I'd love to meet the designer of the American traffic system. He (I'm guessing it was a He) was a rather odd sort, by all accounts. Back in sensible Britain, when you press the button on the Pelican Crossing (see? We even have a cute name for it), you expect two things to happen. One, cars will honour the red light and stop before they enter the crossing space. Two, you will eventually see the little green man telling you that it's safe to walk across the road. Obviously, over here, these two events are mutually exclusive. This leaves the pedestrian with a dilemma; should they risk life and limb by crossing whilst the red hand is present, or should they wait for five minutes, give up, and then risk being run over by the typical American's idea of a family car?

From that, you'd be right to deduce that I did some walking today; in fact I walked to a different city. Sounds impressive, but it's only a mile away from the centre of Chapel Hill. The temperature dropped to a level at which I felt I could make it there and back without needing to stop and die on the way, and I felt it was probably a good idea to get a feel for the area, considering I have to walk there and back for the upcoming Sleater-Kinney concert. Of course, when I get back to my hall, I remember that I meant to deposit my traveller's cheques into the bank today, so I'd been walking around with $1,500 all day. I will get rid of them tomorrow, promise...

People asked me questions today. And I could answer them. Which perked me up a bit, as after spending the weekend locked in my room (strangely, I can't seem to find hermit costume sellers on-line), I was feeling a little down. Being able to do something useful cheers me up somewhat. We still don't have an office; the people who are there are waiting to move into another room, and the people there are waiting on somebody else, and so on. Strange really; I didn't think situations like this ever arose outside of bad Frasier episodes.

I'm a bad person; I keep going back to this page, and finding something exciting each time I visit. You can connect one to an ethernet socket and use it as a base station! Give wireless to all your friends! Somebody take it away before I do bad things with my credit cards!

I spent a lot of the weekend trying (and failing) to get TV capturing to work successfully on my shiny new 8500DV (it has already killed Windows; Linux so far is resisiting), so I've been watching a little more television. Transformers: Armada premiered on Friday with an hour-and-a-half movie. The most impressive thing about it was just how little happened in that ninety minutes; three kids find some Transformers; other Transformers arrive and try to take them back. We don't even see any robots until around the twenty-two minute mark, which defeats the point of a show that contains BigGiantDeathRobots. The return to cel-based animation hasn't brought any big improvements - the drawings are less detailed than the orignal 1984 series, and action scenes are laughable, as they try to create an impression of movement by dragging a background across the screen, just like in Pokemon. The overall impression is of a show that was completed in a hurry, and it suffers greatly. There's a few interesting ideas (Prime's rather vague statment about the Autobots' treatment of the Mini-Cons suggests that there's more ambiguity here than in the original series, but we'll have to wait to see if anything is done with this), but it's not a great start.

Tomorrow - the RIAA, why I like Law & Order, and why you haven't seen any pictures yet..