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5 ... reasons not to get the bus

I don't have a car. This means I use public transport. I may grouch about the trains a lot (UKP 98.00 return to York last week, the return train was running over an hour late and appeared to think the coaches didn't need heating in October in the UK) but I grouch about the local buses here in Exeter a lot more. So here are five reasons not to use stagecoach devon.

  1. price
    I thought I was being unfair comparing the cost of a fare in Exeter to the cost in London. LT is subsidised by Ken etc. so it's not the same. Yes, last year it was only UKP 0.70 from my then partner's house to Heathrow airport (about 4 miles) and it was UKP 0.95 from my house to the High Street (about 1.5 miles) but I couldn't compare a regional service with the one in the capital.

    On Monday, I got a bus in Yorkshire and decided that, no, actually, we are being ripped off here in Exeter.

    Return fare Wakefield Westgate - Overton (6 miles) = UKP 2.10.
    Return fare my house - Exeter Odeon cinema (1.8 miles) = UKP 1.55.

    It's not even the most economic public transport in Exeter. A bus from the stop right by Exeter St Thomas station to the High Street is UKP 1.00 (single fare). A train from Exeter St Thomas station to Exeter Central (less than 2 minutes walk from the High Street) is UKP 0.70 (single fare).


  2. journey time
    My street is one of the main routes into and out of the city. In term time it is jammed with people driving in after dropping the little darlings at school. So the council put in a bus lane. Between 7.30am and 9.15am, only buses and taxis may use the lane, speeding past the stationary traffic. Except most mornings there is at least one car parked in it (three this morning, with no sign of their owners or a traffic warden fining them) so the bus has to stay in the main traffic lane.

    In addition there are no priority bus lanes over the notorious Exe Bridges, so it can take five minutes to cross the river (on foot time, under two minutes).

    Effectively, this means it is not faster than walking during the rush hours. I walk past the bus stop, seeing familiar strangers waiting for the bus and then walk past the same people as they get off the bus in town. OK, so I'm out of breath from walking up a 1/11 incline, but at least I haven't paid to do it.


  3. service times
    The University of Exeter has several entertainment venues: the Northcott Theatre, the Great Hall, the Lemon Grove. The campus itself is on the northern edge of town, up one of our lovely hills. Gigs and plays go on till 11pm, easily. The bus service to/from campus stops at 6.30pm.


  4. service routes
    Exeter is not a massive city. It does, however, have a bottleneck of a river crossing (the Exe Bridges) and inner and outer ring roads. There are no cicular bus routes. Every bus journey in the city has to go through the High Street. It would be more effective to have the feeder buses crossing a circular route. That involves changes buses once or twice, but would also enable cross-city journeys to be made more effectively (wider roads, no city centre junctions).


  5. price
    OK, I cheated, this is number 1 again. but it's because of 2, 3 and 4 that the exorbinate fares really really rankle.


Everywhere on the main commuter routes into the city are signs encouraging car share and other ways of reducing traffic (Exeter air being shown to be less healthy than Hammersmith Broadway). Every night the Exe Bridges are almost at grid lock. The council themselves did a test of different transport methods: the bus and car journeys were the least time effective. But, as long as the bus is not economic, speedy, or providing useful routes at reasonable times, the majority of those car users will keep on using private transport.

--
Posted @ 11:07 am on Friday, October 29, 2004
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I don't spy for the FBI

or LJs or the Rich and Famous part 3.

This isn't about the paused discussion re my LJ syndication feed (thank gods, say the non-tech people) but a post flagging up something rather alarming.

Annie Sewell-Jennings is a Buffy fanfic writer. I don't read her LJ, just her fiction. That's not an issue, just some context as to why I came across this. A friend who does read her LJ just pointed this out to me:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/anniesj/331112.html

(update: Secrets & Lies linked to the above on mefi, so it may be hard to open the link tonight)

To summarize, Annie posted some sarcastic comments about President Bush on her LJ (see mefi). A few of her friends replied. Last night, the FBI were literally on her doorstep checking she was not a threat to the President's life and/or national security. She now has an FBI file and may well be put on the 'no fly' list (i.e. no airline will take her as a passenger). Please follow the link and leave a supportive comment. Whilst I remain convinced LJ is a rather insular online community which fosters the idea that posters are in some way seperated from the wider world of the net, it is still alarming to read that this happens to someone within its fuzzy world.

Some of comments so far have said that it makes them glad to live outside America, but the Indymedia seizure suggests that American agencies can now act with impunity on UK soil without the involvement of UK government agencies. So British bloggers/LJers/whatever should sit up and pay attention: we may not be being watched, but the we could be shopped to the FBI.

--
Posted @ 7:12 pm on Wednesday, October 27, 2004
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Teenage Dreams, So Hard to Beat

Radio is, I think, the most intimate media. Reading involves the eyes and touch, it is tactile. Television is audio and visual. Online life is a whole complexity of senses and interaction. Radio whispers in your ear. You do something else with it on, the voice sliding into your consciousness and unconsciousness. And this is why the death of John Peel is a cause of sadness.

There are lots and lots of blog entries popping up, talking about his career and his influence on music. City of sound, obviously, The Big Smoker, Rogue Semiotics, Horizon and dozens of mp3 blogs. You can download his favourite single, Teenage Kicks by the Undertones, from a lot of the latter. I can't talk about that. Yes, I did first hear a lot of guitar bands via his show but it wasn't exactly the music which kept my dial there. What Peel provided, why he mattered, is that there was this soft, insidious voice tumbling out of the radio and letting you know that there are other people who don't fit the daytime demographics. You listened, knowing that in hundreds of thousands of teenage bedrooms across the UK others were also struggling with their maths or physics O-levels and listening to a soft wry voice saying "oh dear, well, I appear to have played that at the wrong speed but it sounded just as good to me. And now here's one by the Fall..."

And, since he must have been in his 40s when I listened every night, his voice told me that getting older didn't automatically mean getting staid. You can pull up his tracklisting from a couple of weeks ago at the BBCi site and see that he was still playing stuff you would never hear of. his shows said it was fine to be different and that you can go on not fitting in for as long as you wanted to. Looking at the impact of his death within blogging circles, it seems he left that idea with a lot of us.

I lost track when I got an evening job that didn't get me home until gone 11pm, then moved to a bedsit and was actually out at gigs having loud guitar trashing my hearing instead of tuning in to a Peel session. I did listen to the Peelenium back in '99 and I had a moment of sheer joy when, in a foreign country, I tuned in the radio to some music and heard "....and there was one by Gorky's Zygotic Myceni...". There was Peelie, on the World Service, providing me with touch of home. So, although, my own life took me away from listening to Peel, I don't think I would be the person I am now if I hadn't sat there, late on schoolnights, with his voice whispering in my ear.


--
Posted @ 7:28 pm on Tuesday, October 26, 2004
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You Can't Take the Sky from Me

Curse friends with DVD boxsets. My relaxing weekend in York turned into a Firefly marathon. As I'd seen about five minutes of Jaynestown before, watching eleven episodes in a row means I have the theme tune in my head and a compulsive desire to see what Firefly fanfic exists. Bad, bad, belated interest.

We also went to see Finding Neverland (on general release this coming Friday). I'm planning a proper review for Shiny Shelf but safe to say ninety minutes of Johnny Depp putting on a lovely Scottish lilt is the perfect way to spend a morning. Short review of the film is that a lot of the good elements are submerged by the irritating mawkish sentimental bloody music.

Still learning about taking photos with the moto:

| |

The first one is of the Ouze having broken its banks, as per usual. The river bank is over where the straight line is beyond the trees.



--
Posted @ 11:13 pm on Monday, October 25, 2004
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The Importance of Being Grouchy

or, LJs of the Rich and the Famous, part 2.

Things are moving on in terms of fixing the LJ feed. Today I got this from bubba:

Recently (just after answering your last request, actually) the tools were developed and tested for the merging of syndicated accounts in situations such as this. This code would redirect all users from the second feed to the first, which would use the correct feed URL.

However, new code is not immediately pushed live to LiveJournal.com after its development. It could take anywhere from several days to a few weeks before this syndication account merge code goes live. If you'd like, I can keep track of this request so that once the code goes live, I can make the appropriate changes and notify you.
So yay for bubba and the LJ support. Hopefully we'll see something before the year is out.


And now for some plugs:
  • Dogs for Homes is a blog seeking homes for dogs in the London area. Even if, like me, you think dogs are annoying smelly idiots who are clearly inferior to cats, please plug it to others.


  • buy my (old) book!
    play.com are offering H101 at the bargain price of £4.49 inc. delivery. You can even use it as a guide to Barcelona (not a very good guide, it has to be said, although it will point you towards the vicinity of an excellent vegetarian indian restaurant).

--
Posted @ 1:10 am on Saturday, October 23, 2004
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Take Me Out

take me out
hello moto.

I have my lovely new moto e550 photophone. Matt black shell and literally "all singing, all dancing". I tried it out last night at the Franz Ferdinand gig, thus becoming one of those irritating gig-goers holding up a blue screen above the crowd. This is the only one which came out at all without needing digital tweaking. But it proves that the moto works and can send photos direct to flickr. I could even set flickr up to automatically send this here to the grouch as well.

Got back from the gig (very good - for once a guitar band as good live as recorded) to find city of sound was also on a FF trip, thus making myself feel rather cool.

--
Posted @ 1:18 pm on Thursday, October 21, 2004
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The trial

As Mags awoke one morning from uneasy dreams she found herself transformed in her bed into a gigantic insect.

No wait, wrong Kafka story.

I'm sort of enjoying going around the loops with LJ (see previous grouch) but today my mobile phone company also went in for some circular reasoning. I'm due an upgrade but it appears this is too complex an idea for the phone people in the shop. A couple months back I was told I could get one round about now. Last month they told me I could come in on the 19th and get my new phone, that being a month before my contract renewal is due. Today (the 19th), I went in. Oh, apparently my acceptance of a discount last year means that I can't get a new phone until 29th November. This from the same man who last month told me the 19th October. I phoned the phone company where a nice lady confirmed that I could indeed collect a new phone today and assured me that she had a note on the system to that effect. But by the time I was able to go back, the shop was shut. So now I have to go in tomorrow and try to get through the loop again.

I'd change my name to M, to mimic poor K in The Trial, but that always makes me think of Peter Lorre as a child-killer in expressionistic Wiemar Germany, so maybe not...

--
Posted @ 11:05 pm on Tuesday, October 19, 2004
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LJ's of the rich and the famous

The following post is for those of you who are LJ subscribers to my blog. Not that you will be able to read this, due to LJ's curious response to my request for the feed to be changed to my atom feed. All the non-LJ readers should go read something else instead. Or go back to playing the HHGTG game.

Enjoy the following correspondence:



Hi,
Please could you change the feed of
moosifer_jones
to
http://moosiferjonesgrouch.blogspot.com/atom.xml
The blogger atom feed is now configured how I prefer it so I am disabling
the RSS workaround.

Mags


Dear user,

Due to the structure and setup of the syndication system on LiveJournal, no two accounts may share the same feed URL, to avoid duplicate accounts pulling the same content. The feed URL you have supplied is already attached to another LiveJournal account. As such, I will be unable to perform this change.

I apologize that I cannot be of more assistance at this time.

Regards,
Bubba - Syndication Administrator

Did this answer your question?
YES: link snipped
NO: link snipped


In that case, as the owner of a site being syndicated without my permission, please could you close the current syndication of the atom feed and redirect the current feed on moosifer_jones to the atom feed from my blog.

I was unaware that anyone had syndicated the atom feed and would prefer to only have a single syndicated account on LJ.



Unfortunately, it is not currently possible to delete syndicated accounts. This functionality has been suggested many times before, but it is not known when developers will implement it. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Did this answer your question?
YES: link snipped
NO: link snipped


In that case could you please notify me of the name of the syndication of my atom feed so that I can redirect the subscribers to my old feed towards it?

I do not understand why your FAQ tells non-users to contact you if a feed has been syndicated without permission if you are not able to delete the syndication.



It should be pointed out that the only way I can hope to find this other syndicated LJ is if Bubba responds with its ID or if my update of this blog gets flagged here. I'm not quite sure how I notify the users of my moosifer_jones syndication to go to this as-yet-unknown syndication because, of course, I've shut down my old RSS feed...which means they can't see this...

Update: Bubba did get back with the username of moosifer_jones2 for the atom feed i.e.
http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=moosifer_jones2.
I was going to change everything but, looking at the LJ feed, the atom one has no subscribers compared to the 18 on moosifer_jones. So I'm going to see if it is possible to get the moosifer_jones2 suspended
and the original moosifer_jones updated to the atom feed.

--
Posted @ 10:33 pm on Monday, October 18, 2004
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one of oscar's

You must not find symbols in everything you see. It makes life impossible.
Salome

It was 150 years since the birth of Oscar Wilde yesterday. Naturally BBC2 took this as a chance to theme the day.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
The Picture of Dorian Gray

In the afternoon was the 1952 production of The Importance of Being Ernest. I use 'performance' advisedly: it is a poor piece of cinema but even that can't destroy the delight of the play which still has me laughing out loud. Plus it has Joan Greenwood, who played slightly wicked Edwardian women with great skill and a very curious voice.

The good ended happily and the bad ended unhappily. That is what fiction means.
The Importance of Being Ernest

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
ibid.

Then the evening brought Wilde, the 1997 biopic starring Stephen Fry as Wilde and the ever-annoying Jude Law as the also ever-annoying Bosie. Whenever I watch this, I have the 1960 Trials of Oscar Wilde running through my internal projection box. In both films there are scenes of the key moments (like the triumph of Ernest's opening and the waiting about in hotel rooms for the arrest) but other elements had to be codified for the 1960 film (this being exactly the same year as the Chatterley trial on obscenity). It's possible to use the later, more explicit film as a key in which to unlock the earlier one. And, despite knowing the ending, it still tends to make me want to cry for the poor old sod.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard.
Some do it with a bitter look,
some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
the brave man with a sword.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Sadly, the day did not stretch to the lovely 1999 film version of An Ideal Husband in which Cate Blanchett is perfect as the prim wife, Mini Driver pouts as the usual little madam and Rupert Everett is the perfect Wildean cad. They should force Everett to be in film adaptations of all the other plays as well. Just so I could have an entire day of him speaking Wilde's words. That may be a very specialised market though.

I have made an important discovery... that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effect of intoxication.
epigram

Back in the early 90s I was in Paris and went on a visit to Pere Lechaise, the famous graveyard. At the metro station, I bought white carnations (no green, you'd think the florist there would know) and then we armed ourselves with a map of the city of the dead. Like a particularly morbid 'Hollywood Stars' map. One of my friends wanted to find an actress, and we all wanted to find Edith Piaf.

"My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go."

at the hotel in Paris, as he lay dying.

We didn't want to find Jim Morrison but his grave seemed to be some black hole forcing us to have a look. There was a rather creepy bloke hanging about it who kept asking us if the flowers were for Morrison. I tried to explain who they were for, but it seems my "non, Oscar Wilde" was not comprehensible. We eventually found the beautiful Epstein-designed tomb, smeared with lipstick and with the back covered in quotes and - perhaps unsurprising - Smiths' lyrics. All in all a neat coda to the teenage fascination with Wilde (and, in fact, the Smiths) that had seen me devouring every one of his plays.

Wilde is frequently misquoted so...er...now for something from which the line "one of Oscar's!", frequently yelled in our office when things go wrong, comes: the Monty Python Oscar Wilde Sketch:
WHISTLER: Your Highness, you are also like a stream of bat's piss.
PRINCE OF WALES: What?!?
WHISTLER: It was one of Wilde's. One of Wilde's.
OSCAR: It sodding was not! It was Shaw!

--
Posted @ 3:28 am on Sunday, October 17, 2004
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breaking the code

Housekeeping geekery: I have, I think, dismantled the instantRSS feed. Or at least I've taken the code out. Blogger have now improved the atom feed so that I can restrict it to a partial summary and atom has become standard enough to be useful. I've emailed LJ asking them to change the syndication but that can take a week.

Prompted by a newsforge article spotted on del.icio.us (the online public bookmark system) which talked about how to tie together del.icio.us, flickr and bloglines, I reactivated my bloglines account and intergrated things. My blogroll may vanish entirely since even LJ has working feeds now (although the atom feed seems slightly better than the RSS).

My worst new online hobby is mp3blog browsing. I'm not great at seeking out new music all on my own. I need people like A to say "you'll like these!", or DJs on Radio 2 who don't follow a industry-dictated playlist, or the handy musicplasma site which maps artists by similarity in a "like cheese? like peas? you'll love cheesey peas!" way. Mp3 blogs feed the desire for new music with the handy advice element. The principle is that the tracks are only up for a few days so if you miss one, tough. And there are a couple of albums I may now buy having heard sample tracks via the blogs. So far this week I've got:


Best of all though I got Summer Wine by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood. I first heard this on Jonathan Ross a couple of months back (when he had the lady in question in as a guest) and I was stunned by the smoky sensuality of it. I've clearly been making too many playlists with Tarantino-esque music as I'm having a passing fad for this sort of music. Having now got a copy (but I can't find where from - argh!), I'm convinced I need to buy Nancy's new album.

--
Posted @ 7:37 pm on Friday, October 15, 2004
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5 ... things to show I aten't dead


Five things I've done this week:

  • written a proper review of Hero for shiny shelf.
  • seen Bride & Prejudice (very poor Darcy, not helped by preceding trailer for Bridget Jones : Edge of Reason with the Darcy in it - not that I actually want to see Bridget Jones).
  • had hair cut very short and loved the smell of hydrogen peroxide in the morning (schwarzkopf R43).
  • attended sort-of-niece's 2nd birthday and felt so Miranda-like it hurt.
  • bought PlanB in print from the King Ludd bookshop and seen a Chinese lion dance at the bottom of my street.
Plus stuff with the novel, obviously.

--
Posted @ 11:33 pm on Wednesday, October 13, 2004
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I'm a Writer, get me out of here!

It sometimes feels like I've been working on Warring States forever. A photo from RichardR on flickr made me wonder whether I have been working on Warring States for longer than I realised. Seeing this photo of a pagoda, I went to my photograph box and looked through it for photographs of oriental architecture. I was surprised to see that every big overseas trip comes with a subset of photos of a Chinese or Japanese tea garden. When I went through back in March, I'd just pulled out one photo of a street scene and ignored the garden photos (there are no restful garden scenes in Warring States, and the tea houses are all busy street ones). Having just bought a flickr pro account (which works out as UKP2/month for a 1G upload limit), I've got busy with the scanner and produced two sets:

turning Japanese, I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so...[Japanese Gardens, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, 1998] | Confuscious has a puzzling grace, Disoriented you enter in, Unleashing scent of wild jasmine.[Chinese Tea Garden, Sydney, 2000]

Ladylark, who is beta-reader on Warring States, was the person who took me to Sydney. I suggested we went to the Chinese Tea Garden on New Year's Day, 2000, so, at some level, she's also been working on this novel for years. She also came with me to Barcelona for the reseacrh trip for History 101. It makes us sound like the "travelling companions" from a 1930s Agatha Christie novel. I've done a short flickr set of me and/or us on these trips.

I do wonder, though, whether my interest in Chinese culture can be traced back to my childhood, where a particular shop in Birmingham New Street station was ritually visited (if I had been good during the rest of the shopping trip). I used to love it there, buying new reed whistles, little fans or pin-cushions on each trip. It has, naturally, long since gone.


--
Posted @ 10:48 am on Sunday, October 10, 2004
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I'm Eeeevvviilllll!

No, not a late Friday quiz result as I'm giving them up. Well, OK, sort of a quiz result. The Germatriculator tells me that my non de guerre / plume is 80% evil whilst my given name is 80% good. This, obviously, indicates that I choose to be evil. Mwhahahahaha. Ha.

Curiously, the diminuative version of my given name, i.e. the name used by work, almost all my family and a slim majority of friends, is exactly balanced at 50% good, 50% evil.

This blog is certified 46% EVIL by the Gematriculator, whereas my homepage is merely 36% EVIL. So my random grouches are more evil than my Real Work. Of the sites I admin on, advertising_ghosts is 42% good, and the faction paradox forum is (I assume) so evil that it broke the analysis mechine.

This device also lets you check extracts, leading to a dreadful temptation to test large chunks of the novel (and indeed, two sentences from an introductory passage just rated as 91% Good ) but that is a notion I must resist. I've mentioned before that there is a fair bit of numerological whatnot underlying the structure of Warring States so the idea of testing it for numerological Goodness is horrifically seductive. Oh, wait, my current opening sentence is only 57% Good...



note to the money publisher: blame Trina for linking to the site, not me...

--
Posted @ 7:59 pm on Friday, October 08, 2004
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do NOT use the word 'party' as a verb under my roof

Just how small is the UK blogsphere? Aside from checking the list at Britblog, you can also see that the entire UK blogscene may fit in a single party venue. The Webloggers' End Of Year Party 2004 is being organised. As it looks likely to be in London and at a weekend, and I spotted Aquarion (who I know via Discworld) so there would be at least one person there I have met before, I've put my name down. And now I'm linking to it as a "oooh, look at this!" here so anyone else interested can go along and offer suggestions for venues and dates.

(My work Christmas meal is on a Tuesday night, thus getting me 1.5 days off (travel to head office, recover from hangover, travel back) so the December diary is starting to fill)

Hero, doubting

My self-control had set the ultimatum of finishing a particular chapter of the novel before allowing myself a film, but I threw it aside and went to see Hero tonight. I've wanted to see this film for well over a year, and trying to work today knowing I could be in the slightly ratty Exeter ODEON watching it was just too impossible. Yes, the screens there have sound leakage and the sweeties are overpriced, but I had to see it.

For all the trailers and stars (Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi), Hero is not a HK action but a traditional, mainland wuxia story: a warrior on a quest engages in magical battles until reaching a new understanding of the world and of honour. Unsurprisingly, it is compared to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Also unsurprisingly to me, it made me wonder what on earth I am doing. I am, essentially, trying to write a wuxia novel (and the caption at the start of Hero explaining it is set during the Warring States period of history caused a wry smile). I believe it is something I can do, most days, and then I see a masterful film and suspect I am insane. I suddenly doubt that I can put into words the expressiveness of this genre. Technically, yes, I can write fight scenes but can I evoke the meaning of those moves? I think, unknowingly, I started on elements of this novel two years ago in Glasgow's Film Theatre when I watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, so it seems appropriate that, as I near the end, I see another wuxia film which lifts me into another world.

I walked back from the cinema uplifted, energised and terrified of failing my own standards. There are issues surrounding the film's political subtext (everyone should work towards the unity of the land) but I'm still floating from the visuals.

--
Posted @ 10:09 pm on Saturday, October 02, 2004
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