Not breakin' the law, breakin' the law
A colleague at work is quite a committed Christian, and gave up booze for Lent. I wondered what I'd be able to give up for forty days and nights. I don't drink or smoke. I did try to give up take-aways, but the missus wanted one, so that fell down within the first couple of days.

Whilst remonstrating with yet another cyclist who was attempting to run me and my daughter over whilst walking through the pedestrian tunnel to Pitville playground, the criminal in question said "Everybody breaks the law". Which led me to an interesting thought... what if people didn't? What if I gave up breaking the law for 40 days?

Could I actually manage to not break a single law for 40 days?

Well, two-and-a-bit weeks in (I started a week late), I'm doing reasonably well. It's remarkably easy to go about your life not breaking the law at all. I've actually been amazed at how easy it is.

One thing that has made not breaking the law much easier, is free software. In particular, the OpenOffice suite of Microsoft Office compatible wordprocessor, spreadsheet, presentation tool and such meant I could abandon my pirate copy of Microsoft Office 2000. I certainly couldn't justify spending two hundred odd quid buying an MS Office licence. As it turned out, I did actually own an original licence for it... but not the one I had actually installed.

The other main change has been audio. I have a lot of dubiously-sourced MP3 files, including a large library of Doctor Who audio plays. I like to listen to these in bed. Instead, I have switched to only those plays which I have recorded myself off the radio for my own personal use (legal). That's a much smaller library, and I have pretty much worked my way through it, and may instead revert to my library of Goon Show recordings, which being more than 50 years old are now public domain. If Big Finish drop their prices a bit more, or do weekly episodic subscriptions instead of monthly, I might pay for the new non-radio ones.

Other than those two things, obeying the letter of the law has been surprisingly simple. Driving at or below the speed limit didn't seem to make much difference to my arrival times, nor did it seem to make the journey much longer nor more irritating. It became apparent that the main timesink for car journies was traffic jams, not the free-flowing high-speed bits in between.

Watching only TV that I'd recorded using Sky Plus or that I owned on DVD, instead of torrents of episodes ripped from US broadcasts, has been fine. I don't hack subscription telly smartcards anymore like I used to, I pay a subscription and have a TV licence, so that's fine.

One point where I've been unclear on the law is format-shifting. For example, I own a lot of pretty specialised industrial music CDs that I've bought over the last twenty years. It used to be illegal to convert CDs to MP3s in the UK even if you owned the CDs yourself and never gave the MP3s to anyone else. This has always been legal in the USA. In early 2008, a lot of stories indicated that format-shifting was to be imminently legalised in the UK but I haven't heard much about it since. If it's still illegal, then I've failed there. I don't like using original CDs in the car, as they get scratched and become unplayable, and I'd rather go without music at all than have to cart around an enormous personal CD player. I probably could get by with an old-style cassette walkman (I still own a decent autoreverse one) and my meagre but sufficient collection of original tapes.

Other instances of law-breaking have been so few that I can actually remember each instance:

Getting a tax disc for the new car which I bought for the wife. We'd arranged insurance the day before we bought it, so that was fine, but I collected the car (and the V20 form) at 5:30pm which meant that the post office was closed. So I drove it home with no tax disc. I then printed out the insurance document and took it, together with the V20 form, to the post office the moment it opened the next day (another journey without a tax disc). There, I was politely but firmly told that print-outs were not accepted, it had to be the original insurance certificate (quite how they'd notice, if I'd have had a colour laser printer, I have no idea, but that's by the by). Since the original document was "in the post", I was worried it'd be the middle of the next week before I could tax the car. As it turned out, by the time I'd driven home (untaxed) the postman had pushed the certificate through the front door, so I drove back to the post office (untaxed again) to obtain a tax disc. Quite a big fail there.

I accidentally reached well over 90mph on the motorway in the wife's new car. I put that down to simply not being familiar with a new car, and backed down to 70.

And that's it. It's been so little trouble that I'm going to try to continue the exercise indefinitely, and would recommend it to everyone.