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Thanks, thetrainline.com

Published November 14th, 2008 in General. 0 Comments

I’ve just had the worst train journey ever. Let me start at the beginning…

Last weekend, my girlfriend and I booked some train tickets home with thetrainline.com. We used them, because they’re apparently the cheapest place around to book train tickets (I’ve seen no evidence of this, they seem to be the same price as everywhere else).

I’ve booked tickets with them before, and uesd their ‘first class’ delivery system to get them to my door. Well, mailbox anyway.

Because I have an Oyster card, we booked the tickets in stages - Portsmouth to London, London to Ipswich.

We booked this tickets Saturday night when Kat, my girlfriend, was visiting me. Their website says that we should allow up to 5 working days for delivery, which meant that they should have arrived, at the very latest this morning (Friday 14th November), but they didn’t.

Actually, that’s incorrect - half of them didn’t. As it stood, I was able to get from Portsmouth to London, but not any further than that.

We called up the trainline this morning, and they told me that the reason the tickets had no gone through was because the payment had not been accepted, which was odd since the other tickets had (I had booked Kat’s tickets with my card too, and the same had happened for her, she was missing the same tickets). However, the man on the end of the phone assured me that with a valid form of ID, and the booking reference number (which I was sure to check was the one I had just told him) I would be able to go to a kiosk and ask for the tickets, and they would then hand them to me personally.

We had given ourselves an hour to get across London, which seemed fair enough given that it wasn’t rush hour, and we only had to go 9 stops, 8 of which were on the same line. Our train was leaving at 8:00pm, and we arrived at Liverpool street at 7:50, ‘plenty of time’ we naively thought. We walked up to a counter which closed whilst we were in the queue! So we had to move to another queue, where the woman at the counter assured us that they ‘don’t take Visa Electron’. Yes, we said, we know that, but we didn’t book the tickets through you, we got them online and the bastards never sent them. ‘These are not the right numbers’ she said ‘we cannot do anything with these’.

So that was that - we missed our train, and got straight on the phone to thetrainline.com. The man who answered to Kat was very helpful - he got her the right number and was on his way. The woman I got however, was not as helpful. At all. After telling her my story, she did not get the number, and she became increasingly irate, almost shouting at me down the phone. I actually just hung up on her.

The second guy that I called was more helpful - but he would still not give me the number. He insisted on faxing the tickets through, which could take up to 30 minutes. There was another train leaving at 8:30, and by this time it was 8:20. ‘We don’t have 30 minutes’ I explained, and he then guaranteed that it would be with me in 5.

Luckily for him, it was, and we ran to the gate where our train was about to depart. Since it had taken so long for us to get this sorted, Kat had already put her ticket away so that she wouldn’t lose it (trust me ) and so she was trying to get it out. The woman at the gate said ‘are you waiting to get on that train?’

‘Yes’ we answered.

‘Well hurry up then!’, and she scanned the door open. That was pretty rude.

We ran to the train where a nicer man let us on, and here I am now, on the train, writing about our little escapade.

What really pissed me off is how unhelpful thetrainline were about the whole thing, considering that everything that happened is there fault, and no one else’s.

I would recommend to anyone who is looking to book train tickets to use the proper http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/ instead of thetrainline, otherwise you may end up having a story similar to mine.

The nice man behind the counter who I had to deal with the second time, when they were faxed to me, told me that I wasn’t the only person to have had this problem today, and I felt sorry for him because I bet loads of people had given him abuse over it, when really he is not to blame - it’s not even the company he worked for who booked the tickets, he’s just the man who can solve the problem, and he can’t even do that unless a useless, stupid, arsey company give him the information he needs.

And, it’s over

Published November 5th, 2008 in Bite-size posts. 0 Comments

Well election night has been and gone, the votes are in, and Barack Obama has been hailed the winner.

Terrific news, and good job to Obama, but also to all the Americans who voted - not just for Obama, but in total, reports of 130 million voters!

The biggest surprise for me, was when he won Florida.

That’s all for now, so glad.

Oh, as a side note, you should check out this page: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/us_elections_2008/7709978.stm but more specifically check out McCain’s speech - he is saying all of the ordinary things, cogratulations to Obama, comiserrations to us, but somehow it all sounds particuarly genuine, I was pleasently surpirsed.

He sure can give a better speech than bush.

I am in a lecture, but…

Published October 28th, 2008 in Bite-size posts. 2 Comments

I just really felt like making a blog post for some reason.

Don’t panic, we’re having a break right now.

We’re learning all about packets and loss and stuff, it’s the most enthralling stuff in the world.

Ever.

I am serious.

The fact I am here is not proof of the contrary.

Honest.

This past week

Published October 15th, 2008 in General. 0 Comments

It’s been a good week, for many reasons.

Last Friday, I took my first trip home. There was a reason though. The future of web apps conference (FOWA) was on in London, and Diggnation were doing a live show there. Obviously, as soon as my friend told me this, I had to go.

So after navigating the tube system - which I might add was facing tremendous troubles, what with both lines I wanted to take being delayed or closed, and then the DLR seemingly closed entirely in one direction, causing me to change trains several times - I finally arrived at the excel center (that place is huge!) and registered to enter the expo. There I met another one of my friends, and together we wandered around until the third and final member of our little gang turned up.

The expo was pretty fun, but I was a little disappointed with the lack of stuff that was actually there.

But there was something there.

Something very cool:

After this, we all waited around and made use of the free wifi that was provided by MySpace (the only good thing they’ve done, in my eyes) and waited until a sensible time to queue for the show.

The queue was huge. and I am surprised that they managed to fit that many people in the room, to be honest, but it worked and we had a good view of the stage.

There was a huge cheer when Kevin and Alex came out, as you might expect, but there was no bigger cheer than when Alex corrected Kevin’s use of the word ‘elevator’ with the word ‘lift’, causing him to remark ‘you guys are so easy to please!’.

It was a great night, and after the show we went to the ‘Fox’, a bar owned by the excel centre (I believe), where Kevin and Alex were waiting to take photos with the fans (where I happened to get that picture with Simon above - that’s my pride and joy, now).

After the trip home, I got to spend my first weekend at home in a couple of weeks, which was nice, but also felt weird. That said, I can’t wait to go back again, especially for the Christmas holidays.

The tube system was even worse on the trip back - I was on a fairly tight schedule, and the train I was on got stuck at a station because it couldn’t close the doors! Yeah, at least it didn’t get stuck in a tunnel, that could have caused some problems.

I had to run to the next station, which was a long way, especially when you have 3 layers on, and a back pack, you’re not used to any exercise or exertive movement what so ever.

Despite all this, though, I made it back and I am now sitting once more in my Portsmouth room, going to lectures and labs, and actually quite enjoying the whole thing.

So that was my week.

Belated indeed

Published October 9th, 2008 in Bite-size posts. 0 Comments

This is just a short update to let you know that I am still alive, and my poor attempts at cooking have not killed me yet.

Yes, I have finally made the jump from living at home to living at University - so far all is going well, but I have had a couple of really boring lectures, and I already have four pieces of coursework to be worrying about. Still, I suppose everyone is in the same boat.

Even if that boat does happen to be in turbulent waters.

With 40 foot waves.

And some people have life jackets.

And I do not.

I suppose as long as I look out for sharks, or Cthulhu’s I’ll be ok.

The Android … Dream … G1

Published September 25th, 2008 in General. 0 Comments

Well, a couple of days ago T-Mobile announced the G1 (the HTC Dream), the first phone that will run Google’s Android operating system - an open-source platform for mobile phones.

It’s in a similar ilk to the iPhone, a ’super smart-phone’ if you like, and it will have many similar features, such as a web-browser that shows you real pages, not made-for-mobile pages, an application store, and multimedia functionality.

The application store here, tenderly named the ‘Andoid Marketplace’, will allow developers to upload their application for free, and not only that, but I hear talk that they won’t be filtered in anyway (sounds like someone is getting cocky about having an un-hackable system, but that said Linux is very secure), unlike Apple, which means we might get some very interesting applications. One drawback to this, is that I also hear they are relying on third-party developers to give the phone some much needed functionality - mainly the fact that out of the box, the phone will have no video playback (which I assume means it just doesn’t support any codecs). This just seems really weird to me - why would they do this? And think of the average user - are they going to realise that they can just download video playback, or are they just going to be put off of the phone entirely?

I’m very looking forward to Android - I have been playing around with the SDK, and looking at some of the applications that people have begun to develop, and it all looks genuinely exciting (check out Enkin if you want to drool).

I must say though, that even though I am looking forward to Android a lot, the G1 - not so much.

It has a few too many problems for me - it has no headphone jack, and whilst I realise that you can just plug in USB headphones to it instead, that’s not something as readily available as 3.5mm jack headphones (and it’s also not something that the devs can code in after release), and also it has a few performance issues it seems, such as whilst browsing around web pages a little lag is encountered. Many of the problems that I’ve seen with it are neatly summed up in this engadget video.

It’s also not as stylish as the iPhone - yes I know function before fashion, but it has to be said that one thing the iPhone has going for it, is the looks - and it also has the function down too. I’m not sure what made them go with that little bit tilted up at the bottom, surely that just means it’s harder to fit in your pocket.

The phone is set to come out October 22nd in America-land, but in the dear old UK it’s early November, and the rest of Europe is later than that (if TalkAndroid is to be believed).

P.S. My site has been down on and off today, so the last draft or so of this post didn’t get saved, so if there are any unfinished sentences and stuff, sorry about that.

If you’re a developer, and you’re wanting to get into the Android platform, or you just want to play around, the SDK is available at http://code.google.com/android/

Why I have given up with chrome - for now

Published September 23rd, 2008 in Bite-size posts. 0 Comments

I was as excited as anything when Google announced Chrome, and I must admit I still love the browser.

So why, then, have I switched back to Firefox?

It’s not some complex answer, and infact I can boil it down to three basic points:

No plugins - this seems to be the main problem that people have with Chrome, and to be honest it is quite a big one. Chrome has no system to allowing people to build plugins for it, which means that even though it is open source, plugins are no easy task. With so many useful Firefox plugins, such as FoxMarks (weave just died on me, so Foxmarks is a saviour), the Digg Toolbar, Twitterbar, and hundreds of others.
No StumbleUpon - yes, I know this should really come under plugins too, but I missed it so much I figured it should have its own bullet point.
Bad URL bar search - “but James!” I hear you cry, “when you type something into the URL bar in Chrome, it does a google search for you - you love google, right!?” Well yes, concerned citizen, I do love google. My problem, however, is that Firefox handles it much better. Go on, try it now! In Chrome, type ‘google youtube’ There, do you see that? The word ‘google’ has been replaced with a string telling you that a google search will be performed. Nothing wrong with that, eh? In fact, Firefox does exactly the same thing - if you type ‘google youtube’ in the Firefox ‘awesome’ bar, then it will search Google too, and it doesn’t tell you that’s what will happen. But here’s the rub - in Chrome, type ‘youtube’ What happens? It does a search for Youtube, and shows you the google results page. Why? When in Firefox I type it, it gets the top result from Google and takes me there automatically - that, sirs and maddams, is real functionality.

I’m sure I’m just nit picking really - I do really like Chrome, but after having used it solid on my PC since it was released, there are just so many small things that I don’t like about it, that for now at least, I will continue to use Firefox - the greatest browser ever.

Creative Suite 4

Published September 23rd, 2008 in Bite-size posts. 0 Comments

Adobe just announced their new ‘CS4′, the new versions of their software, which adds new features, interfaces etc.

I was just looking through all of the new features (I’m a current user of CS3) too see if there was any reason worth me forking out the money to upgrade. My final conclusion?

Apparently not.

Besides a few updates in Dreamweaver that interest me (but I know I would never use), there was nothing really that I saw which made me want to update. Photoshop seems to be geared, now, towards 3D image manipulation, which is all well and good for someone who wants to do that, but I don’t think that’s most people.

There is one really damned cool feature, though.

I remember about a year ago, Adobe bought out a company who had made some technology, which allowed images to be dynamically stretched or shortened, keeping prominent things in the foreground, such as people, the same width, whilst allowing the background to stretch around them. And it wasn’t just a plain stretch, either - the way that the technology did this, was to add new rows of pixels which almost imitated the background, so to the untrained eye, it looks as if nothing has happened. In fact even trained eyes would have a hard time telling.

Well, they finally managed to put this into Photoshop, and could I think of some practical uses for this, it’s the real sole feature that makes me want to upgrade. Who knows, perhaps CS5 will be better.

I’m not saying that it’s not good software, though - especially for someone who doesn’t have photoshop or anything yet, it’s still worth checking out. Check it! Who knows, maybe there is something there that will tickle your fancy.

My hideous, hideous creations

Published September 13th, 2008 in Bite-size posts. 0 Comments

Sorry to any species out there that actually look like this, but you are a bit on the ugly side. I’m sure I’m not the first to say it.

Anyway, these are the creatures I play as in Spore (I had to make another game for the space age, I messed up a lot…), it would be interesting to know if any of these creatures have turned up in your game, possibly:

Cromin

Bedeye

That’s Genius!

Published September 11th, 2008 in Bite-size posts. 0 Comments

I love the new iTunes (and iPod) feature, Genius, which automatically makes playlists (and in the case of iTunes, recommendations from the store) of the songs in your libaray that go well together. I wouldn’t even want to fathom at the algorithm that makes this work, but it does work, and that’s the most important thing.

And yes, it makes me spend more money.