Here are Rob's Blog entries for December 2003.
Blog entries for other months can be found in the main blog index.
The BBC is reporting that Bob Monkhouse has died aged 75. He had been fighting cancer for the past 2 years.
Bob Monkhouse is one of the comedians I've come to like over the past few years. My early memories of him came mainly from game shows that I never really liked. However, when I received a copy of Bob Monkhouse at the Beeb, I realised just how much work he had done, and what a funny guy he really was. He'll certainly be missed.
RIP Bob.
The spirit of Christmas seems to be dead in Eastbourne at present.
I went to the weekly Sunday jazz night at Maxims yesterday when some scumbag tried to steal the Guide Dogs For The Blind charity box from the bar.
This guy had been acting strangely all night, but I put it down to him just having had a few too many Stella's. He was sitting huddled up in the corner of the bar where the charity boxes are. Copies of East Magazine, the local what's on guide for Eastbourne, are also kept there, so when I tried to reach over for a copy it was a real effort as he wouldn't move. I realise now it was because he was trying to slip one of the charity boxes into his bag.
Thankfully the bar staff were alert, as when he made a dash for the door, Andy the bar manager ran after him and came back with the box.
To quote Alan Partridge this guy is, scum, subhuman scum
.
Walking down Eastcastle Street during my lunch break I came across six 118118 runners.
They were giving out 118118 gingerbread men, so I took one to have with my lunch.
The BBC is reporting that fares on South Central trains to Brighton could rise due to Graffiti.
They currently spend 1.7 million pounds to clean trains per year, though the results are not very obvious in my experience.
However, with the graffiti they expect it to go up to 3 million pounds.
It is annoying and these sort of things get passed on to the customer
, says David Haynes, Head of Security at South Central Trains.
If only they'd spend some of the 25 million pound profit rail earned Go-Ahead last year on better security, or maybe a better Head of Security, they might be able to help prevent the trains being tagged in the first place.
Is this picture proof there is a ghost at Hampton Court?
The ghost at Hampton Court is believed to have been caught here on CCTV closing a set of doors. The doors had been mysteriously opening and closing themselves recently.
Palace guides do not apparently enter that part of the building so they believe this must be a ghost.
It could be the best ghost sighting ever
, says psychologist Dr Richard Wiseman, I haven't seen anything that would match that at all
.
However, others believe it to just be a cynical marketing ploy. Matt Jones at Frownland.com gives an amusing guide on how to increase visitor numbers with a ghost.
Anyway, here's a copy of the picture. I've zoomed, sharpened and adjusted the levels to try to make it clearer. The original ghost picture can be found here.
I received a Christmas card Dean, an old housemate from my days at the University of Kent at Canterbury, today.
I was also going through old uni papers when I came across an old dot matrix printout of an email he sent me on the 15th May 1996.
It was a reworking of the song "I Will Survive" by the Weathergirls, but entitled "I Will Revise". It has to do with not revising, so a bit of an odd title, but as it's amusing I'll reprint it here.
At first I was afraid, I was petrified!
Kept thinking I could never pass with no revision guide,
But then I spent so many nights, getting all the questions wrong,
And I grew strong,
And I learned I could scrape along,
I won't look back, to any place,
When I can swallow 15 cans and get completely off my face,
I would have revised by the clock,
I would have had no spare time free,
If I'd thought for just one second my exams would bother me,
So all my notes, are on the floor,
Don't even matter... that there's no rock night anymore...
Weren't you the one who tried to get me to revise?
You think I'd crumble? You think I'd work towards the skies?
Oh no, not I!
I won't revise!
Unless I die of beer stains, I know I'll stay alive,
Though my money's at an end,
I've my overdraft to spend,
I won't revise,
I won't revise!!
It took all the strength I had, not to act the part,
But in the end my real revision didn't even start.
I used to sit at home at night, feeling guilty to myself,
I used to try, but now I hold my head up high,
And you see me! Somebody new!
I'm not that mixed up wierd bloke who wants a good 2:2
So if you feel like dropping in, chances are that I'll be free,
Coz I've done sod all revision, and I'm failing my degree,
Oh no, not I!
I won't revise,
I think that I may scrape a third, but I could be telling lies!
Let the lecturers all storm,
My bed's far too nice and warm,
I won't revise,
I won't revise,
Oh dear!!
Apparently I am cursed, or at least the woman who sat opposite me on the train home claimed. Each time she sits next to, or opposite me, the train is delayed.
Today, we were sitting on the 17:53 to Eastbourne and Hastings at London Victoria waiting to depart, when the announcement came...
The train is currently being delayed due to a fault with the cab heater at the front of the train. The station engineer is in attendance and we hope to have you underway shortly.
Everyone looked at each other, and some had a quick giggle.
A fatal mistake...
The driver must have heard, as we were then told that the train was being cancelled and taken out of service because of a fault that cannot be rectified
.
No mention of a faulty heater this time. It's nice to know they let passengers freeze all winter with no heating, but the driver can't cope with it.
Anyway, we all had to disembark and head over to platform 16 to catch the 18:17 service.
I found James on the train with his new lady friend, so there was some company for me on the way home.
The cancelled train was 12 carriages, this one is only 8 long, and always packed. True to form, it was standing room only for most people.
Unfortunately for us, they were unable to find a driver for the service. When they eventually found one we were over half an hour late.
Conditions on the train were so bad the guard gave a personal apology for the appalling conditions aboard this service this evening
.
When we got to Clapham Junction the station announcers were pleading with people who were only going as far as East Croydon not to board the service so those of us with longer journies could get home tonight.
In the end I finally made it home 65 minutes late.
The Darkness are doing a signing in the HMV store next to the office in Oxford Street at present.
I popped in quickly to catch a glimpse, but unfortunately didn't have time to queue for a signed CD.
If you look closely you can just see Justin behind the store's bouncer.
The Centre for Tobacco Control Research's website, Tobaccopapers.com, has some very interesting documents on it's site.
The best is a report from the company Market Trends to Gallaher Ltd on young smokers and their buying habits.
If you smoke it brands you as either a Slob, an Aspiring Sophisticate, a Conservative or a Worrier.
Slobs are most likely to be smoking B&H Special Filter, Embassy No.1 KS or Regal KS.
Describing members of this cluster as 'slobs' may seem unkind, but this title is particularly earnt by their low concern with their appearance and the little effort they make to keep them themselves informed.
Aspiring Sophisticates are most likely to be smoking Marlboro, B&H Special Filter or Berkeley Superkings.
Conservatives are most likely to be smoking Silk Cut KS, Regal KS or Embassy No 1. KS.
Worriers are most likely to be smoking Silk Cut KS or Lambert & Butler KS.
Now you can all impress your smoking friends by psychologically profiling them next time you’re all down the pub together.
The Guardian's British Blog Awards 2003 were announced today.
Annie Mole's excellent London Underground Tube Diary was commended, but unfortunately didn't manage to win. This is a real shame, as it's a great read. I discovered she had links to the Slashing Santa a few days before I posted my picture.
Unsurprisingly Belle de Jour won the top spot. The judges were concerned the blog was a work of fiction, but the quality of her writing is so good it had to win.
I have to agree, at times it's just too good. I wonder how long before it appears in print?
While in the White Star Inn, Lewes, I felt hungry so bought a pack of Jack Link's Beef Jerky.
This product proclaims that it is MADE FROM 100% BEEF
. The ingredients list then proceeds to name 12 other ingredients including various flavourings, but most bizarrely that the product contains 200% Beef!
Original chewable smoked bovine, yummy!
As I had half an hour or so to kill in Lewes tonight, I thought I may as well pass the time in a pub instead of on a cold station platform.
I went to the White Star Inn, very close to the station. As you can see from the notice on every table it's a right barrel of laughs.
I'm not sure if it's possible to catch tuberculosis from bottles, but it's nice to know they take their customers health seriously and don't encourage the practice.
Another day, another complaint about South Central Trains.
When I got to London Victoria, the Scottish woman who announces the days cancellations and delays was saying that the Eastbourne and Littlehampton trains were starting from East Croydon tonight and to join the first train to connect with them. What she never mentioned that the first service was leaving at 18:08. Shame the Eastbourne train was leaving at 17:53, and would have been long gone by the time we would have got there.
They start trains at East Croydon to regulate the service and prevent further delays. However, it seems common sense to start the train from where the majority of customers actually get on the train. As a regular passenger on this service, I know very few people get on at other stations, except Clapham Junction.
Of course on the train running statistics this won't show as a delayed or cancelled train as starting it at East Croydon means it will be technically leaving on time.
The next Eastbourne train was running nearly an hour late, so I decided to get the Gatwick Express and try to get to Brighton and along the coast that way.
In the end, after a long wait at Lewes, I made it home in just over 3 hours.
One word I keep coming across lately is FUD, so I decided to look it up to find out exactly that it meant.
FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt
.
Dictionary.com says that FUD was a originally created by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company, and used to describe the techniques used by IBM sales people.
So now you know!
Forced to travel in the mobile cess pit that is the South Central Trains service to Eastbourne, I found myself in need of the lavatory.
A natural occurance you may think on a long journey. Oh no, not to South Central.
Of the entire train of 8 coaches, only 1 of the 8 toilets was open. That had no taps and a notice saying it wouldn't flush. Ironically soap was provided, presumably for comedy value, as there was no water.
When I went to ask the guard why there were no working toilets, and to have a complaint form, I was told I was lucky to have found a working toilet as all were supposed to be out of order. They also don't carry complaint forms on their services.
This only serves to highlight the utter contempt that South Central Trains treats it's fare paying customers. We're all nothing but profitable, subhuman scum to them.
My Orange Nokia 7250 phone has just come back online after having had no signal for the past 4 or 5 hours. This was in the west end of London, the train to the Sussex Coast and in Easbourne, so not a local fault by the look of it.
I wonder if it's a repeat of the fault on the Orange network on the 12th December that left me and many others with no coverage.
To add insult to injury, I'm on a contract phone, but my parents who are on Pay As You Go, have had an uninterrupted service. I guess Orange already have my money so I'm a lower priority customer?
I wrote the other day that I was seeing things, so I went to the opticians today for a checkup.
I had an Optomap retinal examination during the checkup. It takes hi-res images of the back of the eye. I asked for a copy of them, and although it cost 5 pounds, i think it's worth it.
Here you can see one of my eyes. the white bit in the middle is the optic nerve. My eyelashes can be seen at the bottom of the picture.
I'm pleased to say that they've found nothing wrong my eyes, and the shadow I can see in my left eye is just a floater.
I received an email from Nik Borton after my last blog entry and he kindly took the trouble to reassure me that a floater is normally nothing to worry about.
Floaters aren't anything to worry about. Sometimes they get worse, sometimes they get better. The thing to worry about is permanent flashing and/or bright dots, which can be an indicator of retina detachment.
I've been reading up on RDF the past few days and it's certainly very interesting stuff.
The result of this that I've finally got round to providing an RSS 1.0 feed for this site. RSS 1.0 is an RDF document compared to the old 0.9 feed which is just pure XML.
I've also added the tags for autodiscovery across the site.
<link rel="alternate" href="/robblog/RSS.rdf" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 1.0 Blog Feed" />
For more information on autodiscovery have a look at Dive Into Mark.
Today I've been bothered by a black grey shape that keeps coming in and out of the vision in my left eye. Looking in the mirror I can't see anything wrong, but searching online it appears I may have a floater.
Looks like it's a time to take a trip to the optician tomorrow to get it checked out incase there is anything wrong with my eyes, as floaters can sometimes be a sympton of another problem.
The Strategic Rail Authority have released train performance figures for the past quarter, and unsurprisingly South Central trains are getting worse.
Last year they managed to run 82.2% of trains on time, this year it's only 81%.
However, the national average is 80.8%, so technically they are better than many other operators!
Yet again i'm slumming it on South Central. The train is a total tip and down to it's usual standard.
I'd like to say the crap on the seat opposite was arranged just for the photo, but unfortunately for me it wasn't. It was one of the cleaner seats.
They have trolley sellers, but no bins, except one at the end of the carriage that can hold one or two newspapers at best. No wonder the trains are so disgusting.
One thing I've noticed, is that the trains north of London are so much nicer than those down south.
For example, the trains to and from Cambridge are operated by WAGN. The ones I caught were fast, warm, clean, punctual, smooth and generally very comfortable. They had cleaners who emptied all the rubbish left on the train at the start and end of the journey. There was also a ticket inspector checking the train and tickets of all the passengers.
Compare that to my journey home on South Central tonight. The train was flithy, late, bone shaking and so cold you could see every breath. The windows were opaque from the grime and the graffitti etched into them.
It's obvious that South Central run a monopoly. What commercial incentive do they have to improve the service? People have to travel on their services no matter how bad they are. There is no alternative service.
I can just see their new slogan... "Sit Back! We're taking you for a ride."
While looking for more information on proposed train fare rises next year I decided to have a look at the website of the Strategic Rail Authority.
This has to be the worst designed site on the internet. The site uses such a tiny font it is impossible to read. I try to find what I was after I had to override the font sizes using the "Accessibility" option of my web browser. I wonder if the casual surfer would know how to do this. Shame they never carried out any usabilty testing.
On the plus side, I notice the site uses .tt2 extensions, so their techies obviously have the right idea using the Template Toolkit.
Walking to Cambridge railway station, I went past this street whose name made me smile.
I just hope that Cockburn Street wasn't named after an unfortunate accident.
I've just got back from the Levellers concert at the Cambridge Corn Exchange.
The Fish Brothers warned up the show, and it was great to see them live again. I took the opportunity after the show to get the CD of their's I hadn't already got.
The main Levellers show was excellent. All the old favourites, plus quite a bit from their self titled album, which was a change.
All in all, it was a brilliant night, and I can't wait for their next tour.
This poster has appeared on the tube urging people to keep their Christmas shopping with them at all times.
However, it seems to depict dear old Santa having a slash against the tube map at Manor Park station.
Maybe he's making a comment on the state of the service...
When asked earlier by my manager if I was attending our IT department's Christmas party I was very surprised as I didn't know anything about it. It seems that everyone else knew about it, and that I was invited, except me. It's dissappointing as I would of loved to have gone, but finding out a few hours before wasn't enough time for me to cancel my other plans for the night and arrange things.
I have a feeling this may be related to the ongoing problems I am having with email at work at present. The past few weeks I've not been receiving some of the email I know I've been sending myself. When I queried our helpdesk, it appears there is a spam filter running on our Exchange server and that must be blocking them. However, it doesn't send bounces, so we don't know for sure. They suggested if it was important I should use a hotmail account.
It's a shame that for important work emails, I should have to use an external free mail service, as our internal system can't cope. It's going to be embarassing having to give our a gibberish hotmail address to people whose email I need to receive.
It's rather like a phone company blocking certain numbers or operators, then telling it's staff to use a competitors service if they want to be sure of receiving important calls.
The Darkness have the video for their new christmas song Christmas Time (Don't Let The Bells End) online at present.
Kerrang has the story, and links to the video in other formats.
Let's hope it'll be the Christmas number one!
I do a fair bit of work with mobile phones in my job. Yesterday we bought a Nokia 3510 on a pay as you go tariff from T-Mobile for development work.
We'd only had it on and registered for a couple of hours when we received our first sms "spam" message.
Bizarrely, it was a marketing message from Kiss 100, part of the same company I work for so we were able to trace how come we received the message.
It turns out the phone number was registered 2 years ago for a marketting campaign they ran. However, the previous owner had let the contract lapse, and T-Mobile have recycled the number.
I guess it raises some interesting points. To me that message was spam as I had not subscribed for it. To Kiss it was a legitimate marketing message as that number had opted in. Thankfully this was a free service, and not premium rate one for which I could of been charged.
I wonder how the law stands on this?
We've just had the lovely ladies from NG3 in the office.
I'm not sure quite why they were in, but who cares, it was certainly a nice sight. One of them happens to be a former Miss Sweden.
I think Amanda may be exagerating slightly, as she's just sent me the following email.
I saw you looking........... your eyes nearly popped out !!
I've got that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from knowing that I've done a good job.
We're implementing espotting across some of our sites at present. The system works by posting a query to their web service, and it returning an XML document of results.
I've written two nice little Perl modules to interface to this system. A search object that returns a list of result objects.
Combined with the power of the Template Toolkit, a test CGI script took only 10 lines of neat code to query and return a webpage of results.
Encapsulation rocks when it's done correctly!
As I get older, I'm finding myself becoming more intolerant of other people on the train.
Today, for example, there a cretin with a broadsheet newspaper next to me who insisted on reading it by holding it out and wide open all the way to London, invading my personal space. Opposite there was the most enourmously obese man, whose strained breathing made him sound like an asthmatic Darth Vader. I shudder to think what health problems he's storing up for himself being that overweight.
Some train companies have quiet carriages where people with mobile phones aren't allowed. Some pubs have "family friendly" areas where children can sit. I propose we introduce "fat friendly", "broadsheet friendly", "smelly food friendly" and "luggage wedged between your feet and on the persons opposite you instead of on the luggage rack friendly" carriages for all these people. This means they can endulge themselves without pissing off everyone else who travels by train, namely me. :-)
One thing that has really annoyed me today is reading that Leslie Ash is likening her dodgy cosmetic surgery to that of Heather Mills loosing a leg.
"I had an accident", says Ash. "People don't laugh at Heather Mills because she lost a leg".
Well Ms Ash, your motives were those of vanity and you chose to have cosmetic surgery. All surgery carries risks, and this time you were unlucky. Heather Mills didn't choose to have a car crash and loose a leg.
It's the first of December and Mark Fowlers Perl Advent Calendar has made a welcome return for 2003.
Each day a mini tutorial is offered on a different CPAN module.
Previous years have been excellent, and I'm sure this years will be too.
