The disordered mad of a brain man

FLAC – 'Free Lossless Audio Codec' – is a way of making sound files smaller without losing any of the content (unlike, say, MP3 which throws away information to help reduce the size in the hope that you can't hear the difference…)

Because it's lossless, it's a favourite of a website for people who tape concerts and then share the results.

One such concert was the one Kraftwerk played at Tribal Gathering a few years ago: the BBC broadcast part of it live.

Thanks to looking for something else, I can now say that the .flac file containing Trans Europe Express has, somewhere inside, the bytes 70 61 73 74 61 (in hex), or, in ASCII, 'pasta'.

Coming up to a set of traffic lights, this hideous blue box of a three-door hatchback zooms past, a bit too close for my liking. It's a G-reg (Americans: about fifteen years old) with custom exhaust and various other 'vroom-vroom' accessories.

As there's a queue and the lights are still on red, the idiot has to stop quickly.

I overtake, get to the head of the queue and turn right then left onto a long straight road… with speed bumps of the 'island' or 'lozenge' type: along the road there are about a dozen rows of them across the road, with gaps in between.

The gaps mean a) cyclists aren't bothered by them and b) if you're in a car and travel carefully, you can go over them with minimal bumping about.

Just as I'm going through the first set, along comes Mr Hideous – BUmp buMP – ha! Because I'm in the gap, he "has" to go over them. (Of course, he could, you know, slow down, but…)

And a combination of someone in a Merc not wanting to damage his suspension/underside, plus some accurate positioning by yours truly, means that this is repeated on every single set. A-ha ha ha ha…