ttj - Tom Jones

Border crossings continue to get more unpleasant. Today at Heathrow: the first time i have been selected twice in one pass through a customs channel. “Excuse me sir, are you travelling alone?”.   Questions then include did i pack it myself, where i live, where I’m travelling to and from, have i been anywhere else, do i know what alcohol and tobacco allowances are, what cash do i have, what about controlled substances, blades, explosives, firearms, obscene material, etc? So far, UK border still compares favourably to Guernsey in the following ways: the Guernsey intimidation squad use high-pressure techniques like piling questions on top of each other, and repeat questions. UK so far gives time to answer each question. Guernsey goons will start searching bag without saying anything, and send items into room next door, without saying anything. UK will ask “may i search this”, “may i swab that”. They have the authority to anyway, but it lets the subject know what’s happening, and is go...

At Innsbruck airport, boarding is via a bus.  This bus crosses the tarmac, sometimes covering as little as twenty-five metres distance as the crow flies, but is mandatory. It's a two-carriage bendy bus. While the bus is boarding, it has all its doors open, and its diesel engine idling.  The diesel fumes come in to the bus, and the passengers breathe them.  Mentioning this to the driver does not result in the engine being turned off. Some passengers have "priority boarding".  This means they get to go first to the diesel bus, to breathe in the diesel exhaust for longer.  The ones without priority boarding stay longer in the lounge with the cafe.  Everyone ends up on the same bus. When the bus sets off, several people observe out loud what a tiny distance it covers.  Sometimes the bus does a big circle to make it seem longer. If Europeans want access to hydrocarbons again, maybe they should be more sensib le about diesel exhaust.  Just an idea.

British Airways still has rubbish online booking. Payment for putative flight just failed in three different ways. First time, the page with the payment form showed whizzing around for a long time, and then displayed: the exact same unsubmitted payment form, with no indication of what went wrong. Second time, this "we're processing your payment" page, indefinitely, with more whizzing.  The photos of happy people don't make up for the fact that it doesn't function.  You're an airline, but it's almost impossible to book tickets using your web site. Third time, different browser (firefox), page said "an error occurred".  No information about what the error was.  I guess it's better than an indefinite waiting page. Fourth attempt, different card.  It did an SMS code.  Then the indefinite "we're processing your payment" page.

It is confusing to name a transport service after another mode of transport, or imply it with the name. Here at T5 today, we have “railair”. I guess their thought was that it connects the airport to railway stations (why not just join up the rail network per se?). But it’s a bus. The bus service to Oxford is called “the airline”. No. I have been on a train in Austria called “Railjet”. Wrong. And the manufacturer “Airbus” is named after the omnibus. Bad. Come on transport marketers, let’s go back to sensible names.

A recently-spotted departures board at LGW says "Depart..." instead of "Departures", and things like 14..." and "15..." instead of the times: At least it didn't crash.  But this is a design failure for a departures board.  The designer should have designed it so that the required information fit in the space. But there wasn't a thoughtful designer, or possibly a designer at all.  Instead, there were geektards, running rampant.  And geektards love to solve the general problem.  So here, a whole team congratulates themselves on the clever way they generalised a thing of "if there isn't enough space, truncate the text, and put in an elipsis", and the way they did this is a great piece of abstraction, possibly even a "design pattern", and so on.  Meanwhile, people can't see what time their flight departs, or even the word "Departures" in full, and any normal person can see that as a departures board, this is n...

The Sony PRS-650 is the only e-reader I've read lots of books on.  From around 2010 onwards. Tried the PRS-350 too, but didn't end up reading much on it. Tried fbreader on smartphones.  Have read a few books on it, but not extended reading like with the PRS-650.