Time Flies

I was thinking yesterday, in two months time everything will have changed. In that time, I’m hoping to have moved, sorted a new job, (and started it) got through the Festering Season™, and be getting started on a few other things too.

I’m in the process now of sending out CVs and going for jobs – that really is the priority out of everything. Then it’s going to be looking at places in Berkshire. Scary, but true.

Train Travel – Derailment

Unless you were living in a hole in the desert this weekend, you wouldn’t have been able to miss the stories about the train that derailed in Berkshire having hit a car stopped at an unmanned level crossing.

As regular readers will know, I do a lot of travelling by train (for my sins) so I thought I’d have a bit of a waffle about this one. There’s already been a fair amount of media hysteria regarding this derailment – sorry, but I refuse to call it a “disaster” as they do. Yes, seven people died, and that’s always sad, perhaps even a tragedy, but it’s not a disaster. If even 50% of the people on the train had been killed, that might have made it a disaster, but seven out of several hundred just – well, it just isn’t a disaster. Sorry, but there we go.

The other piece of hysteria was about train safety. Now again, this one’s really a non-starter. Any train travelling at a decent speed is going to derail when it hits something solid and immovable like a car. It’s simple physics – bloody big heavy train going at decent speed has a lot of inertia, momentum, and energy, and when it all comes to a sudden halt, that energy has to go somewhere. I suppose you could make trains safer by making them go slower, but God knows, they’ve enough problems as it is. And how the hell do you stop someone who’s determined to do something like this?

To me – and admittedly, I know keff all except what’s come through the media – this looks like someone attempting to commit suicide by train. Some pundits have raised the great bogeyman of Terrorism, but I don’t think so – it wasn’t on a busy line, nor has it had a huge knock-on effect on train services except to a small section of the country. If it were a terrorist event, they’d have plunged a car onto one of the main London lines, or maybe around Birmingham New Street somewhere – it would be big, and have a huge knock-on disruptive effect, which doesn’t apply in this case at all. So to me it looks like a suicide, and again that’s incredibly sad. All but one of the other recent train incidents have involved something to do with maintenance, with something that is corporately culpable – but how can you prevent one determined person from killing themselves like this?

Simply put, you can’t. Short of removing every single level-crossing from the train network, and I don’t even want to consider how much that would cost, let alone the disruption to services while each crossing is removed, and a tunnel under the tracks dug so that cars can travel under the tracks. It would easily be in the billions, if not tens of. Personally I don’t like the half-barrier crossings, but even if the barriers on this particularl crossing had been full-length, thay wouldn’t have prevented an incident where a car was stopped between them.

As it is, the train safety mechanisms appear to have worked, as did the plans of the emergency services. The passengers escaped through windows, exactly as per the instructions given on every train. From the sound of it, all the passengers were seated, and that will have had an effect on the casualty figures too – I dread to imagine what it would have been like if it had been a train like the ones I regularly travel on, where the carriages are rigid with standing passengers as well.

We seem to need scapegoats in events like this, people to blame for their corporate negligence, or for the safety records. In this case, I honestly can’t see that there really is any blame to be apportioned, with the exception of the car’s driver. And if it was a “suicide by train”, then that particular person is already beyond the reach of recriminations.

Landmark Trust – Prospect Tower

To sum it up in one word – Wow. Pictures are going to follow, but for now, just a quick bit about the place.

I’d found out about the Landmark Trust earlier this year, and sent off for their “Handbook”, a brochure of all the properties they’ve renovated and now rent out for weekends or week-long breaks. Every property is quirky and unique, with a lot of towers and ex-follys in their portfolio, all of which have been restored and made habitable, while retaining as many of the quirks, features, and design as possible. The properties aren’t cheap, but they’re also not a run-of-the-mill standard hotel room – really I suppose it’s a case of the old adage, “You pays yer money and takes yer choice”.

Prospect Tower was a perfect case in point. Situated on the Belmont Estate in Kent, between Faversham and Ashford, it’s a small two-storey tower that used to be a folly. It was also used as a cricket changing-room, and there’s an old cricket-pitch in the field outside. A lot of the pictures inside the tower reflect the cricket heritage of the place, but it’s not a relevant factor to the atmosphere of the place.

In fact, the Tower was wonderful, and the quality of it all was absolutely superb. I’m completely impressed with the entire thing, and know it’s only the first of our many visits to Landmark Trust properties – we’re already looking through the Brochure again to work out where else we want to book in 2005.

Growing Up

Tomorrow is birthday stuff, and I’ll be away for the weekend.

Folded in your fleshy purse
i am floating once again
while the muted sounds are pumping rhythm
all the walls close in on me
pressure’s building wave on wave
till the water breaks – and outside i go, oh

one dot, that’s on or off, defines what is and what is not, one dot
two dot, a pair of eyes, a voice, a touch, complete surprise, two dot
growing up, growing up,
looking for a place to live
growing up, growing up,
looking for a place to live
growing up, growing up,
looking for a place to live

my ghost likes to travel so far in the unknown
my ghost likes to travel so deep into your space

three dot, a trinity, a way to map the universe
three dot
four dot, is what will make a square, a bed to build on, it’s all there, four dot

©Peter Gabriel 2002/3 “Up” album

See you all on Tuesday when I get back.

Barred from Blogging

(partly inspired by Graybo’s post about the same thing)

So, Queen of the Sky has been sacked by her employer, the illustrious Delta Airlines following the photos she posted of her – in uniform – posing on a Delta plane. According to Delta, “there were “very clear rules” attached to the unauthorised use of Delta branding, including uniforms” which, of course, is what this comes under. I don’t know if there was also an issue about her showing her “wings” in one photo, or a part of her bra in another – and lets bear in mind here that the US still has enough of a puritan nature to get offended by the sight of a breast on TV – but whatever else caused the corporate fit-flinging, she did these photos while in the uniform of her employer.

I must admit, I don’t have a problem with this, per se. She broke the constraints of her contract with Delta, and that almost certainly comes under “misconduct” if nothing else. Yes, there are also issues regarding personal time, privacy in regard to the fact that most of what she wrote about didn’t involve work, blah blah blah – but I think that also this is a case of reaping what’s been sown. If those photos hadn’t been posted up, Queen of the Sky would still be writing her blog – in fact, she is doing so anyway – but she’d still be employed by Delta. It was the “in uniform” photos that destroyed it, and made her uniquely identifiable.

It was pointed out to me that some Google searches for my employer bring up d4d™ at the top of the list – although it’s not when just the employer’s name is typed in, there needs to be something else as well (normally an obscenity *grin*) in order to bring up d4d™. In the context of this, I’m not sure how I feel – I possibly should be slightly worried, but I’m not. I know I’ll be more careful in future, but at the same time I haven’t broken any of the terms of my contract by writing – and at no point has the employer’s name been used, although it can be found by a combination of words on occasion.

However, if someone were to try sacking me for writing about my employers, I suspect I’d probably accept it, with a kind of “mea culpa” response.

Godlike

One department of this illustrious bunch of smegheads has just forked out a respectable amount of money on a piece of training software dealing with the Freedom of Information Act, which is supposed to go on the intranet.

It’s a piece of shite, and doesn’t actually fulfil most of the standards required of it by the IT department, such as not working in the default web browser (although in fairness they’re so archaic that the default browser is Netscape 4.7, which is now about four or five years old) and was supposed to write information to an Access database on who has successfully completed the form. Now, that’s a no-no, even on the Intranet, so they were trying to find a way to move the Access database to SQL Server.

“Well why not just rewrite the page so it sends an email saying ‘xyz has completed the training successfully and answered all the questions?‘ quoth I. “That way the person in charge of this farce piece of crap can keep records, rather than suddenly asking us in six months time what is in the database they have no access to.“

“Oooh, nice idea,” quoth they, “can you do that?”

It’s taken half an hour to rewrite, upload to the intranet, and test. All working fine. Now I just need to make out it’s taken several more hours than it has…

She’s Back!

And as birthday presents go (oh, and thanks, Karen & Pete for the surprise arrival from Amazon – it’s perfect and I’ll read it when I get back!) seeing the return of Sarah comes pretty high on the list.

She’s been off to Greece for the last six months or so (well, it feels like it, anyway) and it’s good to see her back in the UK. Now, about that blogmeet?