The road to...

I've been driving to work so far this week (although from tomorrow I'll be once again braving the trains) which is fortunate because my entire train line, along with others, has been closed since Monday with only a few hours' notice beforehand. Oh, there is a replacement shuttle service, but it's only operating from a little way the other side of my first connecting station to a long way the other side of my connecting station. There are no trains to get me to Woking, no trains to get me to Farnborough, and no alternative route.

(Incidentally, I visited an online journey planner, entered in the relevant details, and found that it had no information whatsoever about cancellations or delays of any sort. So I went to South West Trains' website and used their journey planner instead only to find that it uses TheTrainLine, which told me exactly the same thing; to use my normal route. I'm not impressed.)

So, driving seemed like the sensible option. Of course, Monday was when the two years of major roadworks on our stretch of the M25 began (there's a big sign after junction 11 saying "Delays until Dec 2005"), which was the cause of much fun and slowing to a crawl. My twenty-mile drive took me 75 minutes both Monday and yesterday, an average of just over 15mph. Strange as it may seem, I'm really glad I'm a train-commuter, and don't have to put up with that every day.

And yes, it takes even longer travelling by train - about an hour and a half door-to-door, if there's no delays - but the difference is that I get to read, relax and listen to my iPod for that time. Much nicer.

All hooked up

The recent big news at home is that, since the XP install on the other computer we finally have our home network up and running. Because it was us, the most distressing part of it all turned out to be choosing names for the computers. We're not a naming kind of family, evidently. Luckily we didn't have to go through the trauma of naming our cat, since we got her from an RSCPA shelter some years ago.

We used to refer to the other computer as the Fujitsu, as that's what it originally was, but since then every single component apart from the floppy disk drive has been replaced (including the case). Thusly, though it's still the same computer, it's no longer a Fujitsu. For the past couple of years it's been known as "the one by the window", but that's screwed up now because the computers have been swapped around.

From the above, it's obviously a supremely good thing that we've been forced to identify the two in a proper manner, else we couldn't have coped. We would have been stuck forever forlornly struggling with, "the one on the left - no, I mean the one that used to be on the left...".

Eventually we decided to distinguish the computers by their respective monitors, which seems sensible. So from the TFT screen came the name Tuftie, and CRT we got Cretin. Mum's laptop was named Tosh according to its manufacturer.

I like these names :-)

Thankfully, our modem problems (which I mentioned in November) disappeared along with the introduction of our new wireless router, although to be honest I'm not entirely certain they were related. What happened was that, for the six weeks or so of our dodgy internet connection, the connection would idle after an apparently random time period between about 20 minutes and 40 seconds. A couple of times we had a freak evening with three hours or more of connectivity, and we had a handful of about one-hour connections. (The modem didn't disconnect, it just stopped responding. So, disconnect, reconnect - I had to have the Dial shortcut on my Quicklaunch bar, since it was by far my most frequently used shortcut).

Of course, BT claimed it was nothing to do with them (well, eventually - after I'd spent three or four hours on the phone to them) and told us to buy a new modem. Luckily we'd already ordered the router from Amazon at the beginning of November, and so we were just waiting for that.

It arrived last week.

We duly installed it as quickly as we could, and everything was sunshine and roses. But even with the old modem, the performance had been slowly improving a little, and for the previous three days I hadn't had to disconnect once. So I'm still suspicious that it was something to do with the BT line, and it's just odd that it was apparently triggered by our installing XP the first time.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean for this to turn into a vent-your-bitterness article...

Anyway, the upshot is that we have networks, we have printers, we have yet to set up Cretin as the central computer that Tutftie grabs the Documents and Settings from (My Docs, Desktop, Favorites and so on...) but give us time :-)

Bloglines the saviour, usurped

For many months after I started blogging (over a year now, by the way), I always read through my blogroll by visiting people's individual sites and then going through all the new posts I hadn't seen. In reverse order to that in which they are displayed, naturally, so that I'd read them chronologically.

When I became more clueful I started using blo.gs to tell me which weblogs had new posts, which simply avoided my visiting any that hadn't updated. What it didn't avoid was my refreshing blo.gs every ten minutes or so, 'just in case', but that's another story. I believe at some point I had a curious look at a desktop RSS aggregator, mainly to see what all the fuss was about, but it didn't make much of an impression on me. Truth be told, I can't even remember which one it was.

So I continued with checking my sites individually until full-time work began, and clobbered my free time around the head with a big stick. Time-wise, when it came down to "Switch to an aggregator or say goodbye to half your blogroll", I was forced into hunting for a friendly one that I could use.

This was about the time that Bloglines came out. Spurred on by the enthusiastic reports bouncing in from all corners of the world of blogs (I still refuse to say 'blogosphere'), I gave it a go and loved it for its simplicity (really, quite a key factor for me) and the very fact that it was web-based. Web-based means:

• I don't have to have Eudora and iTunes and Firebird and mIRC and my aggregator all open at once, and keep flicking between the last four. (Because flicking between three programs, and lots of tabs, is just so much better, y'know?)
• When there are links to investigate, it's easy to open it in a new tab, in the background without interrupting the sentence I'm reading.
• Similar to the above, and just reinforcing the fact that I'm using Firebird for this - for people such as Gert and Iona who a) don't have full feeds and b) write lots, I can choose 'Open all links in new tabs' from my context menu, and have all the individual archive entries open ready for me to read them.
• I can read articles from other places - such as, oh, I don't know, Essex - and still have my aggregator in sync.
• With all the (numerous) installations and reinstallations of XP over the last couple of months, plus the fact that we now have two internet (and therefore 'general use') machines, it's been one little bit of hassle less.

Amongst the bad points is that it's all-or-nothing - you're shown the number of new entries for that weblog in the left frame, you click and they all appear in the right. At that point, Bloglines deems that you've read them all. Now, there is a 'Mark as unread' function, but that indiscriminantly marks the whole frame as unread, rather than allowing for individual items. This is why when I saw "Neil Gaiman's journal (6)", I shied away from the feed, reasoning that he has a tendency to write long articles, and six of them would take up a good 15 minutes of my time all by themselves.

Six weeks later, and it says "Neil Gaiman (41)". Now I'm trying to find a couple of hours to devote to him, and wondering treacherously whether I could just skip some.

In the evenings I can't clear out my whole blogroll, so I've tended to be selective. This led to my mentally categorising all the weblogs, so that I could plough through a category at a time and still feel satisfied that I'd at least got to the end of something. And then last Thursday, when the addition of twenty-odd webcomics feeds brought my total number of subscriptions up to more than 70, I investigated Bloglines' features - finally! - and found that you can sort your feeds into folders.

So I now have 'Cool blogs' (ie. the ones whose entries I want to read as soon as they're written), 'Short posts' (very tempting for feeling that I'm saving time), 'Long posts' (which, regrettably, are now even more of a target for just being left alone), 'Linklogs' (I have far too many of these... they've had to replace my general internet surfing which used to happen), 'Announcements' (Bloghosts and MT news), 'Comics' (which I'm hoping I can now keep up with) and 'Dormant' (Mike, who I'm hoping may still write the occasional entry, and Phil Ringnalda, who hadn't blogged since the beginning of October and then gratifyingly started again the day after he was placed in this folder. I'll have to move him now).

And no, I'm not telling who are my 'cool blogs' ;-)

Of course, the downside to grouping by folder was that I then went back to the main screen and saw "Long posts (95), Linklogs (105), Comics (635)", which frightened the living daylights out of me.

This entry was initially titled just 'Bloglines, the saviour', because initially this entry was going to consist of just what I've written so far - I started it at the end of last week, and then was cruelly interrupted by the weekend - but then I started getting rather irritated by the poor performance of the Bloglines servers, which seem to produce a timeout rather frequently. I had a look to see if I could donate so they could upgrade (don't look at me like that. Eternal optimist, that's me) but I couldn't see anywhere to give money to them, and indeed, I can't see how they're making any money - no adverts, even.

So, I was prompted once more into trying a desktop aggregator with my Bloglines-exported OPML file. NewzCrawler, which I'll probably stay with unless I dislike it to the extent that I won't pay a small amount to register it (half-price until the end of January, you know...). From the look of it though, once I've bullied it into submission, the two of us should get along fine.

The art of holding doors

(With apologies to Mark for petty theft of the theme.)

It seems that there is a subtle art to holding doors open for people which sadly seems to have passed many by completely. The application of erroneous or faulty door-holding techniques can be the cause of many an upset and irritation.

When I started working for my company, one thing that struck me was the sheer number of people who would hold doors open for others. These people spring into action, leaping for the door and standing gallantly aside to let you walk through.

Although it's not always as simple as that.

When holding doors for others

Now, with a few exceptions for special cases, there are four general situations you will find yourself in as a holder of doors depending on whether:

• You and the holdee (person for whom the door will be held) are approaching the door from
  • opposite directions
  • the same direction (holdee is behind you)
• the door opens
  • towards you
  • away from you

Opposite directions, opening towards you

Okay, this is the simple one. Everyone knows this. If you're a practising door-holder, and want to work your way up to more complicated setups, start with this one. You open the door, hold it to allow the other person to go through first, and then follow them through. See? Easy.

The same direction, opening towards you

This is slightly more liable to be messed up, but it's essentially still as above. Open door, hold it and stand aside to let the other person through. Just make sure you don't stop too suddenly, since you don't want the holdee to bump into you.

The same direction, opening away from you

Slightly tricker. Maybe you shouldn't attempt this until you're thoroughly confident with the first two. What many people grasp about holding doors for others is that the main point is to let them go through first. Hence a common mistake made in this situation is to push open the door (away from you) and then stand there slightly awkwardly, your arm pressed flat against the door to keep it open, and inadvertantly blocking the doorway while you're at it. The holdee will then have to delicately push past you.

The correct way to execute this is to open the door, go through it yourself first, and then to hold the door opening whilst standing on the other side, where you will be out of the way. Take heed.

Note also that it is perfectly permissible to walk through and push open the door in order to let the other person take it from you as they walk through. Nothing wrong with that. It doesn't hold up the process at all. The only thing is, it's not in the classical definition of "holding a door for someone". I'm not saying that you can't use this method, or that it's less polite at all, but if you are training in the art of holding doors for people, you should be aware that this method will not pass muster.

Opposite directions, opening away from you

Now this combination perhaps requires the most skill. As above, what you don't want to do is to push open the door and force the other person to push past you. What, in fact, you should do is to (again) go through the door first, step quickly out of the way of the holdee and keep the door open whilst standing to one side of it. It can be tough going since you'll have to spot the holdee approaching from the other side of the door (note: this is much easier if the door is made of glass or some other transparent material) and preferably get through it and out of the way before they begin to slow down. This can take many minutes in training but if done skilfully will be the object of much appreciation.

Special cases

• Guided tours - when being taken on a guided tour last year sometime, I noticed that some people don't seem to have grasped the basic principles involved in holding doors. Of the three people that day who opened doors for me one did it correctly, the second had evidently gathered that 'holding the door for people' means letting them go first - each time we came to a door he stood back and let me open the door and walk through it first - and a third (who was actually conducting the tour) would dart forward to open the door, stand back and let me walk through first. All good and well in principle, but the simple fact was that I had no idea where I was going, never having been in the building before. So I would then stand on the other side, wait for him to come through and get in front of me again so that he could lead and I could follow him. Not ideal.

  So if you're conducting a guided tour (or, at least, are supposed to be leading the party), try and make sure that you go through the door first so that you can resume your tour, safely and without interruption, on the other side. The alternative method mentioned under "The same direction, opening away from you," is ideal for this particular situation.

• Nice as it's intended to be, don't hold the door when the other person is about ten seconds away from it. Else what happens is something akin to the following:

  the holdee notices that the holder is waiting patiently at the door. Not wishing to inconvenience them for any longer than is necessary (what with them being so considerate an' all), the holdee suddenly feels under obligation to reach the door as quickly as possible. From having been strolling leisurely, they break into a strange little trot (which is rendered all the more so because they are in smart work clothes) halfway between walking and running.

  The holder will be grateful, and will think, "Oh, how nice. I'm saving them time, they're saving me time. How wonderfully cooperative." The holdee, however, will think, "Damn them... I was walking quite happily at my own pace, and I wasn't really stressing too much about having to open the door all by myself once I got there, but now I have to start trotting and trying not to look silly whilst, and smile at the same time as if I'm supremely grateful for this."

  Holders everywhere, take note - it's just damn annoying if we have to speed up a lot just to catch up with you.

When a door has been held for you

Smile, and say thank you. Or I'll kill you.

Weather with you

We were all warned days and days ago that this week would bring an unexpectedly cold snap, the like of which we in the south of England hadn't seen for many years. At the weekend, however, we had glorious sunshine round our way - a little chilly, but still a lot milder than you'd expect for January. So to be honest, I personally had little faith in the reports of imminent snow and ice heading our way.

Wednesday was when the weather purported to be at its worst, but again we had sunshine and almost clear blue skies, prompting a beautiful sunset just as I left work. It wasn't even cold enough for me to do my coat up (although this was the big thick heavy oh-it's-really-really-winter-now coat, and since it wasn't actually snowing...).

I thought we'd got away with it.

As the minibus was travelling to the train station, I saw a big (and silent) flash in the sky. Until the second one a short while later, I didn't really click that it had been a great sheet of lightning. Still, there was no sign of anything falling from the skies.

When we were three minutes away from the station there was suddenly the most almighty thundering from the roof. I looked up, startled out of my reverie by the terrific noise, and realised that it was hailstones throwing themselves down to the ground. Looking out the window, in less than five seconds - literally - a fierce blizzard of snow had whipped up, so thick that I couldn't see across the adjacent carpark. It was incredible.

As a consequence, all the trains were delayed (not unexpectedly), but on the plus side we had a more interesting excuse than normal: "The train is being delayed between Basingstoke and Hook due to the signalling equipment at Hook being struck by lightning." Just waiting around for trains doubled my journey time home to two hours, just to travel twenty miles.

Still, we did get off fairly lightly in comparison with the rest of the country. What's strange though is that almost every account I've read of the suddenly violent weather on Wednesday evening has mentioned precisely two flashes of lightning, although at differing times and places. Am I the only one who finds this odd?

That was also my second meteorological phenomenon this month - after lashing rain and blowy weather earlier this month (which I had to drive through, naturlich), I was rewarded with an utterly spectacular rainbow - not content with being incredibly bright, and a double one to boot (there were signs of a third arc - you could trace out in the air where it would be, but no colours were visible), the primary arc was in fact a full semicircle right down to the ground at each end. Stunning.

The whole thing

I was driving home from Salisbury last week, as I tend to do, and speeding along the M3 (well, not speeding, of course. Just, y'know, speeding merrily) when we all suddenly slowed down to 20mph in about five seconds flat. Two separate accidents had occurred earlier, on opposite sides of the motorway but at the same spot - apparently, the driver of the second car had been gawping at the burnt-out first car - and so I switched on the Traffic Announcement on the car radio and settled down, glumly resigned to crawling along for the next couple of miles or so.

(Traffic Announcement, for those who don't know, is a nifty little feature that means you can still listen to your CDs, etc. without having to worry about finding a radio station with traffic news on. When travel news comes on, the feature kicks in and interrupts your CD to let you listen to the alert. Once it's over, you are returned to your CD without having to lift a finger. It can be quite useful.)

I forgot to turn it off, and when I was some way towards home and waiting for a train to go through at a level crossing, another alert came on. "Weybridge, Surrey," they said. 'Oh, really,' I thought, since that's where I live. "Road Bxxx, Oatlands Drive, and Monument Hill," they said. 'Oh, really?' I thought, since that's incredibly close to where I live. "A ten-foot hole has appeared in the road..." 'Oh, really?' I thought.

A ten-foot hole has suddenly opened in the road a couple of miles from my house. (Well, there was a photo of it in the local paper yesterday, and I think someone was exaggerating slightly, but never mind.) To tell the truth, since that's one of two ways I would have gone home that night, I was almost tempted to drive up there anyway just to have a look. Instead though, I came home the sensible way, told the news to my parents and enjoyed the look on their faces.

A mug's game

Last week, in a fit of enthusiasm, I ordered the first series of Black Books on DVD from Amazon. I only ever saw the second series (which is one of the few comedies ever to literally have me in hysterics) and I've been assured that the first is even better - I gave up hope of Channel 4 ever repeating it, so on the wishlist it went.

Noting that Amazon were still running their Super Saver Delivery (free postage if your order is over £25) I hunted around through their January sale offers and found two books to add to the basket, bringing my total up to the required amount. Now, two of these three items had a 'within 24 hours' availability; the other had '2-3 days'. I was therefore slightly puzzled when told that the estimated dispatch would be in six days' time, but shrugged it off.

It came to Wednesday of this week, the initial estimated delivery date, and no sign. So I checked on Amazon and found that the third item's availability had changed to '28th January - 12th February'. Ah. That's the one I need quite soon.

I started trying to hunt around online bookshops before realising that, off the top of my head, I wasn't familiar with any except for Amazon. Checking with Ottakar's revealed that they don't sell any books online, Waterstone's are of course teamed up with Amazon, what was Hammicks is now Ottakar's, BOL.com had never heard of this particular book, and it seemed that I was left with WHSmith.

WHSmith sell books at the RRP (instead of at a discounted rate like Amazon do), which meant an additional £2 there and then; and of course I'd now have to pay their postage rate as well. Adding insult to injury was the realisation that by cancelling the item from my Amazon order, I would bring my order total to just below £25, and thereby disqualify myself from free postage.

I sighed and handed over the money, an extra £8.50 in all, which was more than the (Amazon) price of the book.

Go on, call me an idiot.

Slip slidin' away

Yesterday morning saw me driving seventy miles to work in Salisbury in the aftermath of the previous day's snow which, because this is southern Britain, had turned to slush and then ice in the low temperatures overnight. Not taking any chances (since this was, in fact, the first time I'd driven on proper ice), I spent a good 10-15 minutes scraping all the car windows and windscreen wipers clear while it was -4°before setting off.

The first 30-40 miles were fine, being mostly on the M3 and then the A303. My windscreen was completely clear, but then fine snow particles started to appear on it - it eventually it got bad enough that I needed to get rid of them. I'd been warned not to use my windscreen washer fluid since it was still a few degrees below freezing, so I tried just the wipers. They juddered across the glass due to the lack of moisture, and made it much worse. A few minutes later I tried the washer fluid anyway, but of course, nothing came out due to it having frozen solid.

I remembered a little parking layby a couple of miles along the A303, and pulled over when I got there. It was at this point, while I was slowing down, when I found to my surprise that I wasn't stopping. There weren't any other cars in front of me and I was curiously calm about this: "Oh, I'm not stopping. Oh look, I'm still not stopping. Hmm." The car bounced slightly off the kerb before coming to a halt.

I got out with my trusty scraper in a futile attempt to scrape some of the stuff off my windscreen. Nothing doing. It stayed resolutely stuck there. It evidently needed to be washed off.

An idea struck me and I took some ice from the roof of the car, pressed it against the sponge part of the scraper and started wiping it across the windscreen. Genius! I got back in and could see things once more.

Things were fine until I got onto the A30, which is a relatively small and countryish main road, although national speed limit. There had been no gritters, few cars along it, and there are hedges on either side of the initial stretch of 10 miles or so, which meant no sun to melt any of the ice that paved the road surface.

I and the cars in front of me were trundling along at about 30mph which was okay since the road is a straight line for five miles (albeit one that goes up and down a lot). We passed a car that had gone off the side and into a slight snowdrift; I believe we all slowed down at that point.

We came to a corner, and then saw in front of us a load of cars stopped dead. We braked gently, except that I possibly didn't brake gently enough - I ended up not stopping, sliding to the right, and doing almost a 180° spin at about 10mph. Luckily the cars on the opposite side of the road were also stopped dead, since they were sorting out someone else who'd slid off the side.

Everything would have been fine, but as I was doing my 73-point turn to get round the right way again one of my rear wheels went into a dip off the edge of the road, and this resulted in almost a minute of panicky wheel-spinning and high revving before I got out again and back on the road properly (just as someone had started coming across to help me).

After that, it was slow going to say the least. For the next five or ten miles, we alternated between crawling along at less than 5mph and stopping for minutes at a time, just because so many cars had slid off the side of the road all the way along and needed pushing. I didn't see any crashed or stranded cars, most likely because the ones that had gone off were only moving at snail's pace, but it did hold us up hugely. It took an hour just for that stretch.

We eventually got back onto more main roads which had been gritted, and where the ice was all-but gone, but we were still driving at about half-speed all the way. I finally, eventually got to work at 10:40am, three hours after having set off (the usual journey time is about 1 hour 40 mins). Not a happy bunny. I even left work at 2:30pm just to ensure that I got all the way back home in daylight (which I did by quite a long shot, since I took a different route back and just about all of the ice had melted by then).

Today I worked at Farnborough instead, and went by train.

Thwarted, again

A number of you will know, I hate phones. Mobile phones more specifically. I refuse to spend any significant amount of money on them. My first mobile (disguised as a brick with the word 'Siemens' on it) was secondhand from a friend of my brother's; I paid a tenner for it and barely used it.

My second mobile, bought last year once The Brick became too shameful even for me, I spent even less on - I managed to combine about three special offers from Virgin Mobile, and so paid £30 for a phone that came with £5 of airtime and £30 in airtime vouchers. That was five months ago, and I haven't spent a penny since.

Once I reached work yesterday, I phoned Mum from the carpark and, a couple of minutes later, was startled by a voice saying, "One minute left". I had thought that the balance was rather low, so I hung up hastily.

Thinking that the most sensible thing to do was to get some money on it as quickly as possible (I had worrying visions of more accidents on the ice) I withdrew my credit card and phoned the number.

Ring, ring. "Thank you for calling Virgin Mobile. Your total balance is - three - pence." 'Ah,' I thought. 'That's about a minute's worth, then?' "If you'd like to top up your balance with vouchers, press one. If you'd like to top up with a credit card that you've used with us before, press two. If you'd like to top up with a credit card that you haven't registered with us, press three."

I pressed three.

"Thank you. You will now be transferred to an assistant who will take your details and allow you to top up your airtime balance. This call will be charged at a flat rate of ten pence."

Defeated, I hung up.

I'll buy vouchers tomorrow.