So, McCain announces his running mate.
Channel 4 News leads with the Democrats' line on the announcement ("inexperienced candidate a heartbeat from power...") and Obama's attack on McCain in his speech last night.
They later introduced the Governor of Alaska as a former beauty queen.
We know how much Channel 4 News (and the BBC, of course) want Obama to win but can't they at least pretend to be balanced?
Passing through Bank yesterday evening, I would guess that over 80% of the advert slots in the corridors between the DLR and Central platforms contained TfL adverts, rather than paid-for ones.
Surely the advertising market can't have gone so bad, so quickly? I've only been out of the country for a week!
Wow...
I'm in the process of moving my money resting in various accounts to First Direct in preparation for switching to an offset mortgage.
I transferred a chunk of money just now from Barclays. I then switched to my First Direct account and the money was already in it.
It took less than a second.
Seriously impressive.
First they closed off the Wapping-> East London Line -> Jubilee -> Waterloo route to work.
Then they forced me to use Bank rather than Tower Hill/Gateway to get from the DLR to the District Line.
And now they're closing Blackfriars too!
So, as of March next year, my only viable route to the office will be Limehouse -> DLR -> Bank -> W&C -> Waterloo.
Wonderful.
Arghhh! Who designed the self-check-out machines that have proliferated of late?
Regardless of the store, the self-checkout machines have exactly the same design so somebody, somewhere, is making a lot of money selling them.
I can only assume the manufacturer has a rock-solid patent that is keeping rivals from competing and protects their sordid little monopoly. How else could they get away with failing to fix gaping defects in the user interface that have persisted since they first appeared several years ago?
"Item removed from bagging area"
... yes. I know. The bag was full.
"Please return item to the bagging area"
... WHY?!!! WHY SHOULD I?????
"Unexpected item in the bagging area"
... YOU JUST TOLD ME TO!!!!! I want to cry now :-(
Useless, useless, stupid, stupid machines.
I see I'm not the only one who hates them... (the date on that post also shows that the user interface stupidity has persisted for at least a year.)
I was in Norwich today visiting a customer and thought I'd take a different route home from Liverpool Street this evening.
I walked down some back streets and picked up a 15 bus from Aldgate.
When I alighted on Commercial Road, I noticed that the bus stop was reporting a bus route I hadn't heard of before, the N550.
For those who don't live in London, the "N" is important: it implies a night bus and is therefore a useful backup if you stay out too late to get the tube and can't (or won't, in my case) get a cab.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I walked down Butcher Row and noticed a bus stop advertising a second night bus, the N551!
Two new routes in one day? What gives?
There was nothing obvious on TfL's website but I did find something in Google. It appears that the N50 (an unreliable but useful) service is being split into the two routes above and that, wonder of wonders, one of them (the N551) will travel down the Highway, meaning it will stop outside the flat. Hurrah!
Click here and search forward for "New night route"
Interesting reflections on what not to do when running a startup.
I was speaking to a colleague in Germany last week and he pointed out that I had blogged about the nightmare of getting a new kitchen put in... and showed lots of the "before" pictures.
But I never showed the "after" pictures.
So here they are! (only a year late)... and before decoration.
I did quite a bit of work last year on a solution for a client who had an ever-increasing number of foreign-exchange orders that were threatening to swamp an infrastructure that was built for a world where the volumes were smaller and each order was larger.
The basic idea (there was more to it than this...) was to utilise CEP (Complex Event Processing) techniques to monitor the order flow and look for opportunities to aggregate similar, small orders into smaller numbers of large ones.
When I was producing the explanatory materials and sales decks, I included a worked example of how the foreign exchange market works. I had to piece it together and validate it by speaking to colleagues who specialise in this area and by getting a couple of clients to give me their comments.
Interestingly, I stumbled upon a rather detailed US government web site today. It describes the market in great detail. Knowing about this material last year would have saved me a lot of time...
I'm sure this is the sort of thing that most people do when they first learn to speak, rather than decades later. But I realised yesterday that I couldn't think of any words that had more than one opposite meaning.
That is: "good" has one opposite. Namely, "bad".
Likewise, the one opposite of "on" is "off".
Therefore, I was delighted this evening to realise that "lost" has two opposites: "won" and "found".
Hurrah.
Now I think about it, I'm sure there are thousands of others. Presumably all one has to do is analyse every heteronym in the language.
Still... I enjoyed my victory.
(Now I think about it, it's not obvious that "on" only has one opposite. Presumably "under" is also valid. I suppose I should be pleased to have found another. But I'm actually a little irritated that it's so easy to find them)
I've been waiting almost ten weeks for a refund from an airline, which had originally promised to do it in six weeks (which I thought was bad enough).
So what do we think the reason is? Cashflow crisis, incompetence or cynicism bordering on banditry?
I hesitate to name them as I'm sure there are probably laws against accusing companies of being insolvent but one really does wonder how difficult it is to process a refund.
I flew back to London City Airport from Dublin yesterday.
I didn't have to go through passport control.
Is that normal?
The platforms at Limehouse DLR Station were narrowed rather severely a few weeks ago by having scaffolding and wooden planks positioned along the length. I would say that the depth has been reduced by at least 50cm - possibly more.
The work appears to be temporary and, as both platforms have been similarly mutilated, I'm guessing it's something to do with the three-car project rather than the bridge to the c2c station but the narrowing is noticeable and borders on dangerous at peak periods.
Surely this isn't just being done to create storage space? Anybody know?
Walking back from the cinema at West India Quay last night, I looked up at the DLR viaduct and something didn't seem right. There were huge numbers of workers in high-visibility vests scurrying around, pulling ropes and driving machinery.
There was still about ten hours left until the system had to be open again but something didn't seem right... I said something like: "looks like we'll be walking tomorrow".
And so it has turned out...
http://londonconnections.blogspot.com/2008/05/engineers-break-dlr.html
I thought they would over-run because of the weather (it was pouring down) but, if the first comment above is to be believed, the problem was actually with one of the bridges.
If so, why didn't they bother to email those on their mailing list once they realised so we could make alternative plans?
If I understand this correctly, one of the major ratings agencies incorrectly rated some instruments in 2006. This is surely an open goal for anybody wanting to blame any subsequent losses on someone else.
I really wouldn't want to be Moody's or their insurers right now...
(Question: who can say they knew what a CPDO was before they heard about this story?)
I don't know why I insist on listening to the Today programme. It's not healthy to get so stressed so early in the morning by their one-sided reports, determination to follow their own agenda and insistence on persisting with the "socialist homily of the day" slot at 7:45.
This morning's show was a classic, though.
Evan Davies's failure to understand the difference between "volume" and "mass" during a discussion on alcohol (8mg vs 10ml in a unit) was minor enough but still amusing.
But the best part was James Naughtie's embarrassment of an invterview with the boss of Glaxo SmithKline.
He was determined to throw some mud about Seroxat, seemingly thinking that vague questions, unsupported assertions and sheer aggression could substitute actually having a clue about the topic or having been briefed.
I thought Jean-Pierre Garnier humoured him more than was necessary before tearing him apart. You could sense Naughtie floundering at the end and it made for a most satisfying experience.
Being reminded that even the most "respected" members of the press are really just a bunch of cowboys is still somewhat disconcerting, however.
My brother was down this weekend (primarily to attend a party being held by a theatre company who had recently performed a play he wrote).
Rather than go into town or stay local, as usual, I thought his arrival would be a good excuse to go somewhere different for a change.
So we went to Old Street. Now, I know this area has passed through "scary", "fashionable" and "mainstream" on its journey to "unremarkable" but I have managed to avoid going out there until now so it was new to me.
We went to an enjoyably idiosyncratic bar and had a great night. Perhaps we'll go there again sometime. Probably in 2011 or something, knowing how long it takes me to change my habits.
I was too trusting.
Virgin decided that a seven hour delay was insufficient. So they cancelled... sorry, "renamed" VS15 to VS115 and "rescheduled" it to tomorrow afternoon. Nice.
There's a minor problem. I am only supposed to be there until Wednesday lunchtime.
When I looked ahead to another day in transit, I realised it made no sense to continue.... I just wouldn't get any value from the conference now. I'd be a zombie all day on Tuesday and then it would be time to go home again on Wednesday.
What a complete waste of time (and money) and a big disappointment.... the conference I'm missing out on is one of IBM's best.
I am not happy.
I think this extract from Virgin's "Flight Tracker" page says it all:
Flight number:
VS 015 Departure date: 06 Apr 2008 Route: London (LGW) to Orlando (MCO) Scheduled departure time: 06 Apr 12:45 Estimated departure time: 06 Apr 19:45 Scheduled arrival time: 06 Apr 16:55 Estimated arrival time: 06 Apr 23:37
Were it not for the fact that I am committed to present at this conference, I think I'd probably cancel my reservation and go home.
[UPDATE 17:09.... A small crumb of comfort. I queued up at the information desk and begged to be upgraded. 10,000 miles lighter, I'm now in one of the best seats in Premium Economy (75H). Not Upper Class but better than nothing!]
I returned home from Vienna this evening and amongst my mail was a bag with a TfL roundel on the franking strip. What could it be?!
Imagine my delight when I opened it to find:
Fantastic!
Many thanks to David Sanders at DLR and The Londonist for tipping me off.
So, those wacky pranksters at TfL have decided that getting from the DLR to the District Line at Bank is an unnecessary luxury in these times of austerity. Which is, presumably, why they've decided to ban such things for a year.
The proposed alternatives are laughable:
Travel from Limehouse to Canning Town to pick up the Jubilee? Go to Mile End to get the District? Quite apart from how far I'd have to go out of my way, are they really suggesting I pay to enter zone 3 in order to get from zone 2 to zone 1?
The most obvious route for me would be simply to leave Bank and walk down to Cannon Street.
Except... that would be two journeys.
So I wrote to them.
It turns out that they're going to make an exception and charge people who leave at Bank and re-enter at Cannon Street within thirty minutes as if they'd only done one journey.
I'm almost tempted deliberately walk really slowly and get a coffee to make the most of my hard-fought-for new rights.
Here's the answer they sent:
Dear Mr Brown
Thanks for your email about pay as you go charges during the current interchange arrangements at Bank.I'm sorry for the inconvenience these arrangements will cause.
I can confirm that you will be able to touch out at Bank and touch in at Cannon Street without being charged for two journeys. This will be considered as a continuous journey providing you do so within a period of 30 minutes.
I hope this clarifies the position for you and please contact me again if I can be of any help in the future.
Kind regards
[Name removed]
Customer Service Advisor
Central Line
Of course, "London Connections" have a nice diagram that suggests some routes might be open.... (don;t tell anyone though...)
I'm on my way to Vienna for training. I had really wanted to fly from London City Airport but there were no flights that worked.
So, instead, I'm flying out from Heathrow :-(
I considered flying BA but, because Austrian Airlines can at least bring me back to City Airport, I decided to fly out with them as well.
An unintentionally inspired decision!
I am in Terminal 2. No queues at check-in and minimal queue at security. And at least the possibility that my bags will arrive.
It wasn't all good, however. I've just had the most strange "fish pie" from the air-side Wetherspoon's. I'm not sure why I went there as I didn't have a drink.
Either way, I'd love to know if anybody could identify the fish I ate. There were two main fish-like elements to the pie: red cubes and orange cubes.
I'm guessing the red pieces were Salmon but I have absolutely no idea what the orange pieces were. They didn't taste smoked (well, they didn't taste of anything, really) so what on earth could they have been?
I thought I'd visit scary South East London on Tuesday so took the DLR to King George IV so I could take the Woolwich Ferry over the river... I'd never done it before.
Before I got on the ferry, I had a walk around the riverfront.
I stumbled upon what I can only describe as a factory farm where they grow satellite dishes.
There were big ones, small ones, baby ones, portable ones, oddly shaped freakish ones. Most bizarre.
The name of the site was particularly funny. Apparently it's a "Teleport". One shudders to think what goes on there.
There's a small glimpse of it in this photo... but the real thing is much scarier....
Ian linked to the website of "New London Architecture" the other week.
I was in the area the afternoon so popped around.
What a fantastic place!
The centrepiece of the venue is a massive map of Central London with 3-D models of the buildings. There is a small photograph of it here. One could spend hours looking at it.
I spent some time in the book shop and stumbled upon the reference section. They have a collection of periodicals from organisations such as the Institution of Civil Engineers.
One of the magazines I flipped through was a special edition about the building of the high-speed link between St. Pancras and the Channel Tunnel. More technical detail than you could ever wish for (if that sort of thing rocks your boat...). They're not available to purchase, sadly.
Naturally, the first thing I did when I arrived home was try to find the issue on the web instead.
The individual articles are provided as separate PDFs but it's well worth browsing through.
If you've ever wanted to know about ventilation shafts, the building of the new Thameslink Station under St. Pancras or the cost of the project then look no further!
It's official! The US Department of Homeland Security doesn't think I'm a criminal.
My last two trips to the United States have been marred by delays when passing through Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
On both occasions, the agent spent a long time studying his computer screen and my passport before calling for an "escort" and having me taken to a room for further screening.
This screening consisted of my being forced to wait for nearly an hour until my name was called and I was told I was free to go - with no explanation for why I was kept.
Speaking to some colleagues on a discussion forum at work, it transpired I was not the only person this had happened to. There were various theories on why it happened and how to stop it from happening again. The most obvious approach - stop going to America - had simplicity on its side but was likely to be somewhat career limiting for somebody who works in the IT industry.
The next best alternative was to try reasoning with the system. But how?
After much digging, I stumbled upon the "Traveler Redress Inquiry Program" (TRIP).
I filled out an online form, printed it out, attached photocopies of the documents they asked for and sent it off. And promptly forgot all about it.
I don't even recall when I sent it - it was many months ago, though.
I returned home from work today to find a letter from the Department of Homeland Security. It appears that they have investigated my case and, although they cannot guarantee I'll never be stopped again (the stopping appears to be a result of their matching algorithms), I will be permitted to show this letter to the agent and ask that they read it. No guarantees, of course... but at least it's something.
I'll be in Orlando with work at the start of April so I guess I'll soon get a chance to try it out!
The ongoing Northern Rock disaster and a note from a colleague reminded me that very few people have any idea what is behind a lot of this mess.
One of the best descriptions I've seen was on a mathematics blog (one with an enjoyably low opinion of engineers who opine on matters economic).
However, my colleague has gone one better. He discovered a presentation that explains it all. Well, not quite everything. And it's not quite accurate in all respects. Or, indeed, in many. Still quite fun though.
I can't decide if the dessert I enjoyed last night was the best in ages or a candidate for "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares"
I was staying at the De Vere St. David's Park near Chester with colleagues and had the strangest dessert I've had in ages.
The crème brûlée had the customary caramelised sugar on top. On top of that, however, was an extra coating: crystals of the exploding candy that used to be so popular when I was a kid (imagine a sensation of your teeth exploding).
On the side was a lump of purple ice-cream that tasted exactly like Hubba Bubba - sitting on a sticky brown square of goo that had almost exactly the consistency of a chunk of chewing gum.
The whole dessert was monumentally childish and I can't decide if it was horrific or a work of utter genius.
I'm inclined to think the latter...!
Tim Worstall makes an interesting point today about Caroline Lucas's failure to understand that the whole purpose of tradeable emissions permits is that it allows those who find it difficult to reduce their emissions to pay those who find it easier to do it on their behalf.
That is: if it's going to cost me £100 to reduce my emissions by some amount but somebody else can do it for a tenner (and they wouldn't otherwise have done it), then surely it's better for me to pay them instead? We get the same reduction and I'm left with some money to invest back into my business or whatever!
The problem is that the environmentalists just see this as me shirking my responsibility and getting away without paying the "full cost" of my evil behaviour.
This is, of course, ludicrous nonsense but the argument seems to appeal to some people.
So why not turn the argument around to help them understand?
Rather than focus on the cost of a unit emission reduction, why not focus on how far emissions can be reduced for a unit cost?
Going back to my example: for £100, I could reduce my emissions by some amount if I do it myself. Or, I could pay my cleverer friend £100 and they could reduce their emissions by ten times as much - for the same price!
Now, I'm clearly not suggesting people should be forced to buy permits for emissions they're not making (which would be the consequence of forcing me to actually pay that £100 to my friend) but surely it's obvious that the system that allows more to be done with less is the preferable one.
... hmmm.... I don't know what they mean.
Surely I can't have been the only person who thought the only part of "Grandstand" worth enduring was the theme tune?
It would seem not :-)
(courtesy of b3ta, of course).
I have been increasingly interested in the topic of Complex Event Processing of late so was delighted to see the news that we have just bought AptSoft.
Can't wait to get my hands on it and to have a play.
Like half the world, I popped over to the Inns of Court and the Royal Courts of Justice on Saturday afternoon to see what all of the fuss was about.
I can't believe I hadn't been there before. If I'd known I could continue an Oxbridge-esque existence, in London, as a grown-up, I'd have forgotten about messing arount in IT and become a lawyer. What wonderfully pleasant places the Inner and Middle Temples are.
I actually spent most of the afternoon in the Royal Courts of Justice. I've long said that I'd like to watch a trial one day (but never got round to doing it) so sitting through a mock assault trial in one of the real courtrooms sounded like a good idea.
Sitting at the back of court four for two hours made me realise several things
I enjoyed the experience, however, and thought the event was excellent.
One observation jumped out at me: cross-examination is actually rather difficult. Formulating a list of questions designed to draw useful details out of a potentially unwilling witness, in front of an audience, whilst never being completely sure where the conversation will lead is not an easy skill to master.
In many ways, it is rather similar to the skills required of a successful salesperson when meeting a new prospect for the first time. Questioning models designed to draw information out of clients, assimilate the learned information, use this information to influence future questioning, whilst avoiding going round in circles is really hard and I had missed the parallels until now.
I met up with a friend for drinks after work this evening.
We managed to stumble upon a remarkably pleasant street a short stroll from Bank Station; a most unexpected event. Nice places near Bank? Impossible!
I think I'll be wandering along Watling Street and drinking at Williamson's Tavern again. Most pleasant.
Have you ever wondered how they make Liquid Crystal Displays? How they manage to control each pixel separately? How they do this without the millions of separate circuits somehow being visible and ruining the image?
Wonder no more.
It turns out that Indium-Tin Oxide is both electrically conductive and transparent - and so ideal for making LCD screens.
Who knew?!
(Well, not me, obviously).
I arrived home last night to a cold flat. Which was odd, because the super-timer-thermostat (official name) is remote-controlled, battery-powered and rather wonderful... power cuts are not a reason for it to mess up. And I'm not sure there had been a power cut anyway.
So I opened the wardrobe (for this is where the boiler is - don't ask). A red light was flashing. This is not usually a good sign.
The display was also blinking: "0.6".
Now, I happen to know that, when the boiler is idle, the display reports the pressure in the heating circuit. I know this because I am boring and read the manual when the boiler (Glow Worm 30CXi) was installed earlier this year.
Normally, it reads about 1.5 - and the instructions on the front say it should be at least 1.0 in normal operation.
I suspected a leak but could see nothing obvious (in other words, the floor wasn't wet and there was nothing oozing out of any of the radiator valves).
So, I used the blue plastic knob to top up the heating circuit and the pressure rapidly rose to 1.1.
The boiler worked for the rest of the night and the flat was warm. At bed time, the pressure had dropped to 0.9, which I thought odd. The water in the heating circuit was now warm, so I would have expected the pressure to be higher than 1.1, since the 1.1 reading was taken when cold.
I didn't top it up but fell asleep with a sense of foreboding.
Sure enough, I woke up feeling cold this morning. I jumped out of bed (something I never do unless I have an important problem to solve!) and checked the boiler.
Back to 0.6 and a flashing red light. Arghhhh.
There must be a leak. But where? Under the bathroom tiles? Under the new stone floor in the kitchen? I hope not. Under the laminate floor? None would be particularly desirable.
Regardless, I topped it up again and called the plumber at 9. He shared my suspicion of a leak and is coming out later.
In the meantime, I pulled some boxes out of the airing cupboard and noticed that carpet was damp.
Hurrah!
The leak is in the airing cupboard.
I'm not sure where in the airing cupboard. But in there somewhere. So it's not as bad as it could have been.
I left work a little early today as I had some calls to make, which could be done from home.
I knew that today was the last day of Eurostar at Waterloo so I changed my route so that I could cross the main concourse before heading down to the drain.
None of the press reports have picked up on it yet but I could swear that the singer on their make-shift stage (with at least five TV cameras trained on it) was Lily Allen, attempting to sing "Waterloo Sunset".
Most odd.
