On the Tube

If you are anything like me you can probably get to pretty much any destination in London without too much trouble on the Tube. Thanks in no part to the brilliantly conceived Tube map, the construction of which is so delightfully easy to read.

I can count on one hand the number of times I have driven into London partly because of traffic and parking issues but also because the Tube map makes it so easy to work out where I am going and how to get there.

However, years and years of doing this has left me with a massively distorted image of how big central London actually is. I mean it’s big, don’t get me wrong but it’s not as huge as the Tube map makes it look.

It’s only been fairly recently that I have learnt that you don’t have to use the Tube to get around London. You can walk around too and all those individual attractions I have been going to and insisting on going into the nearest Tube station you can actually walk between. Stuff like walking between Leicester Square and Oxford Street or Covent Garden to Soho or Baker Street to Marylebone.

That’s why I really liked the Tube Journey Planner which really doesn’t plan your journey but just shows the Tube map overlaid on a regular map of London.

It’s just a shame they can’t add all those other extra bits of information like the Circle Line being the slowest train line in the world ever, the Northern Line being the most crowded and uncomfortable and the southern section of the Jubilee Line being the smoothest.

The girl

So it looks like the Girl is publishing a book. I wonder if I could get away with reading that on the train? Its not exactly got the most discrete cover. Of course the chance that I could actaully bump in to the author (Londoner) (although invariably not know) whilst reading makes it all the more interesting.

New sofa

After four years of having either a 'temporary sofa' (recently depsoited in the local tip) or having no sofa at all I think I have settled on getting this one.

There is only one draw back. It either fits but doesn't face the tv or it fits and faces the tv but I don't have a dining table, which rather essentially also supports my computer monitor.

So erm... I am going to Homebase now to get a decent tape measure so I can make a plan of my living room and do some lateral thinking.

Who sits next to you?

So I have been doing this commuting into London on the train thing for about three months now. Various things have struck me and I have got used to them over the time I have been using public transport. When I first started doing it the noise from other people, the train announcing tanoy-robot-lady (I can now recount every single train announcement) and the hassle of having to put up with everyone else really irritated me but I have got used to all that and kinda switch off to it.

However as time has gone on one particular thing has started to catch my interest more. Where people sit or, more specifically, who other people sit next to. Now obviously I am principally thinking of who sits next to me.

In the morning the train gets way crowded. At Maidenhead I always get a seat to myself because it is one of the first stops. However by the time it gets to Southall sometimes there is not room on the train for some folks there to actually get on (usually accompanied by banging on the windows and shouts of move down the isle). Anyway I usually have someone sitting next to me by Langley or West Drayton.

This is where it gets a bit odd.

This is totally unscientific but I would guess that by the time I get off the train at Ealing Broadway the demographics of the train population are around about 60% white, 30% Indian-Asian (although this is massively skewed by the Southall effect) and the remaining 10% being oriental or black. It’s around a 50:50 male to female ratio. The boarding of the various different ethnic origins is generally pretty consistent in terms of where they get on too with the exception of Southall (which is very busy and pretty much 100% Indian-Asian) So it’s a wide mix.

However, around about two to three days a week I end up having an oriental girl sitting next to me. And not the same one either, lots of different oriental girls, although I think a few times the same girl has sat next to me (but I am not sure as I usually stick my head in my book and keep it there). Now given the train demographics the chances of this happening at random so often are pretty slim. I mean like generally there is only one oriental girl per section of the train I am in and they are almost always sitting next to me. Furthermore, white guys never sit next to me but girls of all races do and Asian, black and oriental guys do.

So why do I end up with oriental girls next to me so often? When I get on the train on the way home I generally stand until a pair of seats become available that I can have to myself but if I had to pick someone to sit next to I would apply three tests as to whether I would sit next to them; in this order:

1. Is the person in question a hot girl? If so I would sit next to them.
2. Does the person look clean, quiet, normal, not fat and unlikely to invade my personal space. If so I would sit next to them.
3. Does the person look like they are going to get off at the next stop. If so I might sit next to them but probably wouldn't because that kind of thing is really difficult to thin-slice.

If neither of these options are available I would stand. So running my own thought processes on the oriental girls I must either look hot to oriental girls or look clean, quiet, normal, not fat and unlikely to invade personal space. Neither of which I consider to be bad things. But I really don’t know if this is their motivation. Perhaps my fellow passengers are all more unappealing to sit next to than me for other reasons. Perhaps, like me, oriental girls favour the south side of the train (for the morning sun) and forward travelling airline style seats like I do (but I would be surprised if many people had thought about train seating positions quite as much as I have).

My ego isn’t sufficiently big (but it’s a close thing) so as to be convinced that all oriental girls think I am hot. Nevertheless I can’t think of any other reasonably explicable reason why this situation occurs so often.

Regardless, the oriental girl sitting next to me phenomenon is not so objectionable. They are almost always quiet and don't invade my personal space which is about as good as I can reasonably ask of a seating partner.

Extortr

Like Flickr but with extortion. Extortr.

The staggering

This weekend I was on Bongo's stag weekend 'the staggering' in blackpool. Here's the photo of the T-shirt I have to prove it.

Here's Kieron, Dave and Owain Doug (oops) and a girl with bunny ears. We theorised that girls grow these if they go to too many slaggy nighclubs so they can hear better over the loud music.

No booze was consumed at all. Oh, ok maybe a bit.

Who's that weird short guy in background?

The hotel bar and Dave's tongue.

Saturday morning. Andrew and Chris sporting the requisite T-shirts.

Bongo considering jumping?

This was our curry house for Saturday evening. Around about an hour before the Police and (presumably) someone from the Council closed them down. That was reasuring seeing as we had finished our meal by that point.

Erm, a nightclub. Its not a very good photo because the UV lights were making Bongo glow but the statue in the back corner might hint at what sort of club it was.

This was my only photo from in the club (on account of it being sagely suggested to me that the management might not take so kindly to me taking photos of erm, some stuff). Well, except for this one. 'Strictley no touching.'

I told the bathroom attendant (where I took this) that they'd spelt it wrongly. He said they spelt it like that in Blackpool. I think I told him he was an idiot.

(And big kudos to Dave for sorting it all out).

Idiot builders

My flat development is presently getting an upgrade care of the management company. General repairs and repainting of external walls and windows etc. Anyhow the idiot builders doing the upgrade left signs like this on most of the front entrances recently:


Now, I have seen a lot of dumb signs but this has to be the most dumb sign of all time.

'Can all residents leave there doors and windows open on Monday.'

Yeah sure, I'll leave all my windows and doors open for a bunch of builders while I am at work. Having a giant advert to all and sundry that my doors and windows are going to be open all day really makes me want to join in even more.

It gets dumber (setting aside the 'there' and 'their' troubles they were clearly having). The photo above isn't of my entrance door because it fell off. Why? Because they stuck it on freshly painted and rather unadhesive door stain. I mean honestly.

Literature II

My train commuting lifestyle at the moment means that I am ploughing through literature at a rate of around about one book a fortnight. Here is some of the stuff that I have read recently and some thoughts about it without giving away too much about plot details:

Merde actually by Stephen Clarke. This is a book for the guys I think but that’s not to say that the girls won’t like it too. It’s a delightfully randy (without being literary porn) and a highly entertaining little jaunt around France. I thought it was great because the lead character ended up doing what I was screaming in my mind for him to do around a chapter later. This is my favourite recent read by quite a long way, not least because I could totally relate to the lead character. (You also might like to think of reading the prequel, A year in the merde before this though but as I read Merde actually without realising there was a prequel until after I had finished it I wouldn't say it was a definate prerequisite).

A short history of tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka is not about tractors and isn’t set in the Ukraine. It’s a good book but unlike Merde actually I totally failed to relate to any of the characters making it slightly lacklustre, at least for me.

Past mortem by Ben Elton delivered the usual Ben Elton style fairly obvious plot developments but this time coupled with stomach wrenchingly gory scenes. I don’t recommend reading this on a fast train as the combination of blood, guts and gore and the slightly bumpy non-stop section between Hayes and Slough made me feel a little queasy at times. It was still a good read mind.

And yes ok, so I read the Da Vinci code. Yes it’s a bit trashy and the plot developments are pretty obvious and designed to make you feel smarter than the supposed experts that the book is about (sometimes they are way dumb though). But you need to read it before going to see the film and the conspiracy theories are quite engaging.

Blink by Malcom Gladwell isn’t a novel and it’s not a self help book. It’s about ‘thin-slicing,’ using your instincts as opposed to your ‘brain’ to work stuff out. A book about one of my favourite things, teaching you stuff you already know but didn’t realise you did.

I am presently reading Long way down by Nick Hornby which is shaping up to be an engagingly structured piece, albeit a little morbid.

Reblog

Right, it looks like after a little two week hiatus that the blog is back up and running again. So, why the break I have been asked.

Well, when I started this blog I made a commitment to myself to produce five posts a week. The reasons for this were two-fold. Firstly it was so that every weekday morning you visit the site and there would be new content. Secondly it was so I had a schedule to stick to so I would actually make consistent posts. This commitment I made to myself has resulted in posts of varying quality because of my self imposed rules. Rules that, for the most part, I have stuck to except when on holiday or disconnected.

A consequence of this was that every morning or evening I had stick something up. Now I like doing the blog but my self imposed rules were becoming difficult for me to manage. Up until around about March I operated the blog with a ‘buffer’ of around about five generic posts that I constructed in my spare moments. This was generally fairly non-time constrained stuff unrelated to me and gave you such highlights as LED throwies and the thing about how crazy those Japanese people are.

However, with new job, new flat, new lifestyle and generally being busier and having more on my plate these buffer posts started to dissolve and I used them up and ended up blogging on the fly. Occasionally this meant I was coming home from work on the train and thinking ‘omg I have to do a blog post now too in addition to… etc.’ which was really turning it a bit sour for me and hence the break.

But, that’s not to say that I don’t still like doing the blog. I am just amending the terms on which I do it.

I started thinking about how I can change stuff to suit me and experimented a bit with Nick102 but decided not to pursue that because, well, I didn’t like it really, it didn’t feel right. So after that bit of messing around I thought I would kill the blog all together but I can’t do that either. I couldn’t get through a day without thinking ‘hey that would be good in a blog post’ before realising that I wasn’t doing it any more.

Anyway the up-shot of all this is that I am re-opening the blog. Its up and running again but here’s the clinch. I am no longer making any commitment to five days a week posting. I don’t have the time to be consistent like that anymore. So some times you will get lots of posts, sometimes none, you’ll have to live with that, its all dependent on mood and time now.

Hiatus

I’ve been doing this blog thing for the past nine months or so with five posts a week pretty much consistently the entire time except when I have been on holiday or moved home.

Since I started it I have moved jobs, moved flats, changed a lot of other little things, made new friends and (nearly) learnt how to use public transport.

However I haven’t had a break from the blog in spite of all these other changes. So I am taking a break from doing it for a little while. I don’t know if this is the closing stages of the blog or just a brief break from it. I need to see how I feel about not doing it.

Boycott

Here are the things I want to know nothing about for the next month or so. I refuse to enter into any conversation about these things unless it is one that involves how mind numbingly dull and pointless they are:

Big Brother
The World Cup

Right I am off on holiday now so the next post will probably be the middle of next week.

Even more firefoxy

Look, portable firefox. You can install it on a USB flash drive and run it from any machine. Also you can install it on work computers where the .exe function has been disabled by the IT dictators (or at least I could).

I can now browse the web using firefox at work, following some tweaking of the proxy settings, which is way better than the clunky old version of IE I was forced to use up until I found this.

10 reasons why its great to be Nick

He lives in a really great town in south east England
He works in London (which is way cool)
He has a great flat (notwithstanding a few little issues)
He can eat whatever he likes and stays stick thin regardless
He knows that he is a bit of nerd and is cool with that
He knows that a genuine smile can devastate anyone (and needs to learn to use this tool more often)
He earns way more money than he thinks he deserves
He knows that everyone else is the most important thing in the whole world (but sometimes forgets this)
He thinks he has terrible taste in music but doesn’t care
He has loads of really great friends who read his blog (if you are reading this you are one of them)

Phone dump III

Like phone dump and phone dump II, more photos captured on my cameraphone over the last few months or so with some commentary.

Ooo, look, a portable bus stop. That’s got to come in handy right?

Nice extension. This has an enforcement notice attached to it. I mean, seriously who thought this was a good idea?

Ealing Broadway station late at night. Quite arty I thought (probably wrongly).

This is my new yellow t-shirt. Girls stare at my chest when I wear this which is funny.

This is one of my shots of the fire on Ealing Broadway that I thought I deleted by accident. I might as well have deleted it as it has all the drama of an episode of As Time Goes By.

These are my new little JBL Creature speakers. This is the right one.

This is the left one.

And this is the big-ass daddy sub-woofer. These are very good little speakers if you want a recommendation. They do not go super loud (but when do you want your pc to go super loud?) but are really high quality.

This is the Southall Gurdwara, the largest Gurdwara outside of India.

It is very impressive and very smart (although a little chavy with the gold lettering and those railings).

It is the Seek place of worship. I think this place is great, not least for its provision of wholesome, free, hot food to anyone. Yes, anyone, you don’t have to be a Seek (not like some homeless soup kitchen, its a social focus). And they give this with the only proviso that you respect their customs within its walls.

Camping

So I am going camping in Newquay next weekend. I haven’t been camping since circa 1994 and am a little unsure how I have ended up going camping again now. I am hoping that it has improved since I last went and am approaching it with as open a mind as I can possibly muster. Here is a list of questions I have about camping in the 21st century:

Where do I plug in my mobile phone charger?
Where do I plug in my internet cable?
Or is it all wifi enabled?
Where is the fridge kept?
How does the shower function work?
Where do I hang up my clothes?
Can you plug the kettle in the same place you plug the phone charger?
Do I not need to worry about the kettle because they bring coffee to you like in London?

I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer to all these questions is ‘no.’

New offices

In one months time I move offices. Up until now I have worked in a shabby 1960s relic which is wholly unfit for modern purposes. The building is ear marked for demolition at the end of this year so it (quite reasonably) has not been maintained recently. The result is a building with spalling concrete, failing lifts, boarded up broken windows, shabby carpets and a general demeanour of a building on its way out. The movers have been slowly emptying the place of furniture for the past month or so already.

The new building I am moving into is a very smart, high-tech, ultra-modern edifice replete with white stone internal corridors, brushed steel surrounds, dramatic expanses of glazing and cooling wall colours which change depending on whereabouts you are in the building. All of this is completely new, I slash we will be the first occupants of our area in this building. There are also a range of working arrangement options featuring quiet rooms, informal working spaces and lounge sitting areas complete with plasma screen TVs hung on the wall. And you don’t just go to the toilet here. You have a high-tech lavatorial experience.

So I am pretty excited about working somewhere which is really quite so blatantly cool.

However there is a drawback.

I don’t get my own desk. In fact nobody gets a desk. I get a wheelie cart and cupboard to keep my stuff in but my desk is whatever workstation I choose or can find in the morning. I am honestly not sure how this is going to work and am a little apprehensive about it. Time shall tell I guess.

Flow

Engaging little flash game. I keep burning my dinner because of this.

Urban village

So today I visited Grand Union Village. A sustainable urban village built at a high density along the waterfront to the canal. It features eco-homes, home-zone layouts, car sharing scheme, on site community facilities and all the other environmentally friendly inclusive buzz words you care to think of. I even got the reflective snappy arm bands to prove it (to promote safe walking and cycling).


It was pretty smart though, just a shame it's on the edge of Hayes, the most horrible place in the world.

Update:

So apparently the above photo is far too camp (thanks Mark). And given that I didn't exactly capture the fun snappyness of the arm bands and also caught some of my laundry in the photo here is a better one:

Induction

So today I was in day one of three of my corporate induction. Yes, that’s right, three days. Three days of ‘essential’ information three months into my commencement of employment.

Anyhow, it was more than a little dull so I kept myself entertained with a little bit of impromptu creativity. Here are some of my finer works.

Pie chart of Nick also featuring the time/dismay curve and the time/attention curve:


Introducing the Anthropomorphic-robo-enviro-crime-bot which features a rear mounted gatling gun, missle launcher and pooper scooper (inspired by one of the presentations on ‘enviro-crime’ whatever that may be):

Cyberman shopping list (will probably make more sense if you saw Dr Who this weekend):


Laxative
Self actualisation classes
Battlestar Galactica DVD box set
Slippers
Inflatable ‘water wings’ arm bands
Metal polisher and scouring pads
Moisturiser
Haribo Tang-tastics
Double glazing
Metropolis DVD
Leg warmers
Traditional hand crafted jewellery

On location

So last week I finally got access to the pool cars at work so on Friday I took one out for a spin. Having now been signed up for the scheme I find out that there are actually a selection of electric and regular vehicles available, not just electric cars like I previously thought.

Of the vehicles available to me are a 2005 Renault Clio, a 2004 Renault Clio and a 2005 Toyota Yaris in addition to the electric cars. Rather than mess around in some glorified milk-float I booked myself in for a session on the 2004 Clio (because it was available) and headed out into the world, having some fun trying out a new car.

To tease you a bit here is a picture of its tyre. Not too sure how I managed to both take and store this picture on my cameraphone without realising:

And here is a picture of the car in full glory:

And here is a picture of me (looking a little sunburnt, its tough having a job where you get to go hang out in the sun in shorts and a t-shirt) with the car:

For information the last two pictures were taken here:

This is a small flat development on the edge of the Haymills Estate, a 1920s and 30s housing area of a mixture of Arts and Crafts and Art Deco housing and flats just off the North Circular. It’s a pretty cool place as opposed to much of the rest of the areas I work in which can be anything from a bit scruffy to steaming turd holes. It is the second nicest place I get to go whilst at work.

This is the nicest:


This is Haven Green, just off The Broadway (and the car was stopped at traffic lights when I took this, says he to the ever growing 'don't drive and take pictures' lobby).

It’s a large, beautifully maintained green with mature trees and attractive buildings surrounding it. I get to walk across it every morning and always think something along the lines of ditching work for half an hour and going and getting a coffee and reading my book on the green, but never do. Its great, there’s loads of stuff going on around it but the central sections are sufficiently secluded to be peaceful but also open enough to be able to keep an eye on what is going on with the rest of the world. I sometimes come here at lunch.

Anyhow, the 2004 Clio performed pretty well. It was great catching the train to work, driving around using a new (to me) car I don’t have to pay for, then going down to the pub after work and having a few drinks before catching the train home. I think I will have to try out the other Clio and the Yaris at some point. I might even go so far as to have a go in one of those electric thingies.