December 12, 2005

I must remember never to shop at Heathrow, it only encourages BAA

When you land at most airports, being early is generally a good thing. That does not seem to be the case at Heathrow where it seems to lead to instant banishment to one of the few remote stands that the airport has. You would think, given the amount of time most aircraft have to stack over London to get close to the airport, ticker tape and bunting would drop out of the overhead bins at touchdown any time the pilot managed to sneak in early.

However, even on a Saturday morning, Terminal 4 is busy, busy, busy. So, after a long wait on the taxiway, the pilot announced that BA292 from Washington Dulles had drawn the short straw and was to be parked somewhere close to the perimeter fence and not very close to Terminal 4. The problem is that, even at the best of times, Heathrow is not good at dealing with remote stands. It's not like Frankfurt, or indeed Dulles, where you can expect a convoy of buses to be parked alongside pretty soon after you get there. At Heathrow, you can wait a long, long time for anybody to notice that somebody has parked a plane.

The buses, this time, turned up relatively quickly - by Heathrow standards. I've been on a late flight from Munich (one that often ends up being parked outside because the rest of the terminal is shut) where they had one bus driver left for the night and it took close to an hour to get everyone off. This time around, we had buses and almost enough for a nearly full 747-400. But no steps. Actually, that's a lie, we had steps. But no-one to drive them up to the side of the aircraft and give the nod to let people off. That took, by my estimate a good half hour to sort out. It took another 20 minutes to get most of the people off the plane. So, you would think that by the time even EU passport holders got through immigration, the bags would be waiting. I think you know what happens next. There is a big, empty rubber band going around but no bags. Apparently, BAA, the airport operator, did not just have problems locating people to drive steps around, but the baggage handlers had some difficulty getting to the aircraft.

This is where I guess BAA would argue this is why it needs Terminal 5. Yet, most of the problems come down to inadequate staffing levels and a general ambivalence to the traffic that passes through the airport. If you want to shop, great. BAA has stopped at nothing to renovate the shopping malls that seem to be spilling over larger and larger parts of each terminal. But basic facilities in all four existing terminals are tatty, dirty and a laughable advertisement for "the world's busiest airport". With all the gate fees BAA is scooping up, they might think about employing one or two more drivers to deal with the additional remote-stand traffic they get (although BAA does have to hand back £1.50 per passenger to an airline for each time it dumps an aircraft onto a remote stand).

BAA seems to believe that its incentive revolves around collecting more money from passengers in shops than providing them with a service they have already paid for. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) issued a consultation paper on this in November, having already canvassed British Airways and some others for thoughts - the bit about the £1.50 rebate came from a BA submission. However, as a near monopoly provider of airport services in the UK, I'm not optimistic about any changes. And the airlines only have themselves to blame. Just as I set out from Washington to come home, I got an email from BA saying the airline had decided to shift some of its Munich services from Gatwick to Heathrow. I guess BA likes getting that £1.50 rebate.

Posted by Chris at 10:49 PM

August 14, 2005

Redesign complete (more or less)

One crash course in cascading style sheets (CSS) has made it possible to dump the default templates supplied by LivingDot and MovableType and go for my own on this blog. Changing the design was only half the reason for doing this as I needed to learn a bit more about how MovableType itself worked. Having used a couple of Perl-based site-management systems in the past, it turned out to be quite straightforward. But, then again, I haven't tried to do anything fancy in PHP yet.

There are still a few rickets in the design when it comes to how it renders on different browsers. This was designed on a Mac, so works best in Safari. Firefox has a little problem with the size of the search box, which presumably can be overcome with a quick hack. I had to change the design for IE 5.2 for the Mac as the original design ran into the one bug in the renderer that has no workaround. D'oh. Opera seems to be happy enough with the CSS except for a problem with handling underlines in the headline links in the left-hand panel.

The look is slightly different on IE for Windows - this seems to be down to the way that Microsoft messed up the box model in CSS. The problem only affects the link boxes at the left-hand side so the text alignment is a little off, but I have made no attempt so far to use hacks to make the designs match up. Given that none of the versions of IE that I tried (including IE 5.5 for Windows) didn't leave chunks of text busting out of boxes in bizarre ways, I'm considering myself to be quite lucky. Then again, it is only a two-column design at this point, so there isn't that much that can go wrong.

I'm trying to keep the overall design very simple and clean. I'm not a big fan of sites that litter links all over the front page. You're just asking people to get lost in the structure. Instead, I'm inclined to put a blogroll and similar stuff on a dedicated page. Right now, I can't see a good reason to have a forest of links in a column with no explanation of what they are for.

The banner image underneath the logo by the way is a small stack of DVD-R disks shot with a macro lens and then oversaturated in Photoshop. Once cut out, the image just happened to have the right shape and had the benefit of forming a vague link to both the media and technology.

Posted by Chris at 05:48 PM

August 10, 2005

Time-travelling tickets

I got a promising email this morning from a ticket agency promising me that it was ready to dispatch tickets for The Pixies, who are playing at the end of the month at Alexandra Palace. The tickets were going today and the company added they would be turning up courtesy of SMS: the company responsible for delivering a large proportion of the credit cards issued by banks to people living within the circle described by London's M25 motorway.

Normally, discovering that anything is being delivered to you by SMS is enough to make you wish credit cards never expired. You can sit in all day waiting only to find out that the people with the cards can a) ride a bike and b) read a map. But they seem unable to find the right door or even the doorbell if they can manage to get to the door. Letting them 'try' twice and then having them return it to the bank so you can pick up the card from a nearby branch is often the best bet. But no such problem this time. The tickets turned up Monday. Now that takes some doing.

Posted by Chris at 09:44 PM

July 30, 2005

The new name for...

Less than a month in, and I've decided to change the name of this blog. When I picked the URL, I was in a hurry and so just went for a bit of word association. I then had to pick a name and decided I'd try something else out. Now, I've decided "For More Information..." was way too bland and some people seem to like the URL more. So, it's time for something a little more...phlegmy. Now, I'm wondering why the MarsEdit spell checker hasn't flagged that one up.

Posted by Chris at 09:07 PM | Comments (1)

July 19, 2005

Address harvesting meets word association football

When I first set up this blog, I decided to pick a new URL for it and rather than sit down and try to come up with a phrase that would fit the blog, just played a bit of word association football: journalist, hack, hacking, cough. Simple. And all over in seconds. Just days later, I've got spam. Nothing to be surprised about even though I've not used the domain for any email addresses. It's simply a consequence of yet another directory harvest attack (DHA) I would imagine. However, it seems that some spammers have got past mailing "info" and "webmaster" and various combinations of first and last names to target domains and started playing word association football themselves.

It seems oddly fitting that the to-address of a couple of pieces of spam that I fished out of the webmail turned out to have been spawned using the very same process. But that is the only explanation for two messages that turned up addressed to "spittle". It took me a few seconds to work out why anyone should choose that word as an address until I looked again at my chosen URL.

I shall wait and see if "furball" and "splutter" turn up any time soon. And I will continue to wonder as to who the spammers were planning on getting through to, unless the purpose of DHAs now is simply to find any address that can get through the defences and possible reach a real person who will then simply hit the delete key. Or maybe its the sysadmins who clean out the flotsam that clogs up email servers who buy the most penis enlargement cream and who are most likely to see the weird names.

In the meantime, spittle at hackingcough.com will be forwarded to Mr BitBucket at DevNull Terrace.

Posted by Chris at 09:32 PM

July 05, 2005

Which way to the race?

There were a couple of first-time things that kicked off July 2005 for me. The first one took place on Sunday when I ran in my first 10K race around central London. The second thing I did for the first time was to set up a blog. The blog is not meant to have much to do with running but I thought I'd add a journal section to see how often I would post this kind of stuff. So, the first entry in this blog is about the curiously shambolic event that was the British 10K.

The first part of the competition was to find the start. For no good reason, I thought the race was due to start at 9am, not the 9.35am that was the official start time. Even so, I didn’t turn up ridiculously early. Sitting on Victoria Line from Brixton to Green Park, the train gradually filled up with people who were clearly going to the same place. The problem that faced us was working out exactly where the start was to be. Most people knew that it was outside the front of the Hard Rock Café on Piccadilly. A big clue was the big blue sign saying ‘Start’ on it next to a platform made of the customary wood and scaffolding covered with a few bits of tarpaulin. If only it were all that easy.

According to the guide distributed to entrants before the race together with a flimsy T-shirt and a discount voucher for some energy drink, runners were supposed to be honest with themselves and stand by the sign that corresponded to the time they thought it would take for them to get around the course. The only trouble was that there were just two signs visible, both for times well above an hour. Even I do can 10km in an hour. But decided to be more conservative than honest and perched opposite the 1.5 hour sign close to where the Hyde Park Corner underpass joins Piccadilly.

It turned out that nobody told the stewards anything about starting slots. They had been standing for half an hour halfway down Piccadilly collecting runners who had dropped off their kit outside the Institute of Directors at Pall Mall armed with nothing more than a piece of string between them. Those runners who took a short cut through Green Park to get to the start line who found themselves milling around trying to work how the start was going to work. While they wondered, “Colonel Bogey” and a big-band version of “We All Stand Together” – better known as the homicide-inducing “Frog Song” – blared out from the loudspeakers on an apparently endless loop. A day after Live8, a day before the official WW2 commemoration started and three days before the announcement of the 2012 Olympic venue, the race organisers were milking every link for what it was worth. The music was just the beginning.

Then the stewards turned up with 10 000 runners behind them. The starting arrangement suddenly became clear: it was one step away from chaos. The idea of having people organise themselves into neat groups based on how long they expected to take was nothing more than a bit of wishful thinking. It was only after the start that I realised that I had a lucky break as I was well past the Ritz before the crowd waiting to get going ran out. And it took three minutes for me to get started even from what was a comparatively good position.

Before I and thousands of others were able to get through the start point, we had the usual speeches, most of them pumping up the London 2012 bid. The Westminster Town Cryer left most in no doubt that ringing a bell at every opportunity and shouting can lead to a separation from reality. As the first runners were away, including former Olympic champion Haile Gebrselassie, the Town Cryer suddenly blurted out over the tannoy: “Go on Spiderwoman. Er…no. Wonderwoman.” I don’t remember a Lynda Carter lookalike being among the front runners, so I still have no idea who he directed the comment at even after the correction.

Within a few minutes I was off. Unfortunately, exactly how many minutes remains a mystery as I completely forgot to look at the clock by the start line as I ran past it and did not bother taking a watch with me. Or a mobile phone, which seems to be today’s running accessory for those who don’t believe in iPod holsters.

Trafalgar Square, about 2km down the line, had another selection of wartime hits pounding out from the loudspeaker and it was not until the Embankment end of Northumberland Avenue that we got The Clash’s “London Calling”. On the Embankment a lone DJ and four girls from the Loughborough University dance troupe had pitched up to do a spot of disco-style encouragement. It was just after that someone shouted, “It’s Haile Gebrselassie!” And it was, the Ethiopian runner was hurtling down the Embankment in the opposite direction aiming to make a sub-30 minute time. There was a quick round of applause and he was gone. It would take me another half hour just to reach that point from the 2.5km point I was at.

The number of people all trying to run down the same stretch of road meant that they ended up mixing with the few onlookers who had ventured out comparatively early on a Sunday. But that was nothing on the situation that faced the amateur athletes as they got near the finish line. Getting to the finish meant running along past Blackfriars Bridge, doubling back up the Embankment and then taking another detour with a hairpin bend at the end on Westminster Bridge. After a couple of attempts I think I got the strategy right for dealing with the hairpins: take them wide and keep running rather than risk tangled ankles by cutting in tight and colliding with about ten other runners. Even after 8km, the crowd had not thinned out that much.

By 9km we were getting “Chariots of Fire” over speakers placed at the foot of Big Ben. The clock struck the chimes for half-past ten as I neared the north end of Westminster Bridge and turned for the final stretch. People were yelling out “Last few hundred yards” to anyone who was paying attention. Working out how many hundred yards was not all that easy as the organisers had managed to confuse just about everyone taking part in the race by putting in a final hairpin just yards from the finish line. But people knew they were five minutes away from the end as they turned back onto the Embankment for the final stretch past the Ministry of Defence building.
One woman running for a bowel cancer charity was cheerfully ringing up relatives on her mobile in an athletic version of the “I’m on the train!” announcements you can hear at 6pm on the way out of London on any overground rail service. “I’ve just passed the 9km marker!” she yelled. “Where are you waiting?” The phone seemed a bit superfluous.

The one thing I knew about the finish was that it was by the Cenotaph: the organisers were keen to maintain the link with the VE and VJ celebrations as well as the 2012 Olympic announcement, and anything else they could find as a publicity hook. The catch was that it was the other side of the road. Coming round into Whitehall, I realised that, as the end of “Jurasalem” played out from this set of speakers, there was at least one more turn before I could find the finish. So, at the end of Whitehall it was another wide turn to avoid a dozen legs and then a matter of running back towards the Cenotaph. The finish was easy to spot, although not because it had a big sign saying “Finish”.

There were two clues: one being the clock and the other the big crowd of people who decided that, once past the finish line, you can stop dead. So, the end of the race turned into the pedestrian equivalent of a motorway pile-up. Stewards morosely asked people to keep walking but they were meeting friends, family, anybody who wanted to say hello. So, the sprint finish I saved out petered out a bit in favour of avoiding a collision. The clock counted its way round to one hour, three minutes and 23 seconds, which meant I had taken more or less an hour to get round the course.

I found a piece of wall that did not have any people by it to get some stretches in as my left leg started to protest about the pavement pounding I had been doing for the last hour. Then I set off in search of my finisher’s medal, which was with the bag drop at Pall Mall. For reasons I can’t begin to fathom, the back of the medal carried a picture of St Paul’s Cathedral. You might think the Cenotaph might have been a good choice, or Nelson’s Column. Even the Hard Rock Café might have made an appropriate if tacky and incongruous image: at least it was on the course. But it summed up the organisation of the event: a nice try but not quite on target. And that was my first go in a race like this, just wait until I’ve done some more before I get really scathing about the organisation.

Posted by Chris at 11:06 PM