Author Archives: Tim Hall

Great Americans

Posted on June 9, 2003 by Tim Hall

Following on from their Great Britons a few months back, The BBC are conducting a poll for the greatest American of all time.

Who do you think was the most important and influential American throughout history?

Who did more to shape America’s destiny or spread the US’s influence across the globe?

Your nominees can be from the distant past or a living legend. This is a public nomination and it’s up to you who makes it to the final shortlist, so tell us who you think deserves to win.

The British equivalent ended up with the final three of Winston Churchill, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and (cough!) Princess Diana.

You can vote for your nomination by following the BBC link. Who do you think is the greatest American?

Abraham Lincoln?
Thomas Edison?
Henry Ford?
Walt Disney?
Elvis?
Bill Gates?
Whoever it was that designed the EMD F-Unit?
Emperor Norton?
E Gary Gygax?

(Link from Lawrence Simon)

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The return of Baghdad Bob?

Posted on June 9, 2003 by Tim Hall

Virgin Trains weren’t quick enough. Looks like he’s working for the American railroad CSX.

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The politics of transport, again

Posted on June 8, 2003 by Tim Hall

Ginger has another a good post on the politics of transport in Houston, Texas.

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Spam, spam, spam, spam…

Posted on June 8, 2003 by Tim Hall

On my Royal Mail post, I talked about the road haulage industry externalising it’s costs. But there’s no “business” that externalises costs more than email spamming. And spam seems to be getting worse and worse, with the volume of spam increasing month by month. It’s all bottom-feeding garbage, mostly of dubious legality.

Dorothea Salo and Lawrence Simon both have things to say on the subject, Dorothea in particular points out one of the external costs of spam.

I send just about every spam I get sent to spamcop.net, which deciphers the headers, does lookups on the spamvertised websites, and sends automatic complaint letters. But even this feels like bailing water out of a sinking ship with a saucepan. There has to be a better way.

I don’t think sending complaints, or more aggressive filtering on their own are going to solve the problem. Seems to me that spam won’t be stopped (or at least reduced to manageable proportions) until the spammers are forced to pay the costs that spam imposes on the rest of us.

Perhaps what we need is some kind of law allowing individuals, companies and ISPs to sue both spammers and the rogue ISPs that host them to recover the costs imposed. Given the international nature of spam (much of mine seems to come from China), it would either need similar laws in many countries, and probably international treaties as well. Is such a thing feasible? I don’t know.

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Jazz, Al Di Meola, and Rupert Murdoch

Posted on June 8, 2003 by Tim Hall

If you love music, and think commercial radio plays far too much formulaic sludge and not nearly enough good stuff, you must read this. It’s a longish post, but well worth the time it takes to read it. (Link from the road to surfdom)

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Kandersteg

Posted on June 8, 2003 by Tim Hall

I’ve now got the ten rolls of film from Switzerland back, all scanned onto CDRoms; time to put a few of them up on the web. These are from my first day there, taken in and around Kandersteg, a holiday resort at the top of the Kandertal, and the top of the north ramp of the Lötchberg railway. A mile south of Kandersteg station the line plunges into the 9 mile Lötchberg tunnel, to emerge south of the Bernese Oberland into canton Wallis.

SBB Re460 at Kandersteg

An SBB Re460 heads one of the hourly Basel-Brig Inter City trains out of Kandersteg, formed of a push-pull set of EWiv coaches, with an ex-SNCF “Corail” baggage car behind the locomotive.

The Re460s are the most modern locomotives in the SBB fleet. They dominate inter-city and international passenger trains throughout the country, and also haul a high percentage of freight trains over the steep trans-alpine routes. The stylish design is the work of Italian designer Pininfarina.
Continue reading →

Posted in Photos, Railways | 3 Comments

Less chrome, more black eyeshadow

Posted on June 6, 2003 by Tim Hall

David Edelstein (a.k.a Amadán) tells us what he really thinks about the World of Darkness.

I make a lot of fun of Vampire: The Masquerade, and the whole World of Angsty Prentiousness. But I had a prerelease copy of VtM when it first came out, 12 years or so ago, and it was very cool and full of flavor and atmosphere and just the right amount of angst. Then came a bazillion supplements and new lines and Werewolves and Mages and Changelings and Wraiths and Cyborg Ninja Angsty Mutant Demon Turtle Goth-Punk Dweeb-Marauders, and now the WoD looks kind of like Rifts, with less chrome and more black eyeshadow.

I’ve never actually played Vampire: The Masquerade. The nearest I got was a modern-day horror game in which the PCs were normal mortals, and the vampire was the monster. And the one WoD game I’ve played was one session of Changeling:The Dreaming (Mr Bindle and the Magic Train), which is an awful lot less angst-ridden than the rest of the WoD. So I don’t know how accurate David’s description of the game is.

Of course, if you want to play in either of those possible games David is threatening to run, membership of Dreamlyrics now costs much less than it used to be!

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Another black day

Posted on June 6, 2003 by Tim Hall

Another black day for the rail industry, comparable with the ending of newspaper traffic in 1988, and the closure of the Speedlink wagonload freight network in 1991. The Royal Mail has announced today that it is to stop using the railway for the transport of mail, and transfer all traffic to road and air.

Of course, road transport is only “cheaper” because it externalises a lot more of it’s costs.

It was a lead item on BBC News, and as the EWS press release, EWS are not going to take this lying down.

EWS currently operates a high-speed and high performance rail network throughout Britain that handles 25% of first-class mail. The proposed shift of this volume would add 160,000 lorry journeys, covering 30.5 million miles, per annum, to Britain’s beleaguered road network.

The rail services have achieved high performance levels for Royal Mail. 99.9% of all trains have run over the past 17 months, and Royal Mail train punctuality for this period has been 93.5% against a 95.0% objective. In addition to issues of road congestion, pollution, safety and service reliability, the proposed move by Royal Mail threatens 500 jobs within EWS plus Royal Mail jobs at eight dedicated rail terminals and 27 other loading points across Britain.

Allen Johnson, EWS Chief Operating Officer, said: “We are shocked that Royal Mail is threatening to walk away from the railway. EWS has made numerous competitive price offers in response to changing specifications from Royal Mail. EWS will continue to press the many benefits of rail to Royal Mail as an integral part of the mail distribution solution.”

EWS has had discussions with a number of companies who are exploring mail liberalisation. These discussions have focused on providing a rail-based network for mail distribution, as the companies concerned recognise the problems with increasing road congestion affecting the reliability of a road-based network of operations.

The Royal Mail has been suffering badly from poor management and bad industrial relations; in recent months they’ve blamed late mail deliveries on rail delays, when the real reason has been strikes in sorting offices. I’ve lost count of the amount of first class mail that’s taken four or five days to arrive. I’ve sent birthday presents that have never arrived, presumed stolen by post office sorters.

Time to end their monopoly, it’s clear they don’t deserve it. Let some other company make use of those recently-built mail terminals up and down the country currently used by Royal Snail.

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Computer names

Posted on June 5, 2003 by Tim Hall

Ginger has just partitioned a hard drive into three partitions named “Amber”, “Rebma” and “Tir”, and concludes she’s been playing too much Amber.

I find server names say a lot about the personality of whoever’s in charge of the IT network. Someone boring and unimaginitive will name things “uksun1″, “uksun2″ etc. Other IT network people will name servers after their favourite things:

So far, I’ve seen

  • Boring: “uksun1″, “uksun2″ etc.
  • Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Galahad”, “Lancelot”, “Robin” and “I’mNotDead” (What, no Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch?)
  • Classical mythology: “Charon”, “Styx” (But no “Lethe”. I wonder why?)

I’m still waiting for D&D monsters or Cthulhu entities. Do you know of a server called “Otyugh” or “Nylathotep”?

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Matter/Antimatter Bomb?

Posted on June 5, 2003 by Tim Hall

Much of the right wing of the blogosphere have been praising this article by the Telegraph’s Mark Steyn. Meanwhile the left wing collective blog PolitX finds it so over-the-top it’s side-splittingly funny. I found his account of post-war Iraq is so rose-tinted, I could only come up with this conclusion:

Mark Steyn is the anti-Robert Fisk.

Pray that they never meet. As every good Trekkie knows, when two opposite particles meet, there will be the mother of all explosions, enough to take out the whole of the middle east.

A weapon of mass destruction indeed.

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