Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
09 2006
7:47pm: Today I have the privilege of sampling Hazelhatch/Celbridge train station from the inside of a dark train. The lights turned off just a few minutes after leaving Heuston, Dublin. After the first 15 minutes of the unscheduled stop, the driver finally began a walk through the train to inform us what was going on and that we would be here for another 10 minutes waiting for maintenance to come and fix the lights.
7:52pm: Still no sign of any maintenance people and my iBook battery is starting to die. The battery went from holding 6 hours of charge to barely holding 45 minutes. It sucks but not anything like as much as the woeful public transport system we have in this country.
8:00pm: The view out the window has utterly failed to change. Still no update forthcoming regarding whether they are repairing stuff or whether we'll make Limerick tonight or not. I live in hope...
8:07pm: Now 20 minutes since the driver announced what the problem was, and still no sign of us moving. We're now running at least 35 minutes late.
8:17pm: Still not one inch of progress towards Limerick, and unsurprisingly no update on the train's status from anyone in charge. This is starting to get ridiculous and very annoying.
8:23pm: The driver has announced that there will be another train on the way in 20 to 25 minutes. Im assuming this is the last train from Dublin. I may as well have waited for it and had a decent meal. Public transport in this country is not just bad, it is a joke. I hope everyone on this train writes and requests a full refund of their ticket price for this fiasco. I certainly will be.
8:42pm: To add insult to injury, they have now asked us all to step off the train and wait on the platform for the twenty or so minutes its going to take the next train to arrive. At least its not raining, but it's really quite chilly just standing on an open station platform optimistically hoping a train will eventually appear. I'm too angry at this point to compose a reasonable and balanced letter of complaint. I'll wait until I calm down slightly.
8:54pm: A whistle and a light signals another train's arrival. We've been stopped in Celbridge for a little over an hour at this point.
8:57pm: We finally leave Celbridge station. Feeling is returning to my fingers and there's a hope growing that we'll make Limerick before midnight.
9:00pm: And we've stopped again. Once more, I have no idea why we're stopped or for how long. A joke, this 'transport system' is. Ah, only two minutes this time. Perhaps we'll try and exceed ten miles per hour in a while, who knows?!? Stopped again! I'm beginning to suspect this train is also broken.
Once again, the only saving grace is the good humour of the Irish. Despite having their time wasted and been made to sit in the dark and stand in the cold, they laughed and joked, mocking the trains and the situation, talking and chasing away any atmosphere that could otherwise make the long wait unbearable.
11:24pm: We finally arrive in Limerick station, having left Heuston at 7:15pm. This is a shocking condemnation of Irelands 'public transport;' moreso when you consider that I had to travel for an hour to get to Heuston from my office near Merrion Square - and that's without anything breaking down. I intend to laugh in the face of the next politician who suggests we should be leaving our cars at home and using the laughable fiasco we term 'public transport' in this country.
We were met at Limerick station by three staff, apologising for the delay and handing out forms to make claims for delays. It has a space for postcode and the currency is marked as £ (pounds.) My cup of bitterness doth runneth over...
</rant>
posted at: 11:53 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
Today God didn't want me to have my bedroom window open. He demonstrated this by making the wind blow so hard it slammed shut. I guess my quota of fresh air had already been blown in.
posted at: 13:59 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
An Irish sean-fhocail claims, "Is fearr cara sa chúirt ná punt sa sporrán." Apart from the obvious update in currency unit required, it's as true as ever in this fair green isle of ours. Getting even the smallest amount of customer service from anywhere here in Ireland seems to require 'knowing a man' (and possibly going to speak with him about a dog, as is the tradition.)
I know people who deal with the internet. Various questions, problems and issues have been dealt with efficiently and with the minimum of fuss - because I've been able to have a word in a few people's ears and they've come up trumps every time.
I don't know anyone in Iarannrod Eireann / Irish Rail and my latest fiasco has been getting issued with a slightly incorrect ticket which won't work in any of the mechanical barriers. I've raised this issue to three people so far in 2 railway stations and all have sympathised, one pointed out the the machine was broken and that I was not the first person to complain that a defective ticket had been issued, but none of them were willing to exchange it for a working ticket. They're happy to let me manually pass through the barriers, but not just replace the broken ticket.
Jobsworth's, shackled to processes and procedures that are inherently defective, are not 'making it happen' and are actively hindering others - unless, of course, you know someone who can bypass the brokeness and make good again. While I appreciate the importance of social networking, next time you're dealing with a stranger, try to remember that they could be a friend you've just not met yet and contemplate on whether you're treating them the same as you would a friend.
My friends are great people, but I shouldn't have to rely on them to make stuff happen. So make stuff happen yourself, and when someone today requests your help with something, make it happen for them whether you know them or not. It'll make their day.
posted at: 11:39 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Some muppets have released a razor with 5... count them... FIVE... blades. And a battery! wtf?!? Is anyone using one of these? And if so, why?
I wonder how the hell you get through UK airport (the-opposite-of-) security with one of them?
posted at: 01:44 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
What would you say to the Ryder Cup?
FECK OFF CUP!
For some reason, best known only to themselves, there is a requirment that certain services be configured in a certain specific way to get Windows Update running on Windows 2000. (This probably applies to Windows XP as well, but I don't have a box handy to check at the moment.)
If, like me, you don't like unecessary services running on your system, you will need need to set the following services up as detailed to make Windows Update work:
This morning I woke up in the middle of a dream in which I was debugging a software problem with one of the products my employer creates. The worst part is that I woke up just as I had kicked off a build, so I don't even know if I fixed it.
posted at: 07:25 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Sometimes, we're a hugely helpful bunch on #nonado...
<tyrion>whats the name of those posters which are a colage of images (usually film frames) which appear to be one image when viewed from the distance?
<cheez> I've only heard them called colages.
<bigbro> I think they're called posters.
<cheez> bigbro: Ah, you're right.
<diamond> there is a specific term for them
<diamond> but i don't remember what it is
<tyrion> diamond: thanks
<cheez> Is the term 'a-colage-of-images-which-appear-to-be-one-image-when-viewed-from-a-distance' perchance?
Clearly, the obvious thing to do, having woken up at $SILLY_O_CLOCK in the morning to get a train from Limerick to Dublin and worked many hours to emerge from the office in time to catch the 8:10pm train home, is to tuck into a huge Chinese meal, spend over an hour trying to make Rach's DVD player multi-region so we can watch a US DVD Kev's brought over, only to give up and watch Serenity until after 1:00am. I feel slightly better having fitted so many subclauses into the last sentence before finally going to sleep. Grammar and clarity - Nil! Me - One!
posted at: 01:23 | path: | permanent link to this entry
After my rant on the crappiness of Dublin public transport, my mood was greatly improved by finding a really fine public house just across the road from Heuston Station. (I've forgotten the name - mental note to look at the sign over the door as I leave.) The next Limerick train was, as I suspected, two hours later, so I had about an hour and forty five minutes to kill.
With both food and a drink ordered within 5 minutes of entering the premises, thanks to a friendly barman and a most attentive Slovakian waitress, I relaxed and discovered an open wireless network nearby. Arthur, a local of these parts was in having a few scoops and regaling everyone who entered the pub with his friendly, if slightly over the top, Irish friendliness. An American property agent, her aunt and a guy working in cooling for computers and electronic devices were later joined by a pair of Australians and a Cork girl. I really should have got the American guy's name and contact details since my brother works in the same field - but I was too entertained by the banter bouncing back and forth from the local Dubliners. Fitzer and Bobby made up the remaining complement of Dubliners, interspersing shouting at random people on their mobile phones with shouting in a friendly way at the other occupants of the pub.
I've missed having this kind of atmosphere in pubs. It's something that's extremely rare in the UK. I'm not going to make any comment on the crazy 80's-esque music they had playing, mostly because it was largely ignored and irrelevant to the other, far more comedy, goings on.
Apart from the woefully crap public transport system foisted on us by government after government of blissfully ignorant politicians, I'm very much enjoying my move back to Ireland nad specifically to Dublin. It's a wonderful place, provided you can afford to relax and don't need to get anywhere in a hurry :-)
posted at: 16:37 | path: | permanent link to this entry
...or, how to leave my house in Balbriggan at 1pm and still miss a 3pm train from Heuston. Where was the 1:35pm train from Balbriggan, for example? I didn't see it. Neither did any of the other people waiting on the platform. There was no notice or announcement that this service would be late or cancelled. I guess it's more fun to just play public-transport-roulette.
The 1:50pm train arrived promptly, but decided to park for 15 minutes just outside Connelly station, rendering it now even less likely I was going to be able to get to Heuston by 3pm.
The final straw was missing the Luas due to the ticket machines being so slow and the queues being so large. It's a major f**king station people! Maybe more than 2 ticket machines might be an idea. Alternatively, there's huge ptoentials for reducing transaction time per customer. If anyone dealing with the Luas ticketting system is reading this, I'm happy to consult. I know SFA about ticketting systems, but I'm pretty sure I could do a less crap job.
It's now 3pm and I've made it as far as the Jervis shopping centre. 2 hours to get to the city centre. That's impressively poor, even by Irish standards I think.
I'm probably not going to get a Limerick train for another 2 hours, resulting in me spending approximately 7 hours getting from Dublin to Limerick, including waiting times. Wow! Sucky!
There is no excuse for a level of service this poor. Ireland is a small country. The infrastructure could easily be made to link up better and work more reliably. I'll certainly be pointing this out to politicians who want my vote. Why don't you do the same and maybe I won't have to emigrate again to enjoy a level of public transport that exceeds my moderate expectations of competence.
</rant>
posted at: 15:07 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
Today, yet another of my friends was offered employment with a major internet search firm with offices close by my own. Looks like Steve will shortly be joining us here in Dublin. Congratulations Steve! :-)
In other news, we're going to have to seriously think about renaming the Irish
Linux Users Group (ILUG) to something
incorporating a bunch of colourful letter 'O's and possibly starting with the
letter 'G', given the percentage of ILUGers
employed by the one company... :-)
posted at: 12:44 | path: | permanent link to this entry
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