I've written before about how I feel that using the train for my daily commute is safer than going by car.
I may have to change my mind.
The reason for this was an incident that happened a couple of days ago.
Once you've been commuting for some time you get into the habit of sitting in a certain carriage in or near a particular seat; I'm no exception - last carriage, seat facing forward.
I've recently been joined by a group of Italian woman, one of whom likes living dangerously.
Now, before I start, I need to describe the commuting experience. The West Coast line, of which the Brum to Rugby stretch is part, is one of the newer lines, designed for High Speed Trains (in English terms that means 125mph). However, they still haven't got to the quality of track of the continental HSTs. There was recently a program where they had a journalist sitting in a German HST with a glass of wine sitting in front of him - hardly a ripple on the surface of the wine. Do that on an English train and it's floor mop time.
So, the ride isn't particularly smooth. Normally this isn't a problem; with typical british ingenuity drinks are supplied with lids, or sold in bottles or cans.
It is a problem if you're going to do your makeup.
Now, before you get all republican on me - I don't wear the stuff. The Italian girls, on the other hand, do.
It's also clear that they are in such a rush to get up in the morning that they have to do their makeup on the train.
So, out comes the mirrors, the powders, the lipstick and all the other stuff. And here is when things get interesting.
Putting lipstick on when travelling on a train is interesting, but not damaging. The carriage jolts, you merely have an artistic line drawn up your left nostril. It's when they start fiddling around their eyes that things look like they could get fun; first of all there's the mascara, with the possibilities of stabbing yourself with the brush. However, it a couple of days ago was when things started to get positively dangerous.
The girl sitting next to me started trimming her eyebrows.
With scissors.
I really must emphasise this. National Rail tracks are not perfect. At speed the train jiggers up and down and from side to side. James Bond would have loved a Martini made on the train. At some points they're still working on the track and when you go over points at speed the carriage rattles quite a bit.
So, she's clipping away at her eyebrows
With sharp scissors
On a train traveling at speed
on an uneven track.
All it needed was a good jolt and hey presto, eyeball on a stick.
Luckily she stopped before she did any further damage.
"Where's the danger to you, Bill?" I hear you ask
Well, I've mentioned that there is a group of them. They can't all fit into one block of seats so this girl was sitting next to me, talking excitedly to her friends in the seats in front.
and in that inimitable Italian fashion, gesticulating wildly
with some sharp scissors in her hand
I tell you, I could see myself arriving in Rugby with stab and slash wounds all over my face, probably with an eyeball stuffed in one ear.
"How did you get those interesting scars?", people would ask in the future
"I was scissor slashed by a small Italian girl", I would reply
and they wouldn't believe me.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Fight the flab
I've started going back to the gymn.
Self defense really. It was either make use of the xxxx squids I pay each month or buy a new set of trousers. Besides which, I was starting to get a bit puffed out just by walking up the ramp to the station. As for my weight - I've started measuring how light I am when I go to the gymn and I must be the only person to have 20kg iPod. It must be the iPod - I can't really weigh THAT much.
Before you start making comments about 'why don't you just go for a jog around your neighbourhood', I must point out that my neighbourhood is bounded on one side by a motorway (jogging on THAT would be exciting but brief) and on the other side by the type of area which could be rather nicely summed up as a muggers paradise. It's not that it's rough, it's just that the sight of a middle aged guy puffing his way round the alleyways must be an irrestitable invitation to try out your latest punchbag techniques
So, I go to the gymn - more expensive but supposedly safer.
I say 'supposedly'.
The gymn I go to is one of these whizz bang modern ones with the fancy cardiovascular exercise machines. You stand/sit on them, grab hold of the silver handles and start exercising; the machine then tells you what your heart rate is and if you have chosen to exercise to a particular heart rate, will adjust the level of difficulty to keep your heart rate below the required amount.
I realised how unfit I was when I got on the machine and it told me to slow down to reduce my heart rate to acceptable level - and I hadn't even started. It was probably the walk up the stairs that did it.
They're great fun, these machines; You get on them, program them for a 20 minute excercise, it asks you questions about how heavy you are and what your age is, you slap it around the chops for being so personal, then enter in the numbers, it sniggers and tells you that for that weight the acceptable heart rate is 0, you slap it again and it gives you a more reasonable figure of 135. You then set your iPod to 'play' and after about 5 minutes you drift off into a mindless limbo (which is pretty well near my normal state of mind anyway).
15 minutes later you drift back to reality only to discover that whilst you had drifted off you had been increasing your exercise speed and according to the machine your heart rate is over the limit for your age (in my case, that's about 155 - the heart rate that is, not my age). Still If it doesn't kill me I'm sure it's doing me good.
Mind you, some of the machines are lethal. The machine I usually go for is the ski trainer- the action involves feet and arms, is a bit like running on skis and is a gentle motion that doesn't require much brainpower. The machine to avoid is the classic running machine. This must be the subject of more law suits than the National Enquirer. If you don't keep to PRECISELY the right speed you ram into the control board at the front or rocket off the back. Any lapse in concentration has you lurching all over the shop trying to retain control of a set of limbs that have declared UDI and decided to go off on their separate ways, usually one heading for the front and the other for the back. To cap it all, the later machines can tilt up so you end up running uphill frantically trying to coordinate limbs, arms and torso to stay vertical and midway between painful crotch collisions and starship one backflips.
I don't use the running machines.
After a bit of cardiovascular suicide - sorry - exercise - there's the weight machines. These are usually modern day torture mechanisms that employ a system of ropes, pulleys and weights to cripple you. The system goes like this.
- You sit at the machine and realise that a dwarf or a giant was on the machine before you.
- You search for the adjustment lever
- You adjust the seat, trapping your fingers on the adjustment mechanism in the process.
- You look at the weight the previous person used.
- Either they're superman's relative or they're lying. You select a more realistic weight - 2 kg is my favourite
- You grab hold of the bars and push/pull/raise/lower
- You let go of the bars and massage your strained muscles.
- You halve the weight
- You grab hold of the bars and push/pull/raise/lower
- After 5 goes you stop, halve the weight again and then continue.
- You complete the required two cycles of 12 pushes/pulls/ raise /lower
- You get up off the machine, stagger 2 paces and fall over.
- You pretend to do 3 pressups, get to one and a half and give up.
- You go and have a shower
Even the showers are a bit of a challenge. Not for us these old fashioned taps - our showers are controlled by infra-red movement detectors. Wave your hand in front of the 'eye' and the shower starts. Wave it again and the shower stops. After a time the shower stops automatically.
Now I've already commented on the ability of technology to cock things up.
a) You get nicely lathered up, good bit of suds on your head, ream your ears out, face and eys covered in soap, shower switches off. You're left floundering around trying to find out where your switch is and doing a really good impresssion of 'the monster rises from the deep', and believe me, Bill sans clothes is not a sight you want to see after you've just had your lunch.
b) You finish showering, grab hold of your towel, swish it over your head to dry your back off, shower switches on again and gives the towel a nice thorough soaking
Even more fun is the challenge of getting back to your locker across a floor that is made of these patented non slip tiles that weren't tested in typical conditions and which have turned into a polar bear's skating paradise with all the water and soap on them. Almost as bad as the running machines for encouraging uncoordinated gymnastics
The advert for my gymn says 'Exercise for a full and active lifestyle'. What it should say is 'Only come here if your coordination is better than average and you're superbly fit'.
Still - it keeps the other customers entertained.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Sight's slow slide to senility
Try saying that with your mouth full
About five years ago I went to get to my eyes tested. 'You're an old git', the optician said.
Actually, I'm lying. What he said was that I was starting to suffer from Presbyopia.
For the benefit of my Anglican relatives, this is not a new variant on Presbyterians (although I have to say that some Presbyterians may have Presbyopia).
Presbyopia is when the lens of the eye starts to stiffen up with old age, and can no longer achieve its full focal length. The result is that you can no longer focus on things close to and so have to start reading stuff at arms length.
Now, this doesn't happen overnight, and presbyopia is a finite condition - the lens only stiffens up so much. My optician told me that it would take about five years to make the transition from young and lovely (in optical terms) to old and senile, and in the meantime, would I like some new glasses.
Glasses cost a bit, and I was faced with the prospect of a new set of glasses to manage a changing eyesight over a period of five years, so I went for a pair that would take me through the transition period - a half way house between myopic and presbyopic - neither one thing or t'other, as the Northerners would say.
So, five years are up, and I've just gone for a new set of glasses. Because I'm already short sighted (the technical term being 'myopic') I need glasses for both distance and near vision.
This gives me two choices.
1) Get two sets of glasses. This is a disaster in the making. Not only do you have to keep on swapping glasses, but you also have to find somewhere to put the second set. I can just see myself leaving the house early in the morning wearing my reading glasses and I wouldn't know the difference because I'm always a bit bleary eyed and half asleep anyway and would just put the fuzziness down to that pint or ten I had the night before. Or else I would put the other pair in my back pocket and sit on them or leave them on the train or something.
So I went for choice 2). Varifocals. This is a cunning bit of science where you get the best of both worlds - the upper half of the glasses focus on long distance, the lower half focus on short distance and then there is a smooth transition of focus from one to the other.
It sound's good, doesn't it? - you can have your cake and eat it
Except it doesn't quite work out like that. The first inkling of what's going to happen is when you are called in to have a lesson from the optician on how to wear your new glasses.
No it isn't put them on and use them.
The secret is, apparently, 'Nose and chin'.
Before you start wondering about how the nose and chin get involved with the eyes, let me explain.
The problem arises because of the gradually changing nature of the focus from top to bottom and the fact that grinding techniques (when applied to glasses) are limited on the shape that glasses can be ground to.
This means that although the right focal shape can be ground into the central vertical strip of the glasses, the sides can't be ground to the right shape.
Put simply, as long as you look straight ahead you're OK, but if you look out the side of your glasses you're screwed.
Which is why nose and chin comes into it. 'Point your nose at the thing that you want to look at, then adjust your chin so that the item comes into focus'.
Great. Not only are my eyes senile, I'm going to look senile because I'll be nodding my head up and down trying to get into the right focus
And I bet that you've spotted some of the flaws in this already.
You see, (or in my case, move nose, then chin, then you see), you don't look straight ahead all the time.
The first flaw became apparent when I drove. I now find that although items that are ahead are in perfect focus, items to the side (like when you look out of the side of your eyes to see if any cars are overtaking) are out of focus. And looking in the rear view mirror? I've spent a lifetime developing the technique of keeping facing directly ahead and quickly glancing at the mirror to see if anyone is behind me. Now I've got to nose and chin. And you have to look down to look at the rear view side mirror, which is in the 'reading' focal bit. So what used to be a relaxing drive has turned into an exercise of neck yoga
Looking down when walking is even more fun. Look down at steps - great, now they're out of focus because I'm now looking out through the reading bit of my glasses. Nose and chin again.
In fact, I've discovered a secret.
Those old people you see shambling along the street muttering to themselves and nodding their heads?
They're shambling because they can't focus on what's in front of them, they're muttering 'nose and chin' to remind themselves of what they need to do to see their feet and they're nodding their heads just to get the right part of their d**n varifocals into focus
I'm off to get my Zimmer Frame
About five years ago I went to get to my eyes tested. 'You're an old git', the optician said.
Actually, I'm lying. What he said was that I was starting to suffer from Presbyopia.
For the benefit of my Anglican relatives, this is not a new variant on Presbyterians (although I have to say that some Presbyterians may have Presbyopia).
Presbyopia is when the lens of the eye starts to stiffen up with old age, and can no longer achieve its full focal length. The result is that you can no longer focus on things close to and so have to start reading stuff at arms length.
Now, this doesn't happen overnight, and presbyopia is a finite condition - the lens only stiffens up so much. My optician told me that it would take about five years to make the transition from young and lovely (in optical terms) to old and senile, and in the meantime, would I like some new glasses.
Glasses cost a bit, and I was faced with the prospect of a new set of glasses to manage a changing eyesight over a period of five years, so I went for a pair that would take me through the transition period - a half way house between myopic and presbyopic - neither one thing or t'other, as the Northerners would say.
So, five years are up, and I've just gone for a new set of glasses. Because I'm already short sighted (the technical term being 'myopic') I need glasses for both distance and near vision.
This gives me two choices.
1) Get two sets of glasses. This is a disaster in the making. Not only do you have to keep on swapping glasses, but you also have to find somewhere to put the second set. I can just see myself leaving the house early in the morning wearing my reading glasses and I wouldn't know the difference because I'm always a bit bleary eyed and half asleep anyway and would just put the fuzziness down to that pint or ten I had the night before. Or else I would put the other pair in my back pocket and sit on them or leave them on the train or something.
So I went for choice 2). Varifocals. This is a cunning bit of science where you get the best of both worlds - the upper half of the glasses focus on long distance, the lower half focus on short distance and then there is a smooth transition of focus from one to the other.
It sound's good, doesn't it? - you can have your cake and eat it
Except it doesn't quite work out like that. The first inkling of what's going to happen is when you are called in to have a lesson from the optician on how to wear your new glasses.
No it isn't put them on and use them.
The secret is, apparently, 'Nose and chin'.
Before you start wondering about how the nose and chin get involved with the eyes, let me explain.
The problem arises because of the gradually changing nature of the focus from top to bottom and the fact that grinding techniques (when applied to glasses) are limited on the shape that glasses can be ground to.
This means that although the right focal shape can be ground into the central vertical strip of the glasses, the sides can't be ground to the right shape.
Put simply, as long as you look straight ahead you're OK, but if you look out the side of your glasses you're screwed.
Which is why nose and chin comes into it. 'Point your nose at the thing that you want to look at, then adjust your chin so that the item comes into focus'.
Great. Not only are my eyes senile, I'm going to look senile because I'll be nodding my head up and down trying to get into the right focus
And I bet that you've spotted some of the flaws in this already.
You see, (or in my case, move nose, then chin, then you see), you don't look straight ahead all the time.
The first flaw became apparent when I drove. I now find that although items that are ahead are in perfect focus, items to the side (like when you look out of the side of your eyes to see if any cars are overtaking) are out of focus. And looking in the rear view mirror? I've spent a lifetime developing the technique of keeping facing directly ahead and quickly glancing at the mirror to see if anyone is behind me. Now I've got to nose and chin. And you have to look down to look at the rear view side mirror, which is in the 'reading' focal bit. So what used to be a relaxing drive has turned into an exercise of neck yoga
Looking down when walking is even more fun. Look down at steps - great, now they're out of focus because I'm now looking out through the reading bit of my glasses. Nose and chin again.
In fact, I've discovered a secret.
Those old people you see shambling along the street muttering to themselves and nodding their heads?
They're shambling because they can't focus on what's in front of them, they're muttering 'nose and chin' to remind themselves of what they need to do to see their feet and they're nodding their heads just to get the right part of their d**n varifocals into focus
I'm off to get my Zimmer Frame
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Alexander never had an iPod
I've decided to treat myself to an iPod. For the philistines amongst you, this is not some new plant seed but a portable music player from Apple computers. Apple seem to preface all their products with an 'i' - iMac, iTunes, the Lancashire version eyeUp (I made that up) - so we get an iPod.
The iPod is a very smart looking, small (3.5 x 1.6 x 0.27) and light - I love it. The size is a bit of a problem. Bets are already being taken in the office as to what I'll do with it first - lose it or put it in my back pocket and sit on it. However, I digress.
The real problem with the iPod is not the unit itself. It's the flaming earphones. You may ask what this has to do with Alexander the great - bear with me on this one.
When Alexander was beginning his rampage across the Asian continent he came to a place in Greece called Gordium. Here there was a knotted rope so complex that no-one had been able to untie it. It was prophesied that the man who unravelled the knot would conquer Asia. Alexander did a bit of lateral thinking and cut the thing apart.
You do get the feeling that there is a bit of spin going along here. You can just imagine Alexander's press officer going around the local papyrus makers telling them what to put in their next daily/weekly/summer solstice scroll.
Nowadays, of course, he'd be hauled up in front of the local magistrates. 'Alexander of Macedonia, you are hereby charged with causing deliberate destruction of property and ruining our tourist trade; how do you plead?". "No guilty and if you don't let me go I'll make trouble for you". "Oh yes, you and whose army?" ....
Anyway, to get back to the earphones. The lead on these earphones is white, long and made of a particularly sticky type of plastic. They also have magical properties
Namely this.
However carefully you wrap them up the lead will coalesce into a frightful, tangled knot that would make the Gordian knot look like a child's shoelace.It's no good adopting Alexander's approach - I want to be able to use the damn things. So, every morning on the way to work I take the earphones out my pocket and carefully untangle them, and every evening I do the same on the way back home.
I've yet to listen to the iPod. I'm spending so much time untangling the darn leads that by the time I've got them into a useable state it's time to put them away again.
The only solution I can think of is just to leave the things permanently attached to my ears. The only problem is that you can't hear what's going on around - There I am, tapping my feet and humming the accompaniment to 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and world war 3 could have broken out for all I care.
One of these days on my normal commute I'm going to miss my stop and end up in a siding somewhere
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Train Troubles
I've made a deliberate decision to travel by train. In the long run, viewed over time and all things taken into consideration, I reckon it's less stressful than traveling by car. It's certainly safer.
Let's just take the latter point. The alternative to traveling by train is, for me, the M6 motorway. Now, I have to set the picture here. I have to be at work by 9:00 am at the latest. This means leaving the house at 8:20 (assuming that traffic is clear etc etc). Now, I don't know about you but I tend to leave things to the last possible moment. So, I leave the house with the minimum time between getting up and driving. Let's just assume that the other people on the motorway are therefore like me - half asleep, low sugar level, cornflakes haven't kicked in yet, still doing my shirt up.
This is factor one.
Second factor is the fact that this is a motorway. Now, this isn't New Zealand, where the only traffic on the road is a couple of crows dining off the roadkill from the previous night. No, this is the UK, with bumper to bumper cars full of people with low blood sugar trying to work out if they are going in the right direction and still doing their shirt buttons up.
Third factor is that this is a motorway going east. This isn't too bad in the summer; by the time I leave the house trailing cornflakes the sun is well up.
In winter it's a different matter. At some point in the transition from autumn to winter things get totally suicidal. By the time you get onto the motorway the sun is just peeking over the horizon. Direct into the car. Obscuring all the other cars on the road. In the spring it's even more fun - due to the existing slow slide of winter into summer it's usually freezing so they've heavily salted the road with this compound that seems to be one part salt to one part super glue - it welds itself to the screen and is almost impossible to get off. And because it's freezing there's no way that the windscreen washer jets are going to work because they're jammed with ice, and the engine hasn't warmed up yet so the screen keeps on misting over.
So you're driving east along a packed motorway with a whole load of half asleep people traveling at 75 miles per hour with the sun reflecting nicely off the white glaze that is your windscreen and you can't see a thing which is probably just as well because no-one else can either.
This is why I go by train.
On average traveling by train is OK. I get a chance to catch up on the sleep I've missed, I can read the newspaper at my leisure (No, it's not the Sun newspaper - you don't read that, you only open it to page 3 and let your eyes pop out, or in my case, yawn), and I get a bit of a walk at either end so I can say to my doctor 'yes, I do have a daily walk, the flab around my waist just appears there by transmutation'
I said on average. On some days the journey is exceptional (clear carriage, beautiful day, a particularly interesting book to read and a nice sleep on the way back).
This means that there have to be some bad days to compensate
I had all of them last week.
We can start with the arson attack on a signal box. Now, to be fair, there's not a lot that the rail companies could have done about this, but they did fall over in a wibbling heap as a result. It appears that the more modern the technology is the greater the disruption when the train managers have to fall back on more traditional techniques.
In this case, it felt like they were falling back on a man walking in front of the train with a red flag
My train to Rugby was cancelled. This is an hourly service, and although the one the next hour did leave, it still had to follow the man with the red flag. I was late that day.
The next day we were still in red flag mode although they had made it official this time. I could have got my train if I had got on the laid on 'special' that commuted past the burnt out box. Unfortunately this left at 33 minutes past the hour and I arrived at 33.00001 minutes past. So, another hour's wait. Late to work again.
They eventually got the signals repaired, made the red flag guy redundant and we were back to normal.
Until our train broke down.
Now I had spoken earlier about modern technology. The train company that runs the Birmingham to Rugby local route has just taken delivery of some brand new, wizz bang, up to date, state of the art trains. Amongst the many things it can do it can automatically close the doors.
A history of door closing is in order.
In the old days you had to open and close the doors by hand. Unfortunately this had two down sides.
a) Most of the UK were born in barns as far as door closing is concerned and the train staff had to go down the length of the train closing doors before the train could leave, and then walk back up the platform closing the doors that some late running b*****d had opened in order to slip onto the train.
b) Some people opened the doors whilst the train was still moving. Sometimes this was because leaping from a fast moving train is one way of getting away from it all, but people would also open the doors as the train came into the station so they could make a quick getaway. This sometimes had the effect of sweeping the platform clear of people which appeared to upset these people.
So, they invented guard controlled locks that could lock the doors when the train was moving. There were two benefits of this
a) People no longer got swept off platforms.
b) The entertainment value of being able to lock the doors 30 seconds before the train left and then watch the hapless tardy traveler try and get on must have been immense and probably more than made up for all those b*****ds who used to leave the doors open
However, technology marches on and we now have state of the art doors that open at the touch of a button and which can be closed by the guard (and in the REALLY state of the art, automatically close after a time as well (or close just as you're putting a load of suitcases onto the train, leaving you on the platform and your luggage on the train))
Which is fine but state of the art implies more complexity and to return to the subject, in our case state of the art failed. We had just got to Berkswell, a nice little village between Birmingham and Coventry when the door close switch that says that the door was closed decided to take a holiday. We knew that the door was closed but it didn't, so it just kept on beeping saying that the door wasn't closed and no, the train can't be moved because it wouldn't be safe to do so and some passenger might accidentally fall out of the open door.
So we had to get off, the train was driven off, still frantically beeping and we were left in pleasant Berkswell, no cafeteria, no seats, stand and watch the express trains roar past (I did try and thumb a lift but they weren't having any of it)
I was late again that day.
As an aside, the new technology does have one major benefit. If for some reason I hadn't slept well the night before I would tend to go to sleep on the train. This is no problem for the Rugby to Birmingham route (the train terminates at Birmingham) but in the other direction Rugby is not the terminus. With the old trains I would usually be woken up by the bang of the doors closing, and by the time I had sorted out who I was, where I was and most importantly where my feet were the train was on the move. With the new trains the doors insistently beep as they open which is a good way of saying 'Wake up Bill, this is your stop'. Haven't slept through Rugby yet.
The rest of the week's annoyances were minor. A giggle of girls on a night out in Birmingham (I can't understand why text messages should be so shrieking funny), two teenagers who had one of these nice new portable DVD players and who decided to watch the film 'Bang, Crash, thump, scream and other annoying noises' and a family who had been watching the news and had decided that the instruction to 'evacuate your house and take as many belongings with you as possible' applied to them as well. I've never seen a kitchen sink so fetchingly wrapped. Oh, and the gentleman who obviously smoked several 100 cigarettes a day and whose clothes were a cancer hazard to anyone within 10 meters of him
Isn't life funny.
Sob
Let's just take the latter point. The alternative to traveling by train is, for me, the M6 motorway. Now, I have to set the picture here. I have to be at work by 9:00 am at the latest. This means leaving the house at 8:20 (assuming that traffic is clear etc etc). Now, I don't know about you but I tend to leave things to the last possible moment. So, I leave the house with the minimum time between getting up and driving. Let's just assume that the other people on the motorway are therefore like me - half asleep, low sugar level, cornflakes haven't kicked in yet, still doing my shirt up.
This is factor one.
Second factor is the fact that this is a motorway. Now, this isn't New Zealand, where the only traffic on the road is a couple of crows dining off the roadkill from the previous night. No, this is the UK, with bumper to bumper cars full of people with low blood sugar trying to work out if they are going in the right direction and still doing their shirt buttons up.
Third factor is that this is a motorway going east. This isn't too bad in the summer; by the time I leave the house trailing cornflakes the sun is well up.
In winter it's a different matter. At some point in the transition from autumn to winter things get totally suicidal. By the time you get onto the motorway the sun is just peeking over the horizon. Direct into the car. Obscuring all the other cars on the road. In the spring it's even more fun - due to the existing slow slide of winter into summer it's usually freezing so they've heavily salted the road with this compound that seems to be one part salt to one part super glue - it welds itself to the screen and is almost impossible to get off. And because it's freezing there's no way that the windscreen washer jets are going to work because they're jammed with ice, and the engine hasn't warmed up yet so the screen keeps on misting over.
So you're driving east along a packed motorway with a whole load of half asleep people traveling at 75 miles per hour with the sun reflecting nicely off the white glaze that is your windscreen and you can't see a thing which is probably just as well because no-one else can either.
This is why I go by train.
On average traveling by train is OK. I get a chance to catch up on the sleep I've missed, I can read the newspaper at my leisure (No, it's not the Sun newspaper - you don't read that, you only open it to page 3 and let your eyes pop out, or in my case, yawn), and I get a bit of a walk at either end so I can say to my doctor 'yes, I do have a daily walk, the flab around my waist just appears there by transmutation'
I said on average. On some days the journey is exceptional (clear carriage, beautiful day, a particularly interesting book to read and a nice sleep on the way back).
This means that there have to be some bad days to compensate
I had all of them last week.
We can start with the arson attack on a signal box. Now, to be fair, there's not a lot that the rail companies could have done about this, but they did fall over in a wibbling heap as a result. It appears that the more modern the technology is the greater the disruption when the train managers have to fall back on more traditional techniques.
In this case, it felt like they were falling back on a man walking in front of the train with a red flag
My train to Rugby was cancelled. This is an hourly service, and although the one the next hour did leave, it still had to follow the man with the red flag. I was late that day.
The next day we were still in red flag mode although they had made it official this time. I could have got my train if I had got on the laid on 'special' that commuted past the burnt out box. Unfortunately this left at 33 minutes past the hour and I arrived at 33.00001 minutes past. So, another hour's wait. Late to work again.
They eventually got the signals repaired, made the red flag guy redundant and we were back to normal.
Until our train broke down.
Now I had spoken earlier about modern technology. The train company that runs the Birmingham to Rugby local route has just taken delivery of some brand new, wizz bang, up to date, state of the art trains. Amongst the many things it can do it can automatically close the doors.
A history of door closing is in order.
In the old days you had to open and close the doors by hand. Unfortunately this had two down sides.
a) Most of the UK were born in barns as far as door closing is concerned and the train staff had to go down the length of the train closing doors before the train could leave, and then walk back up the platform closing the doors that some late running b*****d had opened in order to slip onto the train.
b) Some people opened the doors whilst the train was still moving. Sometimes this was because leaping from a fast moving train is one way of getting away from it all, but people would also open the doors as the train came into the station so they could make a quick getaway. This sometimes had the effect of sweeping the platform clear of people which appeared to upset these people.
So, they invented guard controlled locks that could lock the doors when the train was moving. There were two benefits of this
a) People no longer got swept off platforms.
b) The entertainment value of being able to lock the doors 30 seconds before the train left and then watch the hapless tardy traveler try and get on must have been immense and probably more than made up for all those b*****ds who used to leave the doors open
However, technology marches on and we now have state of the art doors that open at the touch of a button and which can be closed by the guard (and in the REALLY state of the art, automatically close after a time as well (or close just as you're putting a load of suitcases onto the train, leaving you on the platform and your luggage on the train))
Which is fine but state of the art implies more complexity and to return to the subject, in our case state of the art failed. We had just got to Berkswell, a nice little village between Birmingham and Coventry when the door close switch that says that the door was closed decided to take a holiday. We knew that the door was closed but it didn't, so it just kept on beeping saying that the door wasn't closed and no, the train can't be moved because it wouldn't be safe to do so and some passenger might accidentally fall out of the open door.
So we had to get off, the train was driven off, still frantically beeping and we were left in pleasant Berkswell, no cafeteria, no seats, stand and watch the express trains roar past (I did try and thumb a lift but they weren't having any of it)
I was late again that day.
As an aside, the new technology does have one major benefit. If for some reason I hadn't slept well the night before I would tend to go to sleep on the train. This is no problem for the Rugby to Birmingham route (the train terminates at Birmingham) but in the other direction Rugby is not the terminus. With the old trains I would usually be woken up by the bang of the doors closing, and by the time I had sorted out who I was, where I was and most importantly where my feet were the train was on the move. With the new trains the doors insistently beep as they open which is a good way of saying 'Wake up Bill, this is your stop'. Haven't slept through Rugby yet.
The rest of the week's annoyances were minor. A giggle of girls on a night out in Birmingham (I can't understand why text messages should be so shrieking funny), two teenagers who had one of these nice new portable DVD players and who decided to watch the film 'Bang, Crash, thump, scream and other annoying noises' and a family who had been watching the news and had decided that the instruction to 'evacuate your house and take as many belongings with you as possible' applied to them as well. I've never seen a kitchen sink so fetchingly wrapped. Oh, and the gentleman who obviously smoked several 100 cigarettes a day and whose clothes were a cancer hazard to anyone within 10 meters of him
Isn't life funny.
Sob
Sunday, April 17, 2005
There's a lot to be said for astroturf
The new house has a sizeable garden (at least, I call it a sizeable garden; My amnerican friends probably call it a grass patch). One of the formulas I am beginning to learn is
Sunshine 4 hours a day + light sprinkling of rain = vegetation
In this case, lots of grass.
The owners left me with a hover mower to keep this grass under control. This machine was designed by a sadist. I need to explain why.
The cylinder mower I've been used to so far has been settable to coarse or fine. Coarse cut gave about an inch trim; Fine cut gave about quarter to a half. Fine cut would mean that I could leave the grass 2-3 weeks before you started to lose yourself in the jungle when you left the house. The cut was also precisely that. Provided the blades were in good shape the mower cut the grass like a pair of scissors
The Hover mower just does one cut, which I call 'flatten-grass-with-blast-of-air-and-then-shred-the-tops'. It flattens the grass because in order to hover the thing needs to ride on a cushion of air, which means that air get pushed down. It shreds the tops because the cutting mechanism is a bit like a sword; it just takes a swing at the grass and hopes it takes the head off. It's a bit like comparing execution with an axe in a force 10 gale with the operation of a guillotine (there are some things that the French have excelled in!).
Grass collection is also a bit of fun. If you don't have a grass collector then the thing just blasts grass out on all sides. If you have a grass collector then you effectively have to put a hole in the mower's 'skirt', which reduces the cushion of air. I'm sure that there has been long and careful design on this to achieve the optimal hover/collect ratio.
It's not perfect
What you get is a mower that takes a bit of a push because it's sort of floating, and which cuts grass by beating it to death, and which then gathers up 90% of the beaten grass into its collector, spits out 9% and carefully gathers the remaining 1% in a thin green layer on the inside of the machine.
So you're left with the occasional gobbet of grass on the lawn. I really mean this. Once the mower's got at it the grass looks like it's been through a cow's stomach
Twice
Which you have to pick up off the lawn because if you've run over it the blast of air has carefully plastered it to the ground. If you don't pick up it has the killer properties of high quality weed killer, and you're left with a brown patch where the gobbet has been.
I haven't yet mentioned the 1% yet. Those of you with weak dispositions look away now.
The 1% is the creme de la creme. It's been through the cow's digestive process 10 times. It's not a solid and it's not a liquid. It does have glue like properties, and its staining power has all the attributes of normal grass but magnified tenfold.
This has to be cleaned off the mower.
If you leave it then it gradually builds up until the only space left under the mower is the space for the blades to turn, which doesn't do its hovering properties any good.
So after every mow you get down and scrape off the gunk. Now, because I'm not a doctor or a surgeon and don't like exploring strange new places that squelch when you touch them I don't do a thorough job; Grass which isn't cleared out starts to go mouldy. So, what you're scraping out is several generations of grass and muold. In fact, it frightens me to think of the mould civilisations, empires and democracies that I'm destroying on a regular basis; We've probably had the unified theory of relativity and immortality sorted several times over and then 'Aaaargh, it's the big hand!'
Murderer
Anyway, enough about cleaning. You can look back now. The quality of cut is such that after a day the grass that was flattened stands up and does a raspberry at you. The grass that was beaten (I hesitate to use the word 'cut') has a somewhat shredded appearance (as you would be if someone took a blunt claymore to your neck). It's also sufficiently long to immeadiately look like it needs a cut. What is certain is that after a week all the neighbours (who own cylinder mowers) are passing by, looking at the grass and sniffing 'why can't he cut his grass occasionally'.
this is why I'm thinking of laying astroturf.
Or buying a sheep
Sunshine 4 hours a day + light sprinkling of rain = vegetation
In this case, lots of grass.
The owners left me with a hover mower to keep this grass under control. This machine was designed by a sadist. I need to explain why.
The cylinder mower I've been used to so far has been settable to coarse or fine. Coarse cut gave about an inch trim; Fine cut gave about quarter to a half. Fine cut would mean that I could leave the grass 2-3 weeks before you started to lose yourself in the jungle when you left the house. The cut was also precisely that. Provided the blades were in good shape the mower cut the grass like a pair of scissors
The Hover mower just does one cut, which I call 'flatten-grass-with-blast-of-air-and-then-shred-the-tops'. It flattens the grass because in order to hover the thing needs to ride on a cushion of air, which means that air get pushed down. It shreds the tops because the cutting mechanism is a bit like a sword; it just takes a swing at the grass and hopes it takes the head off. It's a bit like comparing execution with an axe in a force 10 gale with the operation of a guillotine (there are some things that the French have excelled in!).
Grass collection is also a bit of fun. If you don't have a grass collector then the thing just blasts grass out on all sides. If you have a grass collector then you effectively have to put a hole in the mower's 'skirt', which reduces the cushion of air. I'm sure that there has been long and careful design on this to achieve the optimal hover/collect ratio.
It's not perfect
What you get is a mower that takes a bit of a push because it's sort of floating, and which cuts grass by beating it to death, and which then gathers up 90% of the beaten grass into its collector, spits out 9% and carefully gathers the remaining 1% in a thin green layer on the inside of the machine.
So you're left with the occasional gobbet of grass on the lawn. I really mean this. Once the mower's got at it the grass looks like it's been through a cow's stomach
Twice
Which you have to pick up off the lawn because if you've run over it the blast of air has carefully plastered it to the ground. If you don't pick up it has the killer properties of high quality weed killer, and you're left with a brown patch where the gobbet has been.
I haven't yet mentioned the 1% yet. Those of you with weak dispositions look away now.
The 1% is the creme de la creme. It's been through the cow's digestive process 10 times. It's not a solid and it's not a liquid. It does have glue like properties, and its staining power has all the attributes of normal grass but magnified tenfold.
This has to be cleaned off the mower.
If you leave it then it gradually builds up until the only space left under the mower is the space for the blades to turn, which doesn't do its hovering properties any good.
So after every mow you get down and scrape off the gunk. Now, because I'm not a doctor or a surgeon and don't like exploring strange new places that squelch when you touch them I don't do a thorough job; Grass which isn't cleared out starts to go mouldy. So, what you're scraping out is several generations of grass and muold. In fact, it frightens me to think of the mould civilisations, empires and democracies that I'm destroying on a regular basis; We've probably had the unified theory of relativity and immortality sorted several times over and then 'Aaaargh, it's the big hand!'
Murderer
Anyway, enough about cleaning. You can look back now. The quality of cut is such that after a day the grass that was flattened stands up and does a raspberry at you. The grass that was beaten (I hesitate to use the word 'cut') has a somewhat shredded appearance (as you would be if someone took a blunt claymore to your neck). It's also sufficiently long to immeadiately look like it needs a cut. What is certain is that after a week all the neighbours (who own cylinder mowers) are passing by, looking at the grass and sniffing 'why can't he cut his grass occasionally'.
this is why I'm thinking of laying astroturf.
Or buying a sheep
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
The competitive marketplace
One of the first things I did when I moved in to the new house was order a broadband & telephone package. There are two technical choices for broadband in this country - ADSL & cable.
For the non technical amongst you, ADSL is via the telephone wires (twisted pair wires), cable is via fibre optic to very near the house and then coaxial cable from then on in. Cable is technically faster
Being a speed freak I went for cable. It was only 1.5 Mb/s compared with 1Mb/s but I figured it could only get faster. Cable in Rugby is supplied by a company called NTL. And therein lies the story.....
Things get cheaper if you order in packages so I got a broadband & telephone package. This meant that I would have to wait before I got a telephone connected but it couldn't be that long, could it. I ordered on the 10th January and an installation date was set for the 26th. I even got a nice bit of paper that said the installation would take place on the 26th a.m
"Yeah, right", I said, and took the whole day off.
At 12 I rang them to confirm that they did have the date in their computer system (there was one occasion when a service department didn't know what the sales department had set), and was told that yes, someone was coming out. So I went back to waiting.
It always annoys me, this waiting lark. You're stuck in the house and you can't go out. If I nipped down the road for a paper you could bet your bottom dollar that whoever you were waiting for would turn up. So I waited until 2pm, when I saw two men standing outside the house looking at the connection plate in the raod.
At this point it is important to realise how cable gets its signal to the house. Bear with me.
Cable is fibre optic but it doesn't go straight to the house. The fibre optic cable goes to a junction box somewhere in the locality. From there it is wired with coa cable to terminal boxes sunk in the road outside the houses. When cable is to be connected to the house all that needs to be done (I thought) was to run a coax cable from the terminal box to the customer's house, terminate it in a box on the outside of the house and then connect the necessary bits through to appropriate terminal boxes inside the house (such as a telephone socket and a broadband socket).
So, two men standing outside the house. Looking at the box. I went out to talk to them.
"Morning", I say
"Morning", they reply.
"So, how's it going?", I ask.
"It's blocked", they say.
An interrogation then ensued. It appears that in my case the coax from the junction box to the terminal box hadn't been run and these men were there to pull the cable through. However, the pipe that should have enabled them to do this was blocked.
"So, how long will it take you to clear it?", I ask.
You KNOW what's coming, don't you?
"Oh, we can't to do that, mate; It's not our job. Need to get someone out to clear it".
A conversation about the contractual arrangements ensued. From what they said, someone would come out and clear the blockage, then they would pull the cable through, then they would tell someone else to come round put the cable under my lawn to the front of the house ("we don't do digging", they said) and someone elese would finish off the connections to the inside of the house and test the circuits.
I then spent several happy hours phoning NTL. I was told that it would take a maximum of a week to get the cable to the house connected. Whilst I was on the phone, the contractor turned up to connect the internal wiring. It appeared that he could do this without the externals being connected, so off he went, did a neat job, drilled holes in the wall, brought the connections from the telephone socket and broadband box to the outside of the house and tied them off, ready for the installation of the external box. He left me with my cable modem and an installation disc and told me that once the externals had been done I would be fine. He also assured me the the rest of the work could be done without my presence, so that was alright then.
So I waited a week. I know they said 'A maximum of a week', but I knew darn well that the thing would go right to the edge.
A week later I rang, just to confirm that the system would be installed by the end of the day.
"Let me see", said the nice lady at the other end of the phone.on the computer. "Oh, I see", she says; "There's a call out for construction. The earliest they are going to be able to get there would be the 22nd February". Deadly silence at my end. I asked her to repeat what she had just said. I was very nice about it. I explained that I was without a telephone (I was using my mobile and office phone) and she had just told me that at the minimum I wouldn't have a telephone until the end of February. She agreed it was a problem, but explained that there was nothing she could do. "They're very busy", she said.
Umm.
I put the phone down, went through the stages of shock, anger, resignation and bitterness over the next hour.
Then I rang British Telecom. "How long to reconnect my phone", I said.
"Half a day tops", they said. "It won't cost you anything"
"Do it".
2 hours later I was reconnected.
This is not the end of the story. A few days after the first installation date I got an invoice from NTL for the period 26th January to .... I rang them up. I was very nice about it. I explained that I was being billed for an installation that hadn't happened.
It appears that because the internals had been wired that I had been marked down as installed. The man apologised, and gave me my first month free (I hadn't yet cancelled)
When I DID try and cancel the installation (the wiring to the house) I was told I couldn't cancel the installation because I was marked as installed. What I would have to ask for is an un-installation of my non existant installation.
So I did.
I subsequently went for ADSL via the telephone line
For the non technical amongst you, ADSL is via the telephone wires (twisted pair wires), cable is via fibre optic to very near the house and then coaxial cable from then on in. Cable is technically faster
Being a speed freak I went for cable. It was only 1.5 Mb/s compared with 1Mb/s but I figured it could only get faster. Cable in Rugby is supplied by a company called NTL. And therein lies the story.....
Things get cheaper if you order in packages so I got a broadband & telephone package. This meant that I would have to wait before I got a telephone connected but it couldn't be that long, could it. I ordered on the 10th January and an installation date was set for the 26th. I even got a nice bit of paper that said the installation would take place on the 26th a.m
"Yeah, right", I said, and took the whole day off.
At 12 I rang them to confirm that they did have the date in their computer system (there was one occasion when a service department didn't know what the sales department had set), and was told that yes, someone was coming out. So I went back to waiting.
It always annoys me, this waiting lark. You're stuck in the house and you can't go out. If I nipped down the road for a paper you could bet your bottom dollar that whoever you were waiting for would turn up. So I waited until 2pm, when I saw two men standing outside the house looking at the connection plate in the raod.
At this point it is important to realise how cable gets its signal to the house. Bear with me.
Cable is fibre optic but it doesn't go straight to the house. The fibre optic cable goes to a junction box somewhere in the locality. From there it is wired with coa cable to terminal boxes sunk in the road outside the houses. When cable is to be connected to the house all that needs to be done (I thought) was to run a coax cable from the terminal box to the customer's house, terminate it in a box on the outside of the house and then connect the necessary bits through to appropriate terminal boxes inside the house (such as a telephone socket and a broadband socket).
So, two men standing outside the house. Looking at the box. I went out to talk to them.
"Morning", I say
"Morning", they reply.
"So, how's it going?", I ask.
"It's blocked", they say.
An interrogation then ensued. It appears that in my case the coax from the junction box to the terminal box hadn't been run and these men were there to pull the cable through. However, the pipe that should have enabled them to do this was blocked.
"So, how long will it take you to clear it?", I ask.
You KNOW what's coming, don't you?
"Oh, we can't to do that, mate; It's not our job. Need to get someone out to clear it".
A conversation about the contractual arrangements ensued. From what they said, someone would come out and clear the blockage, then they would pull the cable through, then they would tell someone else to come round put the cable under my lawn to the front of the house ("we don't do digging", they said) and someone elese would finish off the connections to the inside of the house and test the circuits.
I then spent several happy hours phoning NTL. I was told that it would take a maximum of a week to get the cable to the house connected. Whilst I was on the phone, the contractor turned up to connect the internal wiring. It appeared that he could do this without the externals being connected, so off he went, did a neat job, drilled holes in the wall, brought the connections from the telephone socket and broadband box to the outside of the house and tied them off, ready for the installation of the external box. He left me with my cable modem and an installation disc and told me that once the externals had been done I would be fine. He also assured me the the rest of the work could be done without my presence, so that was alright then.
So I waited a week. I know they said 'A maximum of a week', but I knew darn well that the thing would go right to the edge.
A week later I rang, just to confirm that the system would be installed by the end of the day.
"Let me see", said the nice lady at the other end of the phone.
Umm.
I put the phone down, went through the stages of shock, anger, resignation and bitterness over the next hour.
Then I rang British Telecom. "How long to reconnect my phone", I said.
"Half a day tops", they said. "It won't cost you anything"
"Do it".
2 hours later I was reconnected.
This is not the end of the story. A few days after the first installation date I got an invoice from NTL for the period 26th January to .... I rang them up. I was very nice about it. I explained that I was being billed for an installation that hadn't happened.
It appears that because the internals had been wired that I had been marked down as installed. The man apologised, and gave me my first month free (I hadn't yet cancelled)
When I DID try and cancel the installation (the wiring to the house) I was told I couldn't cancel the installation because I was marked as installed. What I would have to ask for is an un-installation of my non existant installation.
So I did.
I subsequently went for ADSL via the telephone line
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