Octopodial Chrome

Daring Fireball points out that top-posting in emails is rude. That is, you should put your reply after whatever it is you are replying to. One of my brothers enver does this, and it’s making me reconsider my will…

Paris now has bike rental kiosks spaced 300 yards apart throughout the city. It’s free for the first half-hour of riding (enough to go about 6 miles), one euro for the next half-hour, two for the third half-hour and so on; there’s also an annual fee of €29, with one-day and one-week fees. One can check bike availability with a mobile phone or on the web. This is really cool, and could potentially revolutionise transport in that city, if they can adequately deal with vandalism and theft. A Flickr user has pictures of the kiosks, which are quite stylish.

Adobe have a really cool web colour selector freely available. Just pick a base colour and a rule to use, and it will derive other colours to use (I used a similar free tool to pick the colours for this blog). Requires Flash, but worthwhile nonetheless.

Now here’s a remarkable video. A soccer fan runs across the field waving a banner, and police run up to arrest him. Fair enough so far. But they start to beat him repeatedly. One of the players gets annoyed at this, and head-kicks a cop. Then the video skips ahead, where fans and players are all over the field, beating and kicking the police and driving them away. It’s a glorious blow against police brutality!

I’ll note that the cops in the video have the absurd pseudo-military haircuts one expects from the worst sort of policeman—the sort who is in a police force because no military would take him. It fits exactly with my idea of the sort of cop who’d be needlessly brutal: a small man with a power complex.

Not all cops are bad; no doubt there are many who actually want to do good, prosecute real crimes and apprehend real criminals. It’s even conceivable that the vast majority are good and decent. But there are far, far too many who are rotten.