Alain Fontaine’s Jabberbox

Yes, polite is right!

Based on the famous (?) Lotus one-liner “light is right”, I thought I’d write up a manifesto of the english gentleman Lotus driver.

1. Racing is for racetracks. Never fall into anyone’s trap to make you race them on the public road. Anyway – you know who’d win! If someone really insists, kindly invite them to your next track-day.
2. Speeding in sensible areas like cities or smaller B-roads, is absolute no-go. Always respect the speed limitations, especially on spots marked 50 or 70 km/h. I’ve been driving for 18 years and never got fined for speeding in sensible spots – I actually simply never did!
3. People often look in awe at your car because they don’t see that many around; some, especially kids, will wink and scream as you drive by. Flash your headlights twice and politely wink back at them with a smile, they’ll appreciate!
4. Always stop at the pedestrian crossing to let that old lady walk over; smile and show her a very visible sign with your hand to indicate that it’s a pleasure for you to stop your car for her. Hey – more people might actually have time to look at your beauty in detail !
5. In dense traffic with changing lanes, make place for others to drive in just in front of you. You wouldn’t want to go head to head with that other big, old, ugly car anyway, would you?
6. When driving back home late at night, gently roll through your block or village in 4th gear at low speed, making as little noise as possible. Your neighbours want to know you as the nice, gentleman sportscar driver, not as the rowdy who wakes them up in the middle of the night, landing in 2nd gear, 8500 rpm, and a stage 3 exhaust – screaming like a jetplane. What’s more – no engine on earth would like a brutal 8500 rpm to immediate engine shut-down process.
7. Talking about neighbours – if they’ve got young kids, invite them to the party when you clean your car. They’ll have a great story to tell next day in school, and you’ll have some helping hands. Just keep an eye on those hands though..
8. If someone keeps hammering you with questions about your car, simply offer them to be the driver for 10 minutes, if they like. I know most people don’t let others drive their Lotus, but the experience I’ve made is very positive, as long as you are the copilot. For most, the driving experience is so new and uncommon that they barely dare hitting the accelerator, but you’ll have made their day. If you really don’t want (or can’t because of insurance) anyone else to drive your Lotus, offer them to sit behind the steering wheel to at least share the feeling.
9. Talking about questions – one of the first questions I’m being asked is “How much horsepower?”, or something like that. I always answer that, with a Lotus, the right question would be “How much weight?”. A very good way to get them introduced to the “Light is right” concept… and maybe transform them into future Lotus owners.

And that closes the circle. Actually, you’ll have noticed that being polite is also very protective for yourself and your car. Win-Win !

Now, keep the comments flowing! How do you culture your gentleman driving?

Traveling to the 2010 PHP Forum in Paris, I’m sitting in on of the TGV’s (the high speed trains going from Luxembourg to Paris, for instance) and I was hoping to be able to connect to the Internet wirelessly, especially as I’m traveling 1st class. Unfortunately, and albeit I’ve been reading all over the Internet that all TGV trains in the east of France should have WIFI on board, there’s no sign of it.

I do have an “unknown” WIFI network that seems to be at a constant 80 to 90 percent signal strength, but any attempt to connect to it fails, as I don’t even know the correct SSID to use. My last hope is to catch one of the SNCF employees in the train and try to get some meaningful information from them.

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For easter, I thought I would get myself the new Lotus Eggxige …

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The famous Lotus name could return to Formula One racing next season if UK Formula Three team Litespeed have their entry for the 2010 championship accepted by the FIA next week.

via The Official Formula 1 Website.

… or “Why you should pay attention to your chemistry teacher”.

A couple of days ago, a friend and co-worker of mine had a big problem. She mistook classic dish washing soap (the classically green liquid) to be special soap for the dishwasher, and put a pretty hefty dose of this stuff into her dishwasher, to wash the dishes. Hum.

The result looked somewhat like this, and her kitchen was full with foam because the stuff just kept flowing out of the machine :

H E L P  !!!

Then I remembered something that was buried deeply into a part of my brain that I didn’t use for years. Soap and oil , saponification , hmmm YES that should work! You use soap to get rid of your oil stains, then you can also use oil to get rid of too much soap. Or the foam thereof. Yes!

The magic recipe: put 10 to 20 cl of olive oil into the dishwasher full of foam, and have it run a quick-clean cycle.

The oil and soap will nicely bind together, and there we go – no more foam soap monster ! This should also work with any other oil… please avoid motor oil though

Happy dishwashing.

I just found one more personal reason not to fly with RyanAir again :

Ryanair Staff Give WordPress some lovin’

Yesterday, we launched our new corporate identity and rehauled website for my web agency VAlain SA. After 4 years of a relative inactivity in terms of image, this new identity was more than needed. The company, although still pretty small, is continuing to grow and expand. We have hired a second sales person who will start in the middle of march and plan to recruit one or two more people for the production team in the coming months.

VAlain SA Web Agency

My poor Bailey fell into our lake today – he slipped on the frozen border and wasn’t very happy about the 0 °C water

Anyway, he’s a good dog!

Urban Dictionary: mental masturbation.

Another example: discussing whether you shoulduse DISTINCT or GROUP BY in an SQL query to find uniques… it depends on the situation of course, but we had one where it’s the same, or “kif-kif” as they say in France.

Safe containing €170,000 sent to be scrapped

Workers tasked with scrapping a safe at a steel plant in Hennigsdorf near Berlin couldn’t believe their eyes when euro bills floated towards them. The Berlin Postbank had accidently sent a safe containing 170,000 euros in cash to be scrapped.

via Young Germany: Safe containing €170,000 sent to be scrapped.