A picture’s worth a thousand words
As it’s Sunday, the British railway system is running at restricted capacity because of engineering works - something that always comes as something of a surprise to anyone who’s used to rail services in continental Europe, as they seem to manage to fit their engineering work around running trains.
Chiltern Railways serves the London to Birmingham via Aylesbury route, and as privatised rail franchises go, it’s run pretty well. It’s the route that I commute on daily, and the service is generally not bad - although longer trains in the morning wouldn’t go amiss at peak periods.
This Sunday, they’re digging up their track in a couple of places, which has resulted in suspension of service along part of the route. This is (verbatim for both content and formatting) the information that they’ve provided:
Sunday 24th February
Kidderminster-Birmingham-Stratford-Upon-Avon- Leamington Spa- Banbury- High Wycombe - London
No trains will operate between Warwick Parkway and Birmingham. No trains will operate between Leamington Spa and Stratford- Upon- Avon.
There will be 2 trains per hour between london Marylebone and Warwick Parkway.
Buses willl run between Leamington Spa and Stratford- Upon-Avon and Warwick parkway and Birmingham Snow Hill.
Passengers travelling between Birmingham and Leamington Spa and stations south thereof are advised to use Cross Country services to/from Birmingham New Street changing at Leamington Spa.
In addition to engineering work at the North end of the route a major event is taking place at Wembley Stadium therefore trains are likely to be busier than usual due to passengers travelling to/from Wembley. We have taken account of this by adding carriages to our trains and ensuring most trains call additionally at Wembley Stadium Station.
Aylesbury- Amersham- London
There will be NO trains on this route today buses will operate from Aylesbury to Beaconsfield calling at Stoke Mandeville, Wendover, Great Missenden and Amersham.
Change at Amersham for London Underground services to Harrow on the Hill.
Change at Beaconsfield for connecting trains to/from Marylebone.
Which makes me want to claw my own eyes out in frustration at the verbosity and lack of clarity.
Firstly, it mixes up four types of information about cancellations, reduced service frequency, peripheral information about events and alternative routes.
Then it uses inconsistent wording to describe the alternative services.
And finally, none of the information is presented graphically - the only way to work out what is going on is to read - and re-read until you understand - the text provided.
Imagine instead, if they’d taken a few minutes to provide a map (which took me five minutes in Omnigraffle):
But even now, I’m not quite sure if this is right - because I can’t figure out for sure whether the buses stop at intermediate stations between Warwick and Birmingham. The buses between Aylesbury and Beaconsfield do, because it’s explicitly stated - but that’s not the case elsewhere. So do they, or don’t they?
Is this picture worth a thousand words, or so?
Filed under Working smarter | Comment (0)Twitter Updates for 2008-02-23
- Shouting at Yahoo for having such a braindead account management process which is stopping me Freecycling stuff #
- Talking to daughter in the next room. By IM. #
- Listening to Stephen Fry’s podcast. It’s like being rubbed all over with a fur glove, while someone drips warm honey in your ears #
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Filed under Twitter | Comment (0)Twitter Updates for 2008-02-22
- Sitting in the Orthapaedics reception. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting… #
- Finished reading newspaper, book and printouts, and iPhone battery running low. May be forced to start humming to stave off boredom. #
- Discovered hitherto uncompleted crossword. Death-by-tedium postponed for as long as it takes to finish the last 6 cryptic clues #
- @aral - try VMWare Fusion, I found that much more Vista-friendly than Parallels… #
- @plip that’s *very* shiny… #
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Filed under Twitter | Comment (0)Twitter Updates for 2008-02-21
- Memo to self: attempting to write wiki markup when in rich text mode is doomed to certain failure. #
- @ewanmcintosh - Scoble?
# - @ewanmcintosh - I think he’s probably jumped the shark, these days. Does Tim Berners-Lee do keynotes? #
- @ewanmcintosh well they don’t come with bigger names than TBL… How about someone completely left-field - Stephen Fry, maybe? #
- Looking for good user experience testing outfit for testing of new website - anyone got any suggestions? #
- About to embark on the trek back oop North. #
- National Express wifi is playing nicer tonight - no authentication problems. But hell’s teeth, it’s unusably slow #
- Dear god, Peterborough has an ugly station. What *were* they thinking? #
- Feeling slightly sorry for the corporate clone sitting opposite me, who’s fighting with his Dell #
- Getting annoyed with NXEC wifi not caching logins on an iPhone. #
- Home. Open fire. Cats. Beer. #
- Listening to In Our Time. After x series of this, Melvyn Bragg must be the best educated person in the land… #
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Filed under Twitter | Comment (0)links for 2008-02-21
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An unfeasibly cool bookcase built into stairs
Twitter Updates for 2008-02-20
- Good morning, world. What’s changed in the two hours since I was last awake? #
- Yay, Moo stickers have arrived #
- Off to the dentist. By boat. #
- Dental treatment was painless. Dental payment, on the other hand… #
- @johniemoore - Behind you! #
- @johnniemmore - did you find any Future Leaders there? #
- @dominiccampbell @lloyddavis is more of a pudding than a starter, isn’t he? #
- Why do all the interesting things happen when I’m supposed to be on a train going home? #
- Apologising to @lloyddavis for implying that he’s anything other than a main course #
- @dominiccampbell would love to, but Thursday is my "bugger off back up north for the weekend" day
# - Coud cover seems to have cleared -debating with self about trying to catch the eclipse in the wee small hours #
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Filed under Twitter | Comment (0)Headshift are hiring
Headshift are hiring at the moment - in fact we’re almost at the point of having to beat off clients with a stick, so extra pairs of hands would come in really handy right about now.
If you’re a project manager, Rails developer, Confluence guru, CSS god or have mastered the dark arts of UI and IA design, then we’d really, really like to hear from you. We’re nice people that don’t bite, have virtually limitless supplies of organic bananas and chocolate Hobnobs in the office, and we also get to work on some of the coolest cutting-edge social software projects with interesting clients.
Filed under Working smarter | Comments (2)Twitter figleafs
A rather interesting comment cropped up in response to one of my automated delicious postings, and it got me thinking about what Twitter is, and why it’s so successful. Although the central premise of Twitter is simplicity and brevity - “what are you doing right now?”
Part of the appeal is watching how Twitter users bend and subvert those limitations for their own ends - status updates like those generated by Sandy, for example, or the way in which conversations can flow across the “twittersphere” (have I coined a new phrase there, or is that as annoying as blogosphere?)
But despite the deliberately limited nature of the Twitter feature set, the natural inclination on the part of us geeks is to want to extend and improve Twitter with extra features. “Now with tint control”, so to speak.
There were a couple of suggestions that cropped up in Michelle’s comment - one was the idea of a time-to-live for an individual tweet, so it would vanish in a puff of electrons after a given interval of time. Although that’s fundamentally attractive, I actually think it’s potentially undesirable on two counts - firstly that it extends away from the fundamental simplicity of twitter which to me is central to the appeal.
The second reason is that it builds in a false sense of security - that a defined TTL will result in that tweet disappearing. The problem is that anything you say on the web is instantly and irrevocably in the public domain, something that Claire Swire and Max Gogarty are going to be acutely aware of for the foreseeable future (the latter is worth looking at if only for the train wreck of a comments thread that emerges in response to the original post). The only way to be able to reclaim anonymity is to not say it at all, or at least try to self-censor.
Personally I think that our notions of privacy and the overhang of youthful indiscretions are going to have to change, if for no other reason that we’re going to run out of politicians in 20 years time unless the Facebook and Bebo generations realise that there’s no-one who’s not said something online that they later had cause to regret. (A world without politicians? An unexpected positive consequence?)
Personally, I’m not that concerned about exposing my tweets in the sidebar of this blog is that they’re out there anyway through the Twitter site itself. I’m not sure I really understand the rationale of having a private Twitter profile, as it’s only a illusory fig-leaf of security anyway.
Technorati Tags: blogging, geek, twitter
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