Over-reaction

I had my first real encounter with road rage today.

I parked the car in Porirua's Megacentre, next to a silver four-wheel drive, which, being a large vehicle parked in a space designed for a regular-size car, didn't leave a lot of room. I managed to get out without my door touching the other car, but Juliette's door caught a gust of wind as she got out, and it tapped the other car.

Next thing we know, a rather portly Pom (judging from his accent), came round from the driver's side and -- before even looking to see where our door touched the side of his car -- started ranting about our carelessness. I told him there was no damage done, and thought he'd go away, but no. He wandered round to between the cars, pointed at a spot completely indistinguishable from the rest of the door, and ranted about red paint on his door. When I asked him to point it out, he couldn't, so he then asked about the flecks of silver paint on the edge of my door. A close examination showed it was where paint from my car had come away, and was showing the underlying body work. I pointed this out to him, and he stomped off, muttering.

I thought that was the end of it, but he comes back round and declares, "People like you should be shot!" And stomped off again. Then comes back (he must have had a list or something) and asked if I'd gotten my driver licence in the lottery. Finally, he went back to his car and drove to a different parking spot (incidentally, parking closer to another car than I had parked to his).

We're eally quite perplexed about how somebody can completely over-react like that. I've had worse dings where the car was actually moving -- both mine and the other drivers' fault -- where everyone was quite civil, and quick to dismiss any superficial damage (if any). But this guy went completely off his nut over a minor little tap -- where absolutely no damage was done to either car. Weird.

Happy New Year!

The new year is upon us, whether you'll call it "twenty ten" or "two thousand ten".

Pity it had to get off to such a rocky start: the neighbours across the road decided to ring in the new year with fireworks. One or two would be okay, but they went for twenty minutes. And their kids would yell "Happy new year!" at anybody and everybody they saw.

And right as we're trying to get Logan to go to sleep. Grrr....

Really good article over on Wired about the fall of 3D Realms.

Currently playing: Battlefield: Bad Company (Xbox), Warhammer: Mark of Chaos (PC).

This post is a day late...

... but that's to be expected, since I've had about 8 hours sleep in the past 67 hours.

Any how, the news: our son Logan was born at 1:30 am, 17 November, 24 days earlier than his due date. Full details are here.

YES!!!!!!!!

We're in!

Christmas Coffees

Starbucks have brought back their Christmas-themed coffees! The only time I ever get anything other than a hazelnut latte! Had a yummy dark cherry mocha today -- the last time I had one of these was just after visiting the Jorvik Viking Centre in York last year.