Is This Thing On?

And so it is finally here. After 2 1/4 years, almost to the day, my last day at work has finally arrived. It’s certainly been an eventful couple of years. [Hmm, well let’s see, there’s been the 5 rounds of redundancies that I somehow scraped through while holding onto my job (May 2001, August 2001, March 2002, August 2002 and December 2002); the acquisition of the company; the move from Richmond to Putney; oh, and of course a lot of beer.]

In all honesty, though, I can’t say that I’m sad to be going. It’s all very different working here now than it was when I joined. Sure, I arrived just as the party was winding down, so to speak, at the end of the boom, but there was still the occasional outbreak of optimism, a prevailing sense of fun about the place and a bit of cash floating around, for a while at least.

Now I really can’t wait to get going on my new work thing next week, after the obligatory session in the pub (or hopefully out the back of the pub if the weather keeps up) this evening and a nice quiet weekend away…

I don’t know what it is I like most about pub conversations. Maybe it’s the belligerence that sets in around the fourth pint and makes you convinced you are right, and makes you begin to formulate wild assertions with little in the way of fact to support your argument. Last night, I somehow got sucked into an ultimately pointless extended “discussion” with an Australian bloke in the pub about, of all things, copyright law. [Yes I know, but we did talk about football as well, though, so it’s ok.] He said you could claim copyright on an idea. I said that that’s rubbish; you can only copyright the expression of an idea (the book you have written, not the idea for the book you were thinking about writing). Turns out I was right after all (not that I would necessarily be writing about this incident if I hadn’t been, mind), but as I was basing my argument on something I read once, and only half remembered, and as I am not exactly a legal expert, I felt compelled to back down and let it pass around the point that the argument deteriorated to the level of:

Him: “Yes you can.”
Me: “No you can’t, that’s rubbish.”
Him: “Yes you can. Einstein copyrighted E=mc2 and that made him a lot of money. I have a Philosophy PhD; I know all about ideas.” [I am not making this up; he did actually say that.]

You see, it’s so much easier to settle an argument when you have the Internet to hand. If we’d been in the office I could have pointed to any one of a number of sites that explain the UK legal position on this (in particular, that link includes a bit that says: “You should also note that copyright does not protect ideas.”), or the Berne convention and it would have all been settled.

But then, things involving rational thought are much easier when you’re not pissed, aren’t they. Not that I’m bitter, you understand…

Nice implementation of the old George Bush speech creator thing. Sure, it’s been done before, but still entertaining…

Art, meet life. “US promises to take over control… of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk…”.

Why don’t you get your war on. There’s nothing more for me to say, really.

[Apart, perhaps, than to link to this article by Julian Barnes in the Guardian.]

Very interesting article from the Guardian about the whole ticket touts/ebay situation.

Getting into the festival mood this last weekend, I finally got round to looking at the videos from last year’s festivals (cheers Pete!). Managed to spot myself in the crowd on the BBC coverage a couple of times.

This is during The Doves’ “There Goes The Fear”. Fringe benefit of being tall, I guess (oh, and being able to see over other people’s heads is handy too).

Chaos on the trains this morning, for the first time in a while. I didn’t mind, of course, as it’s not like I had anywhere important to get to(!), and it was rather pleasant sitting out on the platform in the sun.

When I arrived at the station, the backlog of trains that had built up was causing the announcement system to go into overdrive. South West Trains introduced their Customer Information System about a year ago across my bit of the network. You know the sort of thing, those electronic boards that tell you when the next train is due, and an automated recorded announcement conveying the same information over the loudspeaker in a comforting generic English accent.

The system works fine when the trains are on time. Unfortunately, it’s not very good at predicting accurate delays when they aren’t. It gives out helpful information, like telling you that your train is expected 5 minutes ago. Also, and I think this is my favourite, when a train comes through your station but isn’t going to stop, the automated announcement over the speakers that you should “please stand clear [as] the next train is not due to stop at this station” quite often occurs after that train has passed through the station at high speed. I’ve often wondered if “South West Trains – Even The Announcements Are Late” might not be a good slogan for their advertising literature.

The other thing that always makes me smile is the fact that this computer system apologies to you when the trains are late. [“I am sorry to announce that the 07:30 service to London Waterloo is delayed by approximately 15 minutes. I am very sorry for the delay to your service.”] I mean, I’ve long suspected that all that “we’re very sorry for the delay to your service” stuff was a bit of a token gesture when it’s made by a human being, but when it’s a computer speaking, it is rather lacking as a gesture on the part of the train company (and, frankly, rather patronising. I’m an hour late for work? Well, the computer apologised to me, so that’s ok then…).

This morning, as I arrived at the station, I was greeted by continual automated loudspeaker announcements about the backlog of delayed trains. The recorded computer announcement was “extremely sorry for the severe delay” to one, but only “very sorry for the delay” to another. And the train I had been due to catch? Well, it was only “sorry for the delay” to that one. Somehow, I feel cheated. I’ll be writing a strongly worded letter, you know…

I suspect that Rob’s latest post is some kind of ironic joke in response to my post below… Then again, maybe he just hasn’t read this.

This list of the top 100 April Fool’s day hoaxes of all time is actually quite entertaining. What struck me while reading through it, though, is just how gullible some people (well, a lot of people actually) can be.

Well, there’s a lesson for anybody forwarding on all those Bill Gates will give you money emails, contemplating joining Cilla Black’s pyramid selling scheme, or sending me that piece from the Weekly World News about the time travelling wall street trader being busted for insider trading.

Oh, and I spotted a couple of good April Fool jokes myself yesterday. The Guardian hid theirs away in the Education section (something about Carole Caplin being appointed the education regulator: “to avoid picking someone with a conflict of interest, we picked someone with no experience or qualifications whatsoever… she’ll be bringing degrees in assisted showering and shopping to the traditional universities…”), and this RFC on setting the “evil bit” in IPv4 communications was doing the rounds at work yesterday. Ok, I admit it, I’m a geek…

Oh, and my favourite one out of the list of hoaxes is #69. It was apparently in The Times in 1991, and discussed a plan to double the capacity of the M25 by making it one way only during the week:

“On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays the traffic would travel clockwise; while on Tuesdays and Thursdays it would travel anti-clockwise.”

Fantastic. Many gullible people protested about this, but my favourite comment was this one: “A resident of Swanley, Kent was quoted as saying, ‘Villagers use the motorway to make shopping trips to Orpington. On some days this will be a journey of two miles, and on others a journey of 117 miles. The scheme is lunatic.'”

Wow. That didn’t take long. Rather glad I got my ticket yesterday, but now that it is sold out (or at least appears to be), I will only be really happy when I have those tickets in my grubby little hands. (That confirmation email is really not enough to satisfy my paranoia that something might have gone wrong…)
Can’t wait though.

By the sounds of it, from reading the forums on the official website, a lot of people have been buying multiple tickets in order to sell their leftovers on ebay and make a tidy profit. [After reports last year of people reselling tickets for several hundreds of pounds just before the event]. There are a load of tickets on offer on ebay, most of which are at double their face value already.

Personally, adopting the moral high ground for a second, I think this is a rather sad indictment of the greed-based society we live in, not to mention totally contrary to the spirit of the festival. I suppose I can only hope that so many extra tickets are floating around that supply actually outstrips demand and drives prices back down closer to face value.

I took Sal up to Bristol this weekend. The weather wasn’t quite as kind to us as it has been recently, but it was still lovely. Wandering around Clifton on a pleasant Saturday afternoon just makes me remember how much I miss the place. I guess you don’t really appreciate it until you leave.

Oh and we visited an extremely sunny Bath on Sunday. Spent some time sitting on the grass by the Royal Crescent… people playing with frisbees… a guy with dreds juggling… the smell of illicit substances being smoked by the gang of 14 year olds behind us…. it’s almost like being at a festival (oh, speaking of which, I just got our Glastonbury tickets. Lovely). In fact, the visit to Bath was only slightly marred by a minor road rage incident when a woman driving her car with the window down pulled up for a second and yelled at me (standing on the edge of the pavement, waiting to cross the road): “why don’t you watch where you’re going?” before driving off and giving me “the finger”.

I’m not sure which part of the pavement she would have had right of way on, so perhaps this was just general advice for the future. I had heard that Bath drivers were pretty ropey, so maybe you’re really not safe on the pavement and she just offers this information to all the visitors she sees around town. Perhaps she shouts other advice out as she cruises around. Things like “visit the roman baths!” and “watch out for pickpockets in the tourist areas!”. Maybe this is a kind of helpful tourettes syndrome.

I really wouldn’t mind, but what bothers me most is that I was so startled by being yelled at from a moving vehicle that I wasn’t able to come up with a witty response, and it was all I could do to reply “why don’t you watch where you’re going?”