Parking Woes

This morning's journey to work is a tale of astonishing muppetry. Your correspondent makes it to the station (Southampton Airport Parkway, in case you're interested) with moments to spare and walks briskly to the platform where the train is, even now, drawing in. With a flourish, he claims his seat in an otherwise fairly empty carriage and whips out his laptop for a spot of prototype review work.

His joy is short-lived, however, as he realises that he has forgotten to renew his parking ticket and is thus risking an £80 fine from the ever-vigilant station authorities. But what to do? The train has left the station; his wife is unlikely to welcome a summons to buy a parking ticket, and the thought of an £80 fine is distinctly unsettling. Inspiration strikes - he will get off at Winchester and take the train back to SAP, buy a ticket, then grab the first fast train to Waterloo!

This otherwise excellent plan is easier to state than execute. The next train to SAP doesn't leave Winchester for at least 30 minutes - an unwanted delay. There is, however, a train to Eastleigh, one stop up the line from SAP, from where another train might readily be procured for the extra mile to SAP. Happy again, he hops on the Eastleigh train and relaxes.

By now, of course, you will have realised that your correspondent's character and the timetable of South West Trains are conspiring to thwart and punish our hero. The next train to SAP is running late, will not arrive for another 18 minutes and is, as it turns out, the previously mentioned and refused train from Winchester! Cruel fate, what is a chap to do?

Waiting at a station for an already delayed train (3 minutes only, but SWT have been known to stretch a 3 minute wait almost beyond bearing) is a mug's game; without further ado, your correspondent heads of on foot for the nearby SAP station.

20 minutes later, as SAP station at last comes into view, the train from Eastleigh (and Winchester) overtakes our intrepid walker and pulls into the platform, disgorging rested travellers and collecting non-walkers to speed them on their way. Weary and bedraggled from his long trek, our walker must now hike the length of the car park to buy the fabled parking ticket of Antioch before he can trudge back to his faithful steed and post said ticket in the windscreen.

Finally, exactly an hour after first arriving at SAP, your fearless explorer is back where he started, waiting for the 08:08 fast train to Waterloo. He's tried the 07:08, it wasn't bad, but the 08:08 might be even better. If only he'd stopped at the cashpoint in Eastleigh (the one conveniently positioned opposite the station exit) he could have sated his now raging thirst with an undrinkable railway coffee. Fate, and the parking inspector, can be mighty cruel.

Edit: Of course, the "fast" 08:08 services stops, completely unnecessarily in my opinion, at Basingstoke, Woking and Clapham Junction, eventually arriving at Waterloo at about 09:20.

Athletics

I'm not normally a fan of athletics, but while installing my replacement TV (the previous one went pop on Sunday evening) I chanced across the final of the Women's 400m at the World Championships. An historic race, with Christine Ohuruogu and Nicola Sanders taking gold and silver for Britain; great stuff!

Easy Pilgrimage

In a move sure to be watched by other discount airlines, the Vatican has announced an expansion of its Easy Pilgrimage operation with new flights to Lourdes, Santiago de Compostela and Jerusalem (full story here). I may be a God-less free-thinker, but isn't the point of pilgrimage to demonstrate your faith by undertaking a difficult, unpleasant and potentially dangerous journey to a point of worship in a far-off land? The Catholic church appears to be saying that quantity (number of pilgrims) is more important than quality (devoutness of individual pilgrims).


If they find things are really too easy, they could always outsource their operations to an Irish budget airline and insist that all flights go through Heathrow; that would sort the men from the boys!

August

August draws to a close again, much as it always does. The bank holiday weather was better than expected, and we had a great time visiting friends in Essex, but the rest of the month's weather was, frankly, pants and I'm not expecting September to be an improvement. We're off to Cornwall for a week next month and I'm confidently predicting record rain and possibly storms of life-threatening proportions.

Advertising Flights

I have never flown with Ryanair (partly because their "special offers" have always sold out when I check their website) but they have a certain reputation for customer service. Their advertising often offers spectacular prices and makes fantastic claims; according to this story from the BBC, the Advertising Standards Agency agree.

MS Office 2007

I have been using Micro soft Office 2007 for a couple of months and, in general, I am impressed. Many of the changes are cosmetic but there are also some really nice improvements (the table auto-formatting in Excel, the near-text format box in Word) that ease everyday use of the product.

There are also things I don’t like, like the way that the cursor jumps between pages 1 and 3 in Word if you display two pages side-by-side. I don’t remember this happening in previous versions, and it is frustrating to be unable to key to the next page. Page Up and Page Down behave in a similar fashion, so the application is consistently annoying and, for me, it reduces the usefulness of simultaneous display of two pages.

The Bourne Ultimatum

We went to see the third instalment of Robert Ludlum's Bourne series, The Bourne Ultimatum, on Sunday evening at the Picturehouse in Southampton and really enjoyed it - it is a good thriller, and demonstrates that it is possible to make a third film in a series without it sinking beneath a sea of mediocrity.

One scene features London Waterloo station, through which I pass each morning on my way to work. The scene is very convincing, but the film-makers had to rearrange several elements of the station to make it work for them:

1. Bourne's contact is dropped-off by taxi at the station's south entrance, but they then play cat-and-mouse with their pursuers at the north of the station,
2. The off-licence through which they escape to a first-floor corridor exists, but the building doesn't have a first-floor,
3. The overhead advertising hoarding with rotating triangular segments is not actually at the station.

There were probably other things, but those are all I can remember. Fun to look out for, but they don't detract from the film, which is definitely worth seeing.

Tallinn

Tallinn in August is even better than Tallinn in May (it was a little chilly last time I was here - this time, the sun shone and the city was great). The people are friendly, the city is attractive and the food is cheap; in short, a very nice place for a weekend break. The Reval Olympia hotel is rather good as well, with boutique-style rooms, free wifi and a decent breakfast buffer, which is all a business traveller really needs.

Today's Quote of the Day

Today's quote, from an article on Quantum levitation (source), is pretty cool:

Empty space is not empty, but is filled with the quantum vacuum, with endless virtual processes. The energy of the quantum vacuum, the zero-point energy is infinite according to our present theories. Clearly, this infinity is an artifact - it would make the electromagnetic field infinitely massive, because energy and mass are related according to Einstein's E=mc^2. The empty electromagnetic field would collapse under the weight of its own gravity. Some unknown mechanism beyond quantum electromagnetism must regularize the infinity of the electromagnetic vacuum energy. Nevertheless, the zero-point energy results in perfectly finite and experimentally confirmed facts, for example the Casimir force.

Space Elevator

Do you want to win a million dollars and create something useful in the process? If so, this competition is for you!

Little Flying Things

A moderately interesting article on the BBC website (link) describes efforts by a Dutch team to build an artificial Swallow. If it works, it would be interesting to see it scaled-up to 747 size; a nice agile airliner could be quite amusing.