Despite only having sent 5 messages (four to subscribe to some high-volume mailing lists, and one trying to bypass an upload limit on another webmail service), Gmail are throwing invites at me. I have seven, so shout if you want one.

I’ve been using gmail only for those mailing lists – the threading is useful but frankly not all that great. I’m still waiting for a compelling reason to use it for all my email, and Google are racing against me getting my home computer reattached to the intarweb thingy – 1Gb limit? Pah, meet my 80Gb hard drive…

My new favourite hobby on the bus is to watch the CCTV images that are relayed to screens around the shiny new double deckers on my way into College. My favourite view is the dashboard cam (closely followed by the one at the back of the ground floor which lets you read whatever the person sitting below it is reading). The dashboard cam has an overlay indicating braking and indicators, and I guess makes the video system a bit of a black-box device for buses.

The pictures from the dashboard cam are reminiscent of police patrol cameras, and are the only ones specifically of external goings-on. But it’s notable how much of the exterior is caught by the interior cameras (9 or ten of them by my count) – and so, depending on your political leanings, count them as mobile street cameras bristling with “prying” eyes. I’ve heard on the radio that the police have used passing buses’ cameras to help solve crimes (although there was a recent case where a driver got stabbed while his bus was lacking film: it was being used to help with another enquiry). Will there ever be a time when a police foot patrol could consider diverting a passing bus to point its multitude of high resolution colour cameras towards an ongoing crime?

And is the use of the film properly supervised? I’m not a civil liberties nut, but I sure as hell don’t trust David Blunkett – the ultimate symbol of a big-brother authoritarian, who really, really shouldn’t be home secretary. Has he managed to bollocks up the privacy rules on CCTV yet, in the same way he’s trying to ride roughshod over every other piece of privacy laws in the country?

Tomorrow morning (the 24th) I start work. Next month (on, coincidently, the 24th), someone else moves into the room I’m staying in. Hopefully I’ll get paid next college payday (on, surprisingly, the 24th), but they don’t seem to be too good at getting people on the payroll. It’s going to be an interesting month…

So I’m spending my last day of my “year-and-a-bit out” tidying up loose ends, negiotiating with my bank, doing the washing, and that kind of thing. Hopefully both the job and the flat-hunting go as well as my strongarm negiotiating of a new overdraft went this afternoon!

Mr Brown writes:

Once they start tracking out entire lives, I guess they could then start weighting the lottery according to how wonderful a person you were.

Aha, finally a good argument for state monitoring of the entire populace! I knew there would be one benefit, but I hadn’t yet found it . More importantly, I might then be tempted to play the lottery…

The official olympic website has an asshat linking policy (homage, via). Whoops, I just broke Rule A by not linking to the page using FRIGGIN CAPITALS. At first glance, the site looks quite good, but for me to say that they have better weather info than the BBC, I’ve just broken so many of the rules. And no, I don’t agree with the general terms and conditions – by linking to the site, I’m linking to it, not negotiating a contract – I’m perfectly content that any attempts to prosecute me for breach of contract for using the text “weather info” in the link would be laughed straight out of court. So why do they (and so many other websites) even bother with linking policies?

W00t!, as they say – I’m sure you can all guess which organisation I’m now working for. Well, provisional on HR sorting out all the paperwork…