and would keep their heads down about pay, etc, for a little while. But you’d be wrong.

Senior Tory Sir Patrick Cormack has said that, in return for scrapping MP allowances (second home sponging, spending sprees at John Lewis, that sort of thing), MPs pay should be doubled. Given that your bog standard MP earns nearly £65,000 I must admit to being utterly lost for words. How can he think that it is even remotely acceptable to reward fraud and corruption in that way?

5. Apparently, researchers in Canada have concluded that an attack by zombies would wipe out civilisation really, really quickly. It doesn’t seem to have put them off that zombies don’t actually exist.

They’ve tried to defend their work by saying that it “could help scientists model the spread of unfamiliar diseases through human populations”. The problem with that is that they based all of their assumptions on movies and books and, I hate to tell you this guys, that stuff is all made up. So, any conclusions reached based on made-up ‘facts’ are also made-up and therefore not worth the paper they’re written on.

And the professor who adds a ‘?’ to his name so he won’t get mistaken for the lead singer from The Cure? He’s a complete dick.

6. Finally, as a bit of a geek it always warms my heart when real geeks start to sound off about how the pretend universe depicted in popular science fiction movies wouldn’t really work. The latest one is an attack on the Star Wars universe. It may or may not be intended to be a joke – it’s often hard to tell with geeks – but, if they are serious, could I just point that (as with zombies) it doesn’t really exist, it’s just made-up to entertain people. You really should go outside more!

1. New Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, seems to be picking up where his predecessor left off, at least as far as expenses are concerned. It has just been announced that he’ll be charging around £20,000 of “refurbishments” to his grace-and-favour flat to the British taxpayer. Mr Bercow, though, is “happy that this information is in the public domain, that the public know how this money has been spent”.

Would the public be quite so happy about it, I wonder? The £20,000 includes over £6,000 for a new sofa, £3,600 on planters for the terrace and over £1,000 to redecorate one room. Given that former Speaker Michael Martin spent nearly £725,000 of taxpayers money on the flat between 2000 and 2008, some might say that enough is enough and if Mr Bercow wants to redecorate he should do so from his own pocket (he is, after all, paid over £140,000 a year).

2. Lloyds / HBOS have announced losses of £4 billion, in the same week that both Barclays and HSBC announced profits of £3 billion. Lloyds / HBOS, of course, is the only one of the three to have been bailed out with taxpayer’s money, so it looks like we got value for money doesn’t it?

1. An E.coli outbreak in Wrexham that has left a woman and a three year old girl seriously ill has been traced to one particular fish and chip shop. And it turns out that this establishment had “poor hygiene conditions and major non-compliance with food legislation” in a Council inspection a year ago.

Which rather begs the question, why was it allowed to stay open? Why was it only recommended for annual checks, rather than being immediately shut down and not allowed to re-open until all problems had been addressed?

2. An American woman is suing her college because she has been unable to find work since graduating. She says they didn’t give her enough career development advice.

It may be just me, but haven’t the college completed their obligation by giving her the education she paid for? She graduated – a bachelor’s in information technology – so surely they’d done their bit? Isn’t the rest up to her?

Of course, the fact that she’s suing them has nothing to do with the fact that she’s got $70,000 of student loans to repay.

3. Apparently, UK consumers are being tricked into buying shoddy goods, by fake UK websites – according to a report by Trading Standards. It seems that a number of websites that end in .co.uk are not, in fact, based in the UK but China and rather than selling real merchandise, they sell cheap knock-off rubbish. UK consumers are, according to Trading Standards, being lulled into a false sense of security by the .co.uk suffix and think they are dealing with a British company.

Which just goes to show what a bunch of idiots UK shoppers can be sometimes. If you can’t be bothered to take some elementary precautions when shopping online – like finding out who you’re buying from – then you deserve everything you get. And let’s face it, these sites are only popular because they’re cheap – if the consumer wasn’t trying to get something for nothing, then we wouldn’t even be talking about this. Let’s be clear – these people got what they paid for.

I said it recently but I’ll say it again – it’s the internet; have some common sense.

1. Apparently, from tomorrow Sainsbury’s will be asking anyone who looks as if they’re under 25 to prove their age before they can buy age restricted products. The sign I saw didn’t specify which age restricted products they were talking about, but according to the Trading Standards website all the restricted products such as knives, alcohol, tobacco and so on can be sold to anyone over 18.

Which leads me to wonder why anyone that looks under 25 is being carded? Surely you only need to prove your age if you are over 18 but don’t look it? It’s a ridiculous policy and should be outlawed.

2. Mobile phone directory 118 800 is getting a lot of coverage at the moment, unfortunately (for them) none of it positive. In case you haven’t heard, they’ve attempted to launch a directory enquiries service that enables people to ring up and get connected to your mobile phone. The directory has, apparently, been put together from lists already in the public domain and covers approximately a third of all mobile numbers

As described by 118 800, the service they operate won’t actually reveal your mobile number to anyone and you won’t receive any calls that you don’t agree to. What you will get, though, is a text from 118 800 to tell you that someone wants to speak to you; you then decide if you want to take the call and, if you do, they get put through.

When the 118 800 service is back online (they are having “teething” problems at the moment and have taken themselves offline), you’ll be able to ask for your number to go ex-directory and it’s this that seems to have got everyone worked up. For some reason, people have assumed that their mobile number is somehow uniquely private and that no-one should be able to know what it is. This, of course, is patently not the case; none of the mobile operators (as far as I know) promise to keep your number secret and every time you give your mobile number to a third party, you’re risking that data being sold on.

I think the idea does have merits; so many people now have their mobile as their only phone number that it seems a good idea to have mobile numbers in the directory alongside landline numbers. But in these days where around 50% of landline customers are ex-directory, it would have been a much better idea for the mobile operators to get their customers to opt-in to a directory and then make that information available to services like 118 800.

Personally, I hated them at the top. It seemed counter-intuitive and was a pain when you wanted to click on a tab and ended up moving the whole window. I’m glad to see the back of the feature.

Another feature that I’d be happy to see the back of, but which appears to be here to stay, is the re-positioned reload / stop button. Up until now, its been a proper button by itself, nestled nicely with the homepage button but in Safari 4, Apple have moved it to the end of the URL bar and made it a wishy-washy little icon which often gets swamped by the RSS indicator.

This seems to be one of those design changes that are made just for the sake of it. In practice, it actually makes the browser worse to use. It’s surprisingly difficult to re-educate your mouse hand to go to the right of the screen rather than the left. And even worse is the fact that the Terminal hack that worked in the Beta, and re-enabled the reload / stop button in the customise toolbar window, no longer works. So until Apple come to their senses and re-instate the button, we’re left with the only marginally better option of Cmd-R instead.

And while I’m on the subject of things that bug people about Safari, the big one for me is the Bookmarks Toolbar. Specifically, the behaviour when you go from one folder to another. In Firefox, when you have one folder expanded and you mouse over another it too is expanded. In Safari, you have to click again to get the new one to expand. Again, it’s a small thing but when it comes to browsers, it’s the small things that make all the difference and this one is one that annoys the heck out of me. So much so that periodically I have to relegate Safari to tertiary browser and use Firefox again.

So, what do you think? What’s good – or bad – about Safari 4? What features have they got wrong? Where do the other browsers beat it? Drop a comment and let me know.

In case you’re not aware, RIPA allows councils, police and so on to use surveillance techniques to detect and prevent crime. It was introduced in an attempt to thwart terrorist activity and, according to what has been said in today’s media, should only be used for the investigation of serious crime.

However, because the Act is quite lax local councils have been using the powers it grants them to investigate serious crimes like littering, doug fouling and suspected school placement manipulation. Quite rightly, Jaqui Smith – our esteemed Home Secretary – has said this isn’t right and announced measures to stop misuse of the Act.

If, like me, you’d never heard of RIPA until now you might be feeling a little uneasy about it. Basically, it gives your local authority the right to spy on you for any reason that it sees fit. There is no requirement for councils to seek authorisation from a court or a judge and they appear not to have to justify their actions.

But I think the fact that the Act was introduced – and, it would seem, covertly introduced at that – at all is what is most disturbing. It may be 2009 rather than 1984, but we are living firmly in Orwell’s distopian Big Brother world. Everywhere we go, we’re monitored by CCTV. We leave an electronic trail a mile wide whenever we do anything. We have no privacy any more.

I’ve found it funny recently to read stories about people being up in arms about Google Street View taking pictures of their street. They’re worried about the invasion of their privacy – even though their privacy is invaded every day by the hundreds of CCTV cameras that line our streets. But, those cameras are there to protect them from crime so it’s OK. And they have the same argument with the ID card scheme; if you’ve got nothing to hide, why do you object to it?

I object to CCTV, and ID cards, and RIPA for a number of reasons. The first is that why should I be constantly monitored when I am going about my private, law-abiding business? My second objection is that this constant surveillance does not stop crime; it displaces it to areas that don’t have CCTV or it sits back and watches the crime be committed. Rather than spending however many millions of pounds it is that have been spent on cameras, why not employ some more police (proper police, not PCSOs), to actually walk the streets, get to know their community, keep order? You know, like they used to years ago.

But my biggest objection by far is that all of this surveillance, ID schemes, and so on, produces a huge amount of data on honest, law-abiding citizens which is then stored in local council, police and Government databases. Yet, as they have consistently shown over the last few years, none of these august bodies knows diddly squat about data security. So I sit here, protecting myself as much as possible from identity theft and fraud, and the Government goes and gives my data away willy nilly.

Of course, that’s a load of bollocks. And it’s worrying that a GP would think that the problem of obesity is caused by chocolate alone and can be solved by making chocolate too expensive to buy.

2. The other tax being proposed – by none other than the Chief Medical Officer – is another tax on drinking. Well, to be fair, not a tax as such – a minimum price per unit. Again, this is intended as something that will be good for us and stop us all drinking so much. And, again, it’s complete bollocks. The problem isn’t – and never has been – the price of the alcohol; it’s the minority who can’t drink responsibly. You know who I’m talking about, you’ve seen them on a Friday and Saturday night puking up in the street or kicking the crap out of some poor passer-by.

Both of these misguided attempts at restricting our personal freedoms ignore one small but important fact – the majority of people are not obese and are not irresponsible drinkers. So why should they have to pay extra to try and solve the problems of the minority?

3. A recent survey found that six out of seven dwarves are not Happy.

4. Congratulations to Robert Webb for winning Comic Relief’s dancing contest. His interpretation of ‘Flashdance’ was just hilarious.

5. Oh no! They’re going to make a film version of Stephen King’s It. Well, at least it can’t be any worse than the TV version, which had John Boy Walton as the lead good guy and a totally unrecognisbale – and miscast – Tim Curry as Pennywise.

For me, this is one of those books that’s just not filmable; too much has to be sacrificed to make it fit the time scale demanded by a film audience. All you end up with is the fight against the (rather lame) alien, and the book isn’t really about that. It’s about the nature of friendship and how it changes as we get older, and how you can’t ever regain what you had, however much you try. The alien bashing is really secondary.

1. Nurses can’t offer to say a prayer for patients, apparently. And if they do, then everyone has a go at them. Personally, I don’t believe (I may have mentioned this before) but if you do, that’s fine. If I’m sick and you want to pray for my recovery, please go ahead – just don’t expect me to join in with you.

Atheist groups seem to have elevated not believing in God into a religion all of its own and are just as set in their views and gung-ho as any other religion as you might care to name. I thought the idea was to live in peace with your fellow man?

Or did I dream it?

2. We can all rest easy in our beds, as Titian’s Diana and Actaeon has been saved for the nation. Yes, the £50 million demanded by the current owner – the Duke of Sutherland – has been stumped up by various groups, including a number of Government-funded agencies.

I’m not a big fan of art, I don’t know anything about Titian and whether this is an important artwork or not. What I do know amounts to three things:

• I don’t like the painting and certainly don’t think it’s worth £50 million
• The country has been held to ransom by the Duke who must be laughing his arse off, now that he’s £50 million better off. Basically, he seems to have said to the Government, “Buy this one, or I’ll sell the whole collection outside the country”.
• There are a whole heck of a lot better uses for £50 million than one old painting and I think the message that it sends to most of the country is “Fuck you, chavs. We’ve got our painting so we don’t give a toss about the rest of you”

3. Carol Thatcher has been barred from BBC‘s The One Show because she apparently made a racist remark backstage during filming. She supposedly made a comparison between a tennis player and the golliwog figure from the jam pots, in private, and got reported to the powers that be. Who promptly had a PC overdose and kicked her out.

So far, no-one has reported exactly what she said (probably too worried about being sacked themselves) but isn’t this yet another case of over-reacting? After all, Carol Thatcher is of an age where she grew up in an era when morals were different, when attitudes were different.

And, at the end of the day, what does it matter? If we weren’t all so paranoid about offending everyone (oh, except for straight white people that is – you can say what you like about those fuckers) then perhaps we could all just get on and get things done, rather than be in the royally fucked up state we are now?

4. In that vein, could I just say that no-one really gives a damn if the flag is the wrong way up. Until you pointed it out, Mr Flag Institute Spokesman, I didn’t even know it could be hung upside down. Perhaps if it didn’t look the same both ways up, someone might have noticed?

And, really, aren’t there more important things to report on when Gordon Brown is meeting with the leader of China? I think there probably are.

5. Our compensation culture is getting out of hand, as this story proves. A friend of mine was on one of the trains that got hit yet as far as I know he hasn’t been given any compensation, so why should this guy get any?

But if his case is valid, then I’d like to make my application for compensation now please; I was severely traumatised by worry over whether my friend was OK and the mental scars still haven’t healed.

6. Oh, on the snow thing from yesterday? Collin says it much better than I can.