I can forgive people writing my name as Ian. It’s the more common spelling and even if you know I use the variation you can instinctively write Ian, though admittedly I am significantly more forgiving of people who have never emailed or written to me before because they don’t have the correct spelling right there in front of them.

Lain, however, is infuriating. If you are even considering writing Lain you must have seen the correct name written down otherwise there’s no possible way you’d make the mistake. Writing my name as Lain tells me you aren’t paying me the simple courtesy of even noticing whom you are addressing.

The only way I can even imagine that you’d get it wrong is if you notice that a lowercase lima and an uppercase India may look similar or even identical in some fonts.

OK, fine. Let’s run with that. So you think that I write my forename all in lowercase, even though I write my surname with a leading capital, like every other English speaker. And since we already established that you must have seen other correspondence from me you must also have failed to notice that I also obey the usual rules of grammar in all my writing. Yet for some reason I write a lowercase l at the start of my name and for some other reason my email address has a lowercase i right where the l would have gone?

Besides, if you think Iain is an unusual name, just how many people called Lain do you know?

I didn’t think so.

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.

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 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?

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.

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.