Cycling in the right turn lane

Yesterday, I cycled down Victoria Road from New Hall, and went round Mitcham's Corner Roundabout over Victoria Avenue bridge. Unfortunately, this necessitates being in the right hand lane for about 150m until Milton road splits off. Is it better to:

* Squish in to the left, letting cars overtake very narrowly?
* Squish in to the right, and try to gesture to cars that if they want to overtake, they can be the one to invade another lane?
* Cycle down the white line?
* Cycle in the left lane, but not have enough time to pull out before the roads split?
* Dismount?
* Train until I can reliably accelerate to 20mph in much less than that distance?
* Force anyone behind me to wait 100m to overtake?

Mocking a nationality: an introductory piece of advice

If you want to mock someone's nationality, it's normal to make lots of references to stereotypes about it. It often doesn't matter as much what those are as that you make it clear that you're making fun.

However, if you want to mock someone's nationality to their face, you may have to tell them what those stereotypes are first. If not, they may not notice at all. If you have a large crowd of your own nationality to play to, you may be able to make it clear you're mocking them by all laughing uproariously whenever they say something, and actually make them feel bad they don't know what you're talking about. But if you're on your own, it may fall completely flat.

You may have a conversation like:

American: Have you eaten a lot of sweets lately? Haha!
Brit: Whu? Anyway, we were saying...

Which didn't really hurt anyone's feelings at all. You'd probably do better to step back a bit and make explicit whatever stereotype you're talking about. If the victim is unaware, they may actually be a lot more discomfited at facing a new stereotype.

American: Do you know your teeth are really ugly? Is that because you're too stupid to know how to take care of them, or too poor to have surgery?
Brit: *punch*

In fact, I'm pretty bored of stereotypes about nationality. But if you're going to do it, for god's sake do it right, ok?

Criticisms of Lotus Notes and SourceSafe

A little while back I made a post including several quotes about Lotus Notes. I so enjoyed ripping into Lotus Notes I'm going to reproduce those comments again.

If anywhere near the first page of google hits for Lotus Notes is "Top 80 reasons why Lotus Notes sucks", that's a pretty stinging indictment. After all, it's kind of bad that there's any reason your product sucks, let along seventy nine more.

"Lotus Notes is indeed the worst thing of any kind ever, pipping genocide at the post because of the 'memo' thing."

However, for comparison, see SourceSafe. When you search for that, even before the first hit, was a sponsored result "Still use SourceSafe? We can help. 100% import. Familiar, but powerful & reliable. Free trial. sourcegear.com/vault." Someone is actually paying money in order to advertise their software's bigselling point that it's anything other than yours.

Blue LED aliens

The blue LED on my terabyte is reflecting twice off the window, and making it look like a small alien flying saucer is hiding in my bushes. (Either that, or a small alien flying saucer hiding in my bushes is making it look like the blue LED is reflecting off the window.)