Sometimes I come back to diagrams I’ve drawn as part of the day job, and they’re just a bunch of boxes and lines…
What’s this all about then?
In my recent mini-rant about the snow breaking our trains, I said that the train company didn’t even bother apologising for not running any trains. I was wrong - they did apologise via their website, here.
They’re even offering some sort of compensation for season ticket holders, as long as you still have the ticket that was valid at the time - another reason to always ask the nice man at the station if you can hold onto your old ticket when buying a renewal… The form to fill in if you want compensation is here.
So, sorry to Southeastern for saying you didn’t apologise. Your spokeswoman could probably still do with a spot of media training though…
Akismet is really, really good. Here’s a nice little picture to show how much work it does on my little blog, with no input from me:
You may have missed it, but there was a bit of a nip in the air last week - Garry has already mentioned the effect it has on the, shall we say, “intellectually challenged” amongst us. I was amused by the BBC’s footage of people insisting on walking down the icy bit of the steps outside Waterloo Station - for pity’s sake, use your eyes!
As it was the first time my commute to London had been affected by cold weather I was mildly surprised by the train company’s attitude: “It’s snowing, we’re not running any trains. kthxbye!”. Not a hint of “We’d like to apologise for any inconvenience this will cause” or anything similar, just a stark “no trains today” announcement. Now, I can usually work from home if need be, but I’m guessing I’m still in the minority there. Approximately 143,000 people commute into London on Southeasern Railways trains every day (it says here), and every one of those people was inconvenienced in one way or another on Monday and Tuesday.
Obviously, those of us who pay in advance for our train tickets don’t get any recompense for paying for something that didn’t actually exist - there’s some customer charter somewhere that says that because I pay *cough* pounds a month for my ticket I have fewer rights than someone who only travels occasionally. I’ve never quite understood that…
I don’t think they could or should have done anything different, it’s just the way they act as if we should think ourselves lucky if they actually provide the service we pay through the nose for. Just one little sentence with the word ‘apologise’ or ’sorry’ in it would have gone a long way for this particular commuter.
With thanks to neilalderney123 at Flickr for the photo - I was far too warm and cosy at home to venture out with the camera!
Nick’s Gorrilas photo (‘Tiff’ on Flickr) has been featured in The Daily Mail and The Express, and on the Daily Mail’s website. Well done Nick - it is a fantastic photo 
Don’t forget the little people when you’re rich and famous, will you?
EDIT: And yes, it’s on the Express’s website now too.
I have just sat with my good lady wife whilst she added a veritable forest of content to the Drupal installation we’ve been procrastinating about for ages. It’s cool to see the site starting to take shape and even cooler to see Mary tapping away at HTML with the odd pause and question like: “so the ending tag has a slash, right?”.
I think I may need to throw a few spanners in the works. She’s picking it up way too easily, and at this rate she’ll start wondering whether this web stuff is difficult at all!
Happy new year everyone!
One of the only changes you should notice since I upgraded Fretnoise.com to WordPress 2.7 is the weird icon thingies next to your comments. These are called “Gravatars”, which comes from “Globally Recognised Avatars”. Basically, if you go and register at gravatar.com then whenever you use your email address whilst commenting on a Gravatar-enabled blog then your chosen picture will appear next to your comment. If you don’t register with gravatar.com, then you get a nice interpretation of your email address / IP address in the form of a little pattern (called an “Identicon”) instead.
The important thing to note is that although the image is retrieved (if you’ve signed up) or generated (if you haven’t) based on your email or IP address, those private bits of information don’t appear on this site. The images are retrieved (or generated) based on a one-way hash of your address which, by its nature, is very very difficult to reverse. For example, my gravatar image is requested via the following url:
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/4e84e74a1cba73457b2d3d83e2034f38?d=identicon
(note that my email address isn’t in that url)
The Identicons for non-registered commenters are requested from the same place, but with a different unique identifier, like this :
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/12341234123412341234123412341234?d=identicon
I hope that clears that up
Here’s another (somewhat more geeky) explanation.
I always think that if you’re going to make a major change to your life, you might as well make two at the same time. Last year, Mary and I got married in March, and moved into our new house in July. This year, we had our baby in June, and I decided that would be the best time in the world to start a new job which meant quadrupling my journey time. Genius. It does have its upsides - I’m a developer who’s allowed to develop nowadays, and the 90 minutes of uninterrupted train time do have their uses if you’re the kind of person who can sleep on a train, and your nighttimes are being punctuated by nocturnal dummy hunts.
The downsides are plenty though, and I’m not even counting the obvious ones about being away from home, missing the family, etc etc. Let’s start with the biggest problem every commuter encounters: other commuters. I think there’s enough raw material here for a few posts, so for this one I’m just going to concentrate on one small subsection of my fellow commuters: the Phone People.
The Phone People are those people who spend every spare penny of their wage on a top rate mobile phone contract, and feel obliged to use every one of their 4,5001 ‘free’ minutes every month. They’re the ones who board the train with the phone pinned to their ear, and are still there, spouting nothing into it 90 minutes later when I get off. They speak about nothing, to everybody in their phonebook. There’s a girl who gets on my train in the evenings who starts planning what she’s going to wear at the weekend on Tuesday. And when she’s finished telling friend 1 that it’s going to be the sparkly gold top with the big wide belt, we have to listen as she tells friend 2 that it’s going to be the sparkly gold top with the big wide belt. And then friend 3. And then friends 4, 5 and 6. And then her (obviously) long-suffering boyfriend. She probably continues, but by this point in the journey I, along with most of the rest of the carriage, have given up trying to sleep or read and have donned headphones in an attempt to block out her inanity. I wouldn’t be surprised if she goes on to inform the emergency services of her intended wardrobe for the weekend so that they can stock up on the right kind of replacement heels…
I’ve digressed slightly and got a little bit personal. If you recognise yourself from that description, then please, for the love of everything that is good and right, shut up when you’re on the train… Thanks.
Back to the point, the Phone People are just pure irritation. I think the train companies should introduce something like ‘Annoyance Free’ carriages, where carrying a non-silent phone would be grounds for some serious tutting, and speaking into it would get you turfed out at the next station. I really do think that on a 12-carriage train, they’d need about 11 ‘Annoyance Free’ carriages.
Obviously, for this to work, you need someone to judge what is annoying and what isn’t. I’d gladly give up some of my train time to make the world a better, quieter place…
1 4,500 minutes. Strangely enough, 4,500 minutes is about the amount of time I spend travelling home from London in one month. I reckon most Phone People must have contracts that mean that they have to spend at least that long on the phone. I mean, they must also use the phone when I’m not within earshot, right?
