I live in the county also, and I noticed that my commute was actually better than usual. Normally, the lights are so poorly timed on my route (which is with rush hour traffic) that timing them randomly would be an improvement. The timing is so bad that I actually attribute it to malice, or having some priority other than having traffic flow smoothly. When the predominant flow of traffic catches every red light, when there are major intersections with long backups for one road and no traffic on the other (long gone through the mistimed green), it's beyond incompetence. Hopefully this event shakes things up enough to get the system fixed, but I doubt it.

I did not spell "uv" wrong. The five vowels:

A E I O U

Take the following sounds:

Ah Eh EE Oh OO

This is in accordance with the usage of the vowels in other European languages, such as Spanish or Italian. Thus, the word "of" would be spelled "ov". "uv" would rhyme with "move"

Admittedly, some work would need to be done to refine the phonetic spelling system and to promote adoption and education of the new system. I figure in a generation or two we might be able to iron out these regional differences. Of course, some will resist these changes: if we can get the NSA involved to monitor SMS and internet usage and introduce FCC regulations requiring broadcasters and recording artists to always spell and pronounce things correctly, and institute a new bureau of ruthless and violent enforcement, it should be doable. The back-catalogue of music and literature will have to be either destroyed or republished, and owning old editions will have to be criminalized. It'd probably be a good idea to identify uncooperative parents and separate them from their children, so we can properly institutionalize them using the new system.

Oh, and we'll have to invade England, I think - this nonsense about English English being the authoritative version has got to stop. If we play our political cards right and keep anybody else from getting involved it should be a fairly straightforward war without too much loss of life. We may have to use a few tactical nuclear weapons, but I think once we've established a willingness to use them (say, on a minor city) the Brits will know we mean business. One Britain is down I think it should be relatively easy to make Canada fall in line. Australians and New Zealanders might be a bit of a challenge since they're so well known for their weird accents - we could institute a temporary cultural embargo, that should prevent contamination until we're ready to deal with them.

In the end it'll all be worth it, though, 'cause we'll be able to use the "Don't call me Shirley" joke in writing and it will work properly. Really, all manner of homonym-based jokes will finally be open to use in writing. It will usher in a new golden age of literature.

Last.fm is NOT free. Last.fm is 3 GBP per month, no discounts for longer subscriptions. Sure you could use some of it functionality free-of-charge but the best bits (loved tracks, playlists) require payment (http://www.last.fm/subscribe)

I thought Java WAS a standard, but many pages with a Java plugin for log-on will just not work

Get a Sun JVM. If it will not work too then I believe the problem is not related to MS at all but to the bad quality of coding.