Strange weather this evening: I spent the day time banking and went home to make something to eat before heading over to my other workplace but whilst I was cooking a hailstorm with thunder and lightning took place. When I went outside the walkweays and pavements were covered in so much ice and slush that my trainers became soaked very quickly. Whilst I was at work it started snowing...& I listened to radio reports of nsowy conditions across Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and London. It is only 13 degrees celsius in my bedroom right now. I wasn't planning to put my central heating on until November...but if it gets any colder during the next 72 hours I will put it on sooner methinks: temperatures below 12 degrees can cause cardiac health problems.

On LBC Radio Jim Davis is hosting this week's overnight shows and tonight he is talking about a new website called seety.co.uk where you can check out street views for streets across Central London. They have beaten google maps to providing street views of London. I've established that my whole area was filmed during the summer of 2007: I can tell this from various buildings under construction -- the adverts on the sides of London buses for last year's Harry Potter film and Jim mentioned Bourne Ultimatum. I also spotted a witness appeal board fro a crime I know happened in a particular street last year. Jim read out an email I wrote about this (although he seemed to confuse my link to the very detailed SacBee Crime Maps and my mention of Boris Johnson's London Crime Maps.

More surfing on Seety: you can see from the position of the sun what time of day the streets were filmed - for instance  - it is late-ish in the afternoon when the sun appeas over the N1 hopping centre as viwed from Islington High Street/Upper Street. Petrol at the Tesco Express garage on Camden Road was 95.9 pence per litre - which it was last summer. I've just travelled up to the Holloway and encountered messages that say "sorry this position is not mapped yet". Presumably it will be, in the near future. In conversation with some callers Jim uncovered some concerns: satellite mapping may help pony and horse thieves locate their pray: however - the countryside is less likely to be covered in such detail - and you can spot animals when driving along country lanes or travelling by train. The pedestrians I've come across sem to have their faces pixellated: the privacy policy explains how seety try to keep a balance between high enough resolution to make the site usable but low enough to protect the privacy of passer-by. One caller (Nadia from Pimlico) talked about a more worrying aspect of society these days - laws recently introduced that mean people with mental health issues like personality disorders can be arrested if they are thought likely to be a suicide risk.
 
There are concerns about the direction society is going: new technology always seems to have pros and cons. Who knows where the march for what we think as progress will lead us?