My name is not Lain it is Iain. India Alpha India November not Lima Alpha India November.

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The command: snapdrive storage list -all

The error message displayed to the user: Status call to SDU daemon failed

The error hidden in the Snapdrive trace log: Fatal error: Assertion detected in production code: ../sbl/StorageOperation.cpp:182: Test ‘osAssistants.size() == 1′ failed

The actual problem: /etc/redhat-release contains the string CentOS not Red Hat.

Driving to Maidenhead was a Good Idea (being code for A Really Bad Idea) and was reasonably Fun (being code for Nightmarish). Nevertheless I’m going back to the train for the rest of this week.

It sucks having to be at the station at a certain time only for the train to be late and throw you off your schedule by thirty minutes but at least you don’t get run off the road by people on your outside deciding they want to turn off the roundabout in front of you, and you don’t have to park your car on the M25 for an hour.

The numbers, though, are not so good. I drove to Maidenhead and back twice and filled up once. Assuming I did drive every day that would work out to about three fillups per week which would cost me about £90. A weekly season ticket on the train is £138.

I went to the ticket office tonight and was told that since I only want to travel tomorrow, Thursday and Friday (for reasons outside the scope of this document I will not be traveling next week) it would actually be cheaper to buy three full-price return tickets at £40 each.

Doing the Right Thing and using public transport is up to twice as expensive as driving. Now I’m a big fan of public transport (in other countries) and my car is unsuited to long journeys but let’s assume I owned a different vehicle. Why would I not drive when

• I’m not tied to someone else’s schedule
• I’m guaranteed a seat
• I don’t have to sit with Other People
• It’s an hour quicker
• And it’s half the price

Note that this is simply a gratuitous rant. Of course I don’t honestly believe that I’m the first person to notice that the UK’s transport infrastructure is rutterly ubbish. I did live in Lyon and Hong Kong, remember.

Footnote: The line above was supposed to read utterly rubbish but I liked my typo so much I’m keeping it in.

Do you ask what is the MPH of this car?

Do you ask what Mbps of this network?

Do you ask what is the joules per coulomb of this lightbulb?

No.

So why do you insist on asking what is the FPS of this game?

The following type of grammatical error is one which never ceases to upset me.

Today I received a survey email from the iTunes Store. Of course I’m not going to respond to it but I did at least read the first paragraph.

As a valued customer, your opinion is important to us.

My opinion is not a customer of the iTunes Store, much less a valued one.

I received a letter in the post from my bank. It came on such awful quality paper that it looked like someone had faxed a letterhead to himself and used the printout for the letter.

There was no date and no reference number. The text said that Someone had tried to contact me regarding my account; no mention of why. It was "signed" with a circle and a wavy line, with Customer Services printed underneath.

I called up the branch to a) ask what they wanted and b) complain about the way they tried to correspond with me. I was told my account was fine and they don’t know why the letter was sent.