Virgin Trains have redone their website, as I found during my hour and a half ticket booking saga yesterday. It’s nothing special, but the messages it gives you while you wait made me cringe. After selecting travel dates and time, you are shown a spinning clock with the following message:

"We’re off looking for your trains at the moment, but give
us a few moments and we’ll be back with the results soon.
Thank you for being so patient."

Riiiigghhht. Don’t try patronising me by pretending that you’re doing anything other than using an (admittedly quite impressive) algorithm to trawl through an enormous database of timetables. The image of a sentient website that’s now down at the station checking for trains is a bit of a farce. And I’m not being so patient; if I was, I wouldn’t have gone and bought my tickets from a different website while I waited.

The other message, for when all the trains are fully booked, starts with "We couldn’t find any trains which leave when you wanted them to…". I know that sentiment, but it’s usually when I’m already aboard at Euston.

Perhaps last night’s posting got a bit too melodramatic, but I just felt a bit bad after talking through the whole chemicals saga with yet another bunch of people. I should declare the end of me giving my point of view on the issue, as I think I’ve ran through it often enough.

I’m concerned that there’s about to be (yet) another episode of bitterness and recriminations in my life shortly, since I can smell trouble brewing from 30 miles. Or to be more exact, I’ve heard (at length) every side (repeatedly) of every topic of the discussions coming up, and I know that nobody will go into this meeting with an open mind. I’m not sure how it’s going to resolve itself, but I really don’t think that we’ll all benefit, and I fear things will be said or done that leave lasting effects. Guys, it’s just a hobby; you’re supposed to be enjoying yourselves.

Standing at the bus stop this evening, I was trying to remember what it was like to be truely cold. Harking back to sitting on windswept ground, hiding behind my rucksack, watching the scudding clouds go by, yet still enjoying myself. When the cold was in my limbs, the bitterness in the wind, and the deep pains came from outwith.

I was being very drunk last week, and tried quoting some song lyrics that I thought were relevant to a conversation I was having. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember what the lyrics were, and they weren’t as deep an meaningful as I thought anyway, but that wasn’t the point really.

What I was doing though, was trying to put into practise one of my theories of life. I can almost make it through each day quoting only Southpark (for it is great), especially a certain Mr Cartman (and his special song - "I hate you guys / you guys are assholes / especially (insert name of my current target) / I hate him the most / Come on you guys, you know the words"). For anything slightly more meaningful, however, I turn to other sources. With over 3600 songs in my playlist at the moment, I’m pretty sure that I can find lyrics to cover every emotion that I want to express. What I wasn’t so sure of is if the one song can consistently say what I feel; they usually miss the mark after a few verses. Yesterday I found it though - number 2814 says everything I want to say, and nothing else. But to tell you what the song is would ruin all the fun…

Andy T, the local expert on Urban Exploration (those words again), has a different attitude on writing "correct" webpages, as shown in this posting to Slashdot recently. The difference is that Andy has something interesting to put on his website, so needn’t worry too much about the technicalities of it, whereas me and Sam have only the sites themselves to show off.

Anyway, if you want to see how extreme properly writing websites can become, have a read of Ian Hicksons critique of other peoples websites (Markup Challenge: diveintomark.org and Markup Challenge: aaronsw.com). Hixie knows what he’s talking about; he works on standards compliance for Mozilla. He ran a quiz over the summer to find markup errors in a document that validates fully with the w3 validator. I was quite proud to find three of the four errors in the document, but even then, I’ll not pretend that my own pages are perfect.

Locks aren’t everything when it comes to locking things up, you know. I’m just surprised at how many people don’t realise this.

After the snooker club had some money stolen from an unlocked cash box (albeit from a locked cabinet), lots of people were asking me why I didn’t have the cash box locked. Well, there’s not much point really, when you think about it. Cash box locks do only two things - keep the lid down so you can pick it up by the handle, and stop sticky fingered friends from making off with a tenner. But face it, if someone wants to steal the money, there’s nowt stopping them from lifting the box in entirety.

Thankfully, some other right minded person (and our resident criminal expert) pointed this idea out when another club in the Union wanted to buy a small safe for a very expensive piece of equipment. It was pointed out that having a small, cheap safe is just begging to be broken into, and that the safe can’t be fixed down to prevent someone just picking it up and walking off with it. Which then prompted a discussion between both of us about theivery in the Union - I’ve personally carted out thousands of pounds of equipment without being queried by Security. Is it possible to pull up in a transit van at the back door, carry a safe past the reception and out the front, continuing past Security and into another van, without being stopped? I think so.

This isn’t Japan, though, where according to an article I read in the Economist last week safe breaking is a new crime wave. Not with the stethoscope / twidle a dial effort though, instead, just stealing the safe, or indeed, entire cash machines. Apparently, the quickest way to get the contents of a 300 kilo safe in Saitama is to push it out a second storey window, and let gravity do the hard work. Smooth.