James’s blog
Extras:
- Harry Hill’s book - index of famous names (PDF)
- Cover Paije (Spotify playlist)
- Now That’s What I Call Wigging Out (Spotify playlist)
Why not:
Sites I’ve linked to:
- Amardeep Singh at Lehigh University
- Anglican Church Music
- Billie the Vision
- Books by Mark Billingham
- Einar Egilsson’s chord image generator
- Garry Knight on Flickr
- Harry Pearson
- Korall on Wikimedia
- Lille Cathedral
- Michael Rosen blog
- Nadia Oh
- Nick Hillman on Twitter
- One Post Wonders
- Popjustice
- Red Bubble
- Slate: Owen Pallett
- Sputnik Music forums
- Stewart Lee
- Survivors Fund
- Tour de France Lanterne Rouge
- Wordle
- Wyclef on YouTube
Other good sites:
Security! Security!
14 Mar 10 | Re: A creeping laxity
I seem to be getting lax about security. In 2010 so far, I have, in increasing order of severity:
- left my bike lights on my bike outside places, where anyone could just walk past and yaffle them
- left my bike unlocked in the rack outside work, where anyone could just ride off with it
- gone out and left the front door unlocked, so that anyone could just wander in and ransack the place
- left my back door unlocked for about a week, when anyone could have just breezed in at any time and murdered me in my bed and mixed up my CD collection.
Thankfully, however, none of the above in fact had any consequences whatsoever. Clearly that is down to luck, to some extent. What is not clear is exactly how lucky I’ve been. I wonder whether there’s an index somewhere that will tell you the exact probability of your bike getting ridden off with, or an intruder intruding in your home, if you leave them unlocked.
In the case of unlocked doors, the thing is that a potential criminal would only know that they were unlocked if they tried the handle. I’ve never seen a shady character going from door to door trying all the handles in the hope of a lucky strike before, so presumably you’re not that likely to get burgled if you do forget to lock yours. Except that if you and a lot of other people got into the habit based on that assumption, it would eventually become known that doors were being left unlocked, and then representatives of the criminal community would start trying it on.
The conclusion, then, is that it’s probably OK to leave your door unlocked once in a while so long as you feel bad about it afterwards and don’t get into bad habits, and, importantly, so long as everyone else behaves the same way. It’s a bit like immunisation - if everyone else gets the jab, theoretically you wouldn’t have to, but it’s still important for everyone to do their bit and build up herd immunity. This is herd security. Do your bit. I’ll try to do mine from now on.
Posted by DOCTOR CLAW at 21:09
[Or dive into the blarchive...]