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31
Aug 10

Facebook Places; Haven’t We Been Here Before?

A week and a half ago Facebook finally launched their Places feature to a predictable media furore over location privacy, regardless of whether it’s justified or not and, to location industry watchers at least, a strong sense of deja vu. Haven’t we been here before?

Let’s look at the key issues that seem to be getting people hot, bothered and generally up in arms.

Deja vu the first. According to Facebook, at the time of writing they have 500M users. But how many of them will actually use the service, regardless of whether they’ve updated their privacy settings?

Deja vu the second. So you decide you want to use Facebook Places? Only on an iPhone I’m afraid or from Facebook’s HTML5 mobile web site. Want an Android or Nokia app? You’re out of luck, for now. Want to use it outside the US? You’re even more out of luck, for now.

Facebook Places. The UK Version

Deja vu the third. So you decide you don’t want to use Facebook Places? It’s a location app so there’s bound to be privacy implications. Granted, Facebook have chosen to go down the opt-out route for location privacy, though you still have to physically use the service, but even the most cursory of web searches for “disable facebook places” yields loads of different takes on the same basic set of actions. Cult of Mac and ReadWriteWeb have great write ups, in non threatening, non technical language for how to ensure Facebook Places never sullies your Facebook stream.

Now take a step back, re-read the three points above and substitute, in order, Google’s Latitude, Foursquare’s, err, Foursquare and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle for Facebook Places. Granted the opt-out vs. opt-in approach to location sharing differs substantially (for Latitude, Foursquare and Fire Eagle it’s implicitly opt-in) but we’ve been here before. Many times. A new location sharing service is launched, people get worried due to media coverage and eventually the status quo is restored and everyone gets on with their lives as before, maybe with an additional bit of location richness added, maybe not. It’s worth bearing this in mind before you buy into the latest media coverage which over-uses the phrase “sparks privacy concerns“.

Update 1/9/10 – turns out I’m not the only one thinking along these lines. After I originally posted this, my daily trawl through my RSS feeds uncovered a post from Jonathan Crowe over at The Map Room blog that draws pretty much the same conclusions over Facebook Places as I do.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
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26
Aug 10

History Is Also Written By The Man From The Council With A Tin Of White Paint

“History is written by the victors“. So goes the saying attributed to Winston Churchill sometime during his reign as British Prime Minister. I’d like to offer up a corollary to that saying, which is “History is also written by the man from the council with a tin of white paint“.

I should explain.

I live in what used to be the rather grandly named Municipal Borough of Twickenham. Used to be. Twickenham as a borough was created in 1926 out of the 1868 Twickenham Local Government District. In 1934 the new borough absorbed the nearby urban districts of Hampton, Hampton Wick and Teddington. But when Greater London was created in 1965, Twickenham Borough vanished overnight, becoming part of the new London Borough of Richmond Upon Thames.

But traces of the old borough still exist, if you keep your eyes open. Almost all of the old street signs still exist, with the old Borough of Twickenham wording carefully painted out, by the man from the council with a tin of council issued standard white paint. Almost 45 years later, those same street signs are still there, but they’re starting to show their age and the paint is peeling in places, peeling back the years as an added bonus.

Lost London: The Borough of Twickenham

The Borough of Twickenham wasn’t the only thing to vanish overnight in 1965, so did the County of Middlesex, of which Twickenham was a part. Middlesex however lives on, both as an informal name and as a postal county and again, traces of the lost county still exist, if you know where to look.

County of Middlesex sign

Photo Credits: Gary Gale and In Tea We Trust on Flickr.
Written at the Radisson Blu hotel, Berlin (52.519648, 13.40258) and posted from the Nokia gate5 office in Berlin (52.53105, 13.38521)
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7
Aug 10

Roughly Halfway Between England And France

As a race and as a society we just love our boundaries and our borders; go here, don’t go here, this is yours, this is ours. We put up border controls, we tax dependent on what side of the street you live on, you need the right visa stamp in your passport to pass onto this piece of land, which looks identical to the one you’re currently standing on but because of a line drawn on a map its … different.

While lots of the animal kingdom are equally territorial, no one species has managed to invent a whole series of rules and regulations and to employe an entire bureaucracy to ensure the rules and regulations are correctly implemented and patrolled.

But most of these lines of meaning are ignored by the fellow denizens of our planet and our technology ignores them too these days. On mainland Europe, each country has its own set of cellular networks, whose signals overlap with those of neighbouring countries along the myriad of borders that make up the European Union. This happens to me around twice a week as I shuttle back and forth between London and Berlin, but because I’m at around 33,000 feet, on a plane, with my mobile either switched off or in flight safe mode, it passed unnoticed.

But put a big mass of water in the way, like the English Channel (or La Manche as our French neighbours say) and travel much more slowly, say on a ferry and something much more interesting happens.

Halfway Between England and France

Roughly half way across the Channel and the French mobile signals weaken and signal strength starts to drop off. At the same time, the first faint signals from their UK counterparts start to gain in strength and, if you’re watching carefully, your mobile gets confused for about 5 minutes, swapping back and forth between UK and French networks until, as you get closer to Dover, the UK signal strength overwhelms the French ones. If you’re watching carefully, you can see it happen, right before your eyes. If it helps, it’s like another, technological border and your mobile phone is the passport, allowing you passage from a French roaming network back to your UK home network.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
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1
Aug 10

Grepping And Grokking The Etymology Of Grep

I’ve been thinking a lot about the etymology of place names recently. That’s a slightly verbose way of saying that I’ve been thinking about the origin of place names and where they come from. Take London for example. That’s pretty easy as most sources of information seem to agree that London derives from Londinium, the name of the Roman settlement from which the modern metropolis of London grew.

Then there’s Teddington, the town on the River Thames at the upstream limit of the Tideway, where I currently live. Some people believe that the name derives from Tide’s End Town; Rudyard Kipling was one of the people who subscribed to this version of the name’s origin. Scholars though tend to believe that the town was named after a Saxon leader, called either Todyngton or Tutington, which morphed into the modern day name over the centuries.

All well and good but this sort of debate over the origin of a name is continuing even today and in a much more geekier vein. To paraphrase John Cleese in Monty Python’s Cheese Shop sketch, I was perusing the internet the other day and came across a discussion of the origins of the UNIX command grep. If you know your UNIX command line, you’ll probably know that grep is the tool you use to search inside text files. Indeed, just as Robert Heinlein’s grok has become part of today’s technical culture as a synonym for understand, so grep has become a synonym for search … I’m just grepping for the time the restaurant opens.

GREP. A photograph only a SysAdmin could love!

If you’d asked me last week how grep got its name, I’d have said with high confidence that it’s an acronym for General Regular Expression Parser, G .. R .. E .. P, grep. But Mike Burns over at Giant Robot offers up an alternate etymology, albeit a rather contrived one to my mind, that the name originated from the commands to search for text within the ed text editor, thus when looking for the regular expression “re”, you’d issue the command g/re/p. All of which looks nice and convenient but only works when you’re looking for the string “re”, which isn’t that much of a common event when you think about it.

A bit of background research yields even more versions of how grep got its name. John Barry’s book Technobabble offers up a whole slew of alternatives.

  • The November 1990 issue of the SunTech Journal states that grep is an acronym for Get Regular Expression and Print.
  • The December 1985 issue of UNIX World, thinks that it’s really Globally search for a Regular Expression and Print.
  • A technical writer at Hewlett-Packard offers the alternative of Generalized Regular Expression Parser.
  • An Introduction to Berkeley UNIX disagrees; it’s Generalized Regular Expression Pattern.
  • Don Libes and Sandy Ressler in Life With UNIX thinks it’s Global Regular Expression Print.
  • And finally, the authors of UNIX For People prefer the definition as Global Regular Expression or Pattern.

That’s 8 differing and conflicting definitions.

And the point of all of this etymological meandering? Well, today’s internet community prides itself in being the ultimate source of information in today’s society. Yet I find it deliciously ironic that we can pretty much agree on the origins of place names dating from Roman and from Saxon times but can’t agree on the origin of a UNIX command that was created on March 3rd. 1973. The irony becomes even deeper when you consider that UNIX systems formed the backbone of the origins of today’s internet and World Wide Web and that a substantial proportion of the servers on the net today still run UNIX, and thus still run the grep command.

Photo Credits: Danny Howard on Flickr.
Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
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30
Jul 10

Cartographically Speaking; Data (Lots), Maps (Not So Much), Problems (Many)

In September I’ll be at the 46th. Annual Society of Cartographers Summer School at the University of Manchester where I’m lucky enough to have been asked to give a talk on geographic data. This topic should come as no surprise to anyone who’s come across one of my blog posts.

I’ll be talking about Welcome To The World Of The Geo Data Silo; Where Closed Data Is Open And Open Data Is Closed; the talk abstract is now up on the SoC web site and it’s reproduced below.

We’ve been mapping the world around us for centuries, even before the Mappa Mundi first appeared in Hereford Cathedral. But now, as location becomes ubiquitous (if you have a smartphone and you’re not in an urban canyon), as the major and minor players coalesce into the nebulous thing we call the “geo industry” and as there’s sources of geographic data everywhere, suddenly the map isn’t the important thing anymore. Now, it’s all about the data.

At this year’s Where 2.0 in the heart of Silicon Valley, a veritable geo-fest if ever there was one, the map was strangely absent. Instead we have data, lots of data.

data slide

Some of it commercial and authoritative (Navteq and Teleatlas), some of it niche and authoritative (Urban Mapping), some of it country specific and authoritative (Britain’s Ordnance Survey) and some of it crowd sourced and growing aggressively (OpenStreetMap). But there’s also data from unlikely allies, from geo-tagged photos (Flickr), from location based social networking services (FourSquare and Gowalla) and from forward thinking experimental authorities (Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue).

Data, data everywhere. Some physical, some spatial, some subjective, some colloquial. But all of it locked in its own private little data silo. There’s much irony here as well, as previously proprietary data becomes unlocked and open (Ordnance Survey) and open, crowd sourced data become locked behind a well meaning but restrictive license.

You could call this Geo-Babel and we’re in the midst of it right now. How can we recognise this and, more importantly, how can we as part of the geo industry dig ourselves out of this hole?

… now I just need to write the talk and the accompanying slide deck in time.

Photo Credits: bionicteaching on Flickr
Written and posted from Berlin Tegel Airport (52.5545447, 13.2899969)
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30
Jul 10

Berlin’s Tegel Airport; From Plane To Taxi In Under A Minute

According to that fount of online knowledge Wikipedia, an airport “is a location where aircraft such as fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and blimps takeoff and land“. You don’t see that many blimps around these days but it seems simple enough. Airport. A contraction of the words aircraft and port. But not all airports are created equal. Take Heathrow for example, which, under the ownership of BAA is now less an airport and more a rambling shopping mall, spread over 5 terminal buildings, where hapless passengers (note to UK railway companies, we’re passengers not customers) are crammed into a small space in order to extract the maximum amount of cash out of them in overpriced shops, bars and restaurants and where the act of getting on and off a plane seems to be tacked on as an afterthought.

Even with travellators between the gates and the fun and games of immigration and baggage reclaim it can take anything up to half an hour from the moment you get off a plane to the time you emerge blinking into the outside world.

What a refreshing change it is then to use (the soon to be closed and replaced with Brandenburg International Airport) Berlin’s Flughäfen Tegel, where checking in takes minutes and where the duration from plane to taxi rank can be measured in seconds not minutes. Sounds hard to believe but yesterday while waiting to disembark from a flight from Heathrow I idly set the stopwatch on my iPhone and started the timer running the moment I stepped off the plane. I then stopped it the moment my backside met the seat of a taxi outside the terminal building. Total elapsed time from plane to taxi … 52 seconds.

Berlin Tegel Airport. From Plane to Taxi In Less Than A Minute.

Fifty two seconds. Count them. 52. Fifty two. Less than a minute. Lovely and plush and modern as Brandenburg airport will be when it finally opens, allegedly in 2012, it won’t be a patch on Tegel.

Written at the Radisson Blu hotel, Berlin (52.519648, 13.40258) and posted from Berlin Tegel Airport (52.5545447, 13.2899969)
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29
Jul 10

Geo-Loco; Where The Geo-Wonks Meet The Geo-Clueless And All Points Inbetween

Last week I was in San Francisco, ostensibly to meet with fellow Nokians in Mountain View and Palo Alto, the homes of Google and Stanford University respectively. But I was also there to take part in a panel on the topic of “is geo loco a business or a feature?” at the Geo-Loco conference, chaired by geo-eminence grise Marc Prioleau.

With the explosion of interest in all things geo recently (and for once I think the hyperbole is justified) and thus a large amount of new conferences on the topic, I was somewhat skeptical of how Geo-Loco would pan out. But the presence of Marc Prioleau and other geo-rati such as LikeList’s Tyler Bell, Urban Mapping’s Ian White, Tom Coates, the man behind Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and Waze’s Di-Ann Eisnor, to name but a few, swayed me to participate.

I was interested to hear how Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures would keynote but was sadly disappointed; it was a rambling and somewhat disjointed affair with little structure or insight; the sole exception of which was an interesting technique to quickly mashup your Foursquare check-ins on Google Maps. Thankfully Fred fared much better when interviewed one-on-one later in the day by John Batelle of Federated Media, which produced an engaging discussion on the state of the geo market; some of which I even agreed with.

Geo-Loco Conference 2010

Proof that Geo-Loco was a fully fledged geoconference was evident in the Twitter back channel which was, by turns, witty, informed, damning, sarcastic, enlightening and downright funny. I may have contributed to this part of the proceedings. A bit. Here’s a brief sampler of some of the comments the speakers and panels contributed to, albeit inadvertently.

One of the braver panels was chaired by Phil Hendrix of IMMR who asked the audience and a panel consisting of the Institute for the Future’s Michael Liebhold, GigaOm’s Liz Gannes, the aforementioned Di-Ann Eisnor, Rackspace’s Robert Scoble and Google’s Lior Ron (who I’m not sure uttered a single word during the entire panel) to pontificate on the futures of location based services.

Now, making predictions of any sort is a risky business at best, even more so when those predictions are on an industry moving as rapidly as geo, a fact I noted last month in an article for Coordinates Magazine …

Attempts to predict the growth, success and uptake of technology are rife. Accurate predictions, less so. “There’s no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home“, said Ken Olsen, then founder and CEO of DEC in 1977. “I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers” is apocryphally attributed to Thomas Watson of IBM in 1943.

… but the panel gamely attempted to agree, disagree or abstain on 5 statements.

Geo-data will be free, with OpenStreetMap and other crowd-driven open-source data eclipsing commercial vendors.

Oh dear. Not this one again. Quite correctly the panel were split on this. Whilst I’m a big fan and supported of OpenStreetMap, this will not sweep all pretenders to the throne to one side and reign supreme. There is no one sole authoritative source of geographical data in the world for very good reasons; differences in use, in scope, in language support, in coverage, in acquisition methods; the list goes on and on. Even with the success of OSM, I’d still feel safer if the emergency services route their vehicles to where they’re needed by using official national geo data. It’s also worth noting that whilst people don’t seem to want to pay for geographic data any more, both Navteq and Teleatlas were acquired by Nokia and TomTom respectively precisely because of the value inherent in their authoritative views of the world, albeit one tempered by the Personal Navigation Device view of the world.

Location-awareness will be integral to any mobile app.

There was pretty much widespread agreement from the panel on this one. My take, whilst in general agreement, is tempered with the fact that we don’t all live in the Silicon Valley bubble, where there’s 3G coverage everywhere and everyone has a smartphone capable of location awareness. Will location be integral to smartphone apps? Undoubtedly. Will location be integral to all forms of app running on any nomadic device, be it tablet, laptop, phone or otherwise? Only if there’s an infrastructure to support it already in place, which gives the developing nations a disadvantage.

More than half of all mobile advertising in 2014 will be location based.

Not much agreement on this point from the panel and I’m in accord with them; advertising is notoriously difficult to predict at the best of times and to put a 50% figure on all mobile ads being location based in 4 years time should be viewed with extreme cynicism.

Virtually all user-generated content will be geo-tagged.

The panel were enthusiastically with this point and I’m also with them. But again, not everywhere in the world has the networking infrastructure to support geo-tagging so this statement needed to be viewed with cautious agreement. We’re also long overdue a highly publicised event which brings the topic of location privacy to the general public’s attention; the result of which may cause a significant turn off of location services. When, and not if, that happens, the prediction for location based advertising looks on even shakier ground than it is right now.

Proximity will become a critical filter for content.

Well yes, duuh, but isn’t this already happening? Either through our own efforts to obtain relevancy, through constraining search queries to locations or through localised services. The question should really be “automatic, meaningful, proximity will become a key context for content” as there’s no relevancy obtained by automatically constraining results to a local area when what you’re really looking for is information on your next vacation destination.

Photo Credits: Ken Yeung on Flickr.
Written at the London Heathrow BA Lounge (51.47286, -0.48726) and posted from the Radisson Blu hotel, Berlin (52.519648, 13.40258)
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25
Jul 10

More Location Tracking; This Time From Foursquare

Back in March of this year I wrote about deliberately tracking my journey by using Google’s Latitude and unexpectedly tracking the same journey by looking at the history of my Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins.

By using the history function from Google Latitude I was able to put together a quick and dirty visualisation of the locations I’d been to but my check-in history added not only the location but also the place that was at each location.

During last week’s Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco, Fred Wilson (no, not the guy from the B-52′s) mentioned that you could feed your Foursquare check-in history into Google Maps and produce another quick and dirty visualisation of not only the places you’d checked into but also where those places were.

Simply login to your Foursquare account and visit your feeds page at http://foursquare.com/feeds/ and copy the RSS check-in history link but don’t click on the link. Open up Google Maps and paste in the link and add ?count=200 to the end of the URL to make Foursquare return a reasonable amount of check-ins. Hey presto, one instant map of your check-ins, which shows me that I’ve been checking in in the Bay Area in the USA, in and around London in the UK and in and around Berlin in Germany. Not that I didn’t know this already but it’s always good to see this visualised on a map.

Foursquare History - Global

Of course, Google Maps is a full slippy maps implementation, so I can click, drag and zoom in to see my check-ins from the Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco in the Bay Area, south through Palo Alto to San Jose.

Foursquare History - Bay Area

I can also jump across the Atlantic Ocean, straight over the United Kingdom, to Berlin and see Berlin’s Tegel Airport in the west and the Nokia Gate5 office in the Mitte district of the city.

Foursquare History - Berlin

With a little bit of time, effort and GIS know-how I could have probably come up with a slick animated trail of my check-ins but sometimes a quick and dirty way of seeing where I’ve been on a map is all that’s needed.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
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11
Jul 10

The Uncertainty Principle Of Maps Sites (And Eddie Izzard)

I should start off by saying that I don’t mean mapping web sites. There’s no Ovi, Yahoo!, Google or OpenStreetMap web sites in this post. No, this is a blog post about Eddie Izzard (at least slightly), Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (even more ephmerally), the (death of) RSS, maps and cartography (generally) and (in the main) web sites about maps and cartography.

A strange set of bedfellows you might think (you might also think I’ve been overdosing on LISP as there’s way way too many parentheses in the first two paragraphs alone) … but bear with me.

Eddie Izzard, in his Dress To Kill stage show (“cake or death”), was musing on the way in which people perceive history and this got me to thinking about RSS. But first, this is what he said …

Yes, and I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from. Oh, yeah. You tear your history down, man! “30 years old, let’s smash it to the floor and put a car park here!” I have seen it in stories. I saw something in a program on something in Miami, and they were saying, “We’ve redecorated this building to how it looked over 50 years ago!” And people were going, “No, surely not, no. No one was alive then!”

sketchmap-Apostle Islands, WI

And the RSS connection? Well in 2005 ZDNet were predicting the death of RSS by way of the death of the RSS reader, and then last year TechCrunch composed an epitaph for Really Simple Syndication saying “Rest in peace RSS. It’s time to completely cut RSS off and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore”.

Yet for me at least RSS is very much alive, well and part of my daily routine of news and information gathering and acquisition (which includes Twitter, but it’s by no way the sole source). Sorry, went back to parentheses there; I’ll try to curb this.

And under my RSS group that contains feeds from sites I’ve noticed and want to read again (yes I could have bookmarked them but my RSS reader, still alive and well in the form of NetNewsWire, aggregates them for me in a way that I find works) and it struck me the other day that there’s a hell of a lot of maps and cartography sites alive and well.

So to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? That can be summed up neatly by saying that the observer affects the observed. So is this part of a renaissance of interest in mapping and cartography in general or are there more mapping and cartography sites out there because we’re looking for them and people are responding to a perceived need? With this in mind, here’s a list of sites you should probably read at least once because they show just how much variety and interest there is on the topic of maps out there on the web.

IMG_4480.JPG

Strange Maps - If you read one maps blog, read this one. It never ceases to inform, amaze, amuse or any combination of the three.

Mapperz – The Mapping News Blog - Regularly updated roundup of what’s new in the world of maps and GIS.

The Map Room – Jonathan Crowe’s Weblog About Maps - Links and articles on maps, map collections, map related resources and anything much map related on the web.

Fuckyesmaps - A boy and a girl with a love for maps. Need I say more?

Fuck Yeah Cartography - More cartographical profanity but basically anything that explores interesting representations of space.

Cartophile - Whoever the anonymous author of this Tumblr powered blog is, one things for sure and that’s that they love anything maps and cartography related.

Cartastrophe - What happens when maps go bad.

Atlas Obscura – Curious and Wonderful Travel Destinations, A Compendium of the World’s Wonders, Curiosities and Esoterica - Not strictly maps related but an online atlas of the weird and wonderful that’s around the world. Punch in your home city or area and be amazed.

Know of any more that should be in my (not dead yet) RSS feed? The comments would be a good place to let me know, you know.

Photo Credits: pixn8tr and Justin Masterson on Flickr.
Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
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8
Jul 10

An Open Letter To Prospective Minicab Drivers

Since I started my new job, Terminal 5 at Heathrow has become close to a second home. This means I’ve been taking a lot of local minicabs to the airport early in the morning. The experience of frequent use of minicab services has been interesting, to say the least. With this in mind, I offer this up as a list of do’s and don’ts for anyone considering plying a trade behind the wheel of a 5 year old Toyota Avensis.

DO

Turn up on time; if I order a cab at 7.00 AM I expect it to arrive at 7.00 AM, not at 7.15 AM with a cheery “don’t worry, the roads are usually clear at this time of day”. They’re usually not.

Either knock gently on my front door to avoid waking the rest of the household or call me on my mobile when you’re outside; the controller took my mobile number for a reason when I made the booking.

Give me a receipt if I ask for one; lots of people travel to the airport on business and asking for a receipt shouldn’t be a foreign concept. Having a pen to write out the receipt is also helpful.

Take the fastest and more direct route to the passenger’s destination. Driving a route which describes 11 of the sides of a dodecahedron because “it’s a short cut” or because “my satnav told me so” isn’t going to be met with any other tip than “learn the Highway Code and your local area, in that order”.

Weekend with an iPhone 6: Mini cab

DON’T

Ask for help in programming your satnav en route to get you to Heathrow. It’s one of the most popular destinations around this area. It’s a big airport with 5 terminals and lots of planes. If you memorise the route to just one of the local destinations, this should be the one.

Drive the wrong way down a one way street, attempt to do a 37 point turn in the middle of the street with an increasingly enraged queue of cars behind you and then attempt to blame it on the local council because you didn’t notice the two, very large, No Entry signs at the end of the street. The fact that all the cars on the road are parked in the opposite direction to your direction of travel should be considered a significant hint.

Run the meter in the vain attempt to charge me more than the fixed price quote that I’ve already obtained from your controller the night before. Heathrow Terminal 5 is £20.00 from my house; attempts to charge me £35.00 from the meter will be met with a £20.00 note and utter derision on my part.

Don’t attempt to argue with me that my house isn’t in the neighbourhood I mentioned when I made the booking; I’ve been living here 10 years and all of my neighbours plus the Royal Mail are in agreement as to which neighbourhood we’re in. The fact that it’s also written in large red letters on the street name signs is also a clue. Having said that, if you miss the large red No Entry signs at the end of the road, you’ll probably miss the large red letters on the street name signs.

Jump red traffic lights on the way to the airport. Even more so, don’t jump red traffic lights and when I point out that you’ve jumped a red traffic light, stop the cab in the middle of the road, reverse into the oncoming traffic and try to argue that the light really wasn’t red when you jumped it. The presence of other driver gesticulating violently through their rolled down windows with the elbows jammed onto the car horn might also be considered a contextual clue.

Turn right on a no right turn junction because “you know a short cut”. Even more so, don’t turn right on a no right turn junction, jumping a red traffic light into the bargain and in doing so cut across the path of three lanes of fast moving traffic which misses colliding with the passenger side of the car by a fraction of a millimeter. I’m liable to get irate under these circumstances.

Photo Credits: pixelthing on Flickr.
Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
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