October 2003 Archives

October 17, 2003

Email to RSS conversion

This is awesome - I have just been talking with a colleague about the relationship between email mailing lists and RSS feeds - pondering what if Microsoft bundled a half-decent feed reader into Outlook or Longhorn or whatever they next strangle the market with? As an economic model chucking out RSS feeds will be cheaper than chucking out bulk mail once it becomes trivially non-technical for the average PC World customer to subscribe to them. The chat moved on...
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ER vs EU

I had to laugh at the front page of The Sun today - "EIIR vs EU" It was a story about a monolithic institution, that was unwilling to reform, which was costing taxpayers an immense sum of money for very little return, most people didn't understand what its function was, and it was stuffed with foreigners like Germans and Greeks.... ...and this institution was going to save us from the European Union ;-)...
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October 16, 2003

Oystercard - the problem is when the man meets the machine

I had my first practical unsatisfactory Oystercard experience today. I tried to get the 212 bus (franchise holder First) to Walthamstow Central this morning, and the card would not swipe on the bus driver's ticket machine. As I walked away there was a tap on the plastic grill that separates the driver from the public. I told him that the card didn't expire until next week. I tried the card another couple of times. It didn't read. He wasn't...
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October 15, 2003

Sky's the limit for the tabloid Independent

A little bit of The Independent's editorial grabbed me today - "Sky's the limit" - for two reasons. Firstly, it was one of those articles that was happily kicking a TV channel for falling viewer share without looking into some of the underlying market reasons. But the bit that got my attention most was their listing of the channels "BBC 1, 2, 3 and 4". It was the first time I have noticed them listed in UK media print...
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October 13, 2003

Leaf-fall timetable starts today

Today my cattle WAGN journey into work started 3 minutes earlier than usual - due to the autumn 'leaf-fall' timetable being put into effect. This gives trains extra time to slow-down going into stations when there are wet leaves on the line. The SRA or WAGN haven't found a way of fixing the problem - they've now just built British inability to cope with our own climate into the timetable. But what really brightened my journey up today was...
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