Tom Roper's Weblog

iBlog mysteries

Another thing: why can't I display my e-mail and so on? Help suggests that you can set this using General Preferences, but there's no such option. I wonder if this is because I downloaded a version from .Mac offered to .Mac users and its a cut-down version of the full product? I shall ask.
(Later note: I seem to have cracked this one now: not sure how)

Brighton to London in 2003

One of the great things about this weblog is that it allows me to inflict my views on anything and everything on the world at large. So, for purely cathartic purposes, here is my account of a simple journey attempted on Britain's railway network yesterday evening, a distance of some seventy miles from work (Brighton & Sussex Medical School) to home (North London)
5 pm: leave work for Falmer station for the first leg, a six minute journey to Brighton. Train indicated as 3 minutes late: annoying, as this means I will miss the 1719 Brighton to London train, but this is fairly frequent. But a friend from work is also waiting for this train, so the wait and the journey pass pleasantly, althogh the indicator changes to show the train as being on time, when it patently isn't
520-ish: arrive Brighton, bid farewell to friend. Worryingly large crowd at station. As soon as I see the indicator boards I realise something is wrong: all trains to London shown as delayed. Apparently there has been a fire at Preston Park. Vague announcements don't tell me very much, but eventually they advise travellers to London to catch a train to Lewes; this is the very train I just came in on; I and other passengerswonder why we weren't given this advice at Falmer station twenty minutes earlier. But I catch the recommended train and apart from a curious incident in which a passenger beat on the driver's cab door repeatedly and had to be told not to, all passes well.
540: Arrive Lewes, and the 1749 for London is indicated as being on time. It pulls in and is full, but not impossibly so.
610: Arrive Haywards Heath, A variety of conflicting and often inaudible announcements are made. A fool sitting next to me witters into his mobile, which makes the indistinct loudspeakers even more difficult to hear. But it becomes apparent that as well as the fire, there is a points failure at Haywards Heath. In a while we are told to get off the train we're on and catch another one at another platform. This seems to be a Brighton train which has been turned round at Haywards Heath. Again it's full, but I find a seat.
730: arrive London Victoria.Now for the tube...but the Jubilee line is "experiencing delays". I arrive home at 830, about an hour and a quarter later than I should be.
Now no blood has been shed, no real suffering endured....but what I don't understand is why, when demand for rail travel has never been higher and is growing, should it have to be such a difficult experience?

Blogger or iBlog

I started this blog using blogger , but have moved over to iBlog . While this restricts me to using the Mac (and only the Powerbook, the old G3 at home being too feeble to run OSX). I think I find iBlog better, at least in that I can do lots more with it on the train, where I spend some 4.75 to 5 hours every working day (or more on a bad day). But it's obviously something still under development: although the documentation suggest it supports ftp uploading, in fact the only options available are local publishing or publishing to .mac. I decided I wanted to hold the pages on my own site, so what I do is to publish locally and then use Dreamweaver's synchronise feature to upload them, which works well enough but is not what the computer johnnies call elegant. Will be good if they actually implement this feature in future releases.

This morning's Times; library theft and the British Museum

Two stories of professional interest in this morning's <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/" target="NewWindow">Times</a>  : a report of a Danish librarian turned thief, now dead, who stole 3,200 books from the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen. His widow and others were caught trying to sell a 1517 title, irritatingly unnamed, through Christie's. And a letter on the letters page correcting a previous report about books lent by the House of Commons Library to the Kings Library at the <a href="http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/" target="NewWindow">British Museum</a>  .
Theft by librarians from their own collections is unfortunately not unknown. I wonder if it has ever been quantified? I knew one senior librarian of a major London institution who referred to his extensive and internationally famous historical collection as his "pension fund"...he was joking, wasn't he?

Perouse wins

Yes, he did it! "Quickened to lead approaching last, easily" said the <a href="http://www.racingpost.co.uk/" target="NewWindow">Racing Post</a>  comments in running.
Shalako and Thesis second and third respectively, but had no chance with winner. Where next? 

Cheltenham December meeting

I am a reformed character and not in any sense a betting man but it is hard to resist Perouse in the 1.10 at Cheltenham this afternoon. He won convincingly at Fontwell on Tuesday, "without extending himself " said the race reader; this will make a third victory in eight days. Main danger I would say is Venetia Williams' Thesis, with Tony McCoy on board.

Bad journey

For one train to be delayed is a misfortune...

Ha! here we are in what was once one of the leading nations of the civilised world and every train I have been on so far this morning has been delayed.
Shall start a new category for these posts, called perhaps "Why, oh why...?" or "It really is appalling" to hold these. But in brief, the Jubilee line train I take first of all pulled into my starting station, Canons Park, let passengers on and then sat there without moving for ten minutes. As I was obviously not going to catch my usual London Bridge train I diverted myself to Victoria, but the Victoria line was having delays due to "speed restrictions". Forced to take the train to Lewes, which gets me to work late after changing there for the Falmer train, and that too was delayed. It is clearly unreasonable of me to try to work so far from home and I humbly apologise to those who run the railways and in particular to Alistair Darling for troubling him.

2003 Varsity Match

An 11-11 draw: Oxford looked very threatening from the start, and spent much of the game in Cambridge's half.
But in the last twenty minute Cambridge suddenly started playing and took the fight to Oxford.
A good time was had by all, I think, including drunken City louts, old men whose playing days are long gone and who can only carp at the efforts of the young men on the field, and over-excited schoolboys.
Attended with a group from my old school.

Reed Elsevier share price falls

This morning’s Times reports the fall in Reed Elsevier ’s share price, (the biggest yesterday of any company in the FTSE 100). The fall was caused by an announcement that they expected only a “high single digit” percentage increase in earnings in 2004. This is remarkable, as most small investors would be profoundly grateful for a high single digit rate of return. Leading US universities recently announced that they will boycott Reed Elsevier products, in particular ScienceDirect, in protest at the company’s rapacious pricing policy, according to a report in Information Today  . The reports cite a fall in demand in the US educational market, but blame this on the development of new curricula, rather than a subscriber revolt. But Reed Elsevier also forecast that they will be back to double-digit earnings growth in 2005 and 2006, and that demand for their main scientific platform, ScienceDirect, has doubled.
Librarians need to think hard about this, and about the state of the publishing industry generally. So far the professional press is full of denunciations of the evils of Reed Elsevier but not much else. Solutions such as institutional archiving and new methods of electronic publishing such as BioMedCentral and pubmedcentral are attracting interest but there hasn’t been much deep thought and analysis.
Too often librarians think that to lead a goat labelled Reed Elsevier into a professional gathering and stone it to death makes a debate. Instead we need to conduct a rigorous and scientific analysis of the current state of the publishing industry, the effects that the tendency to monopoly is having on the communication of knowledge, and evaluate possible answers for librarians and those we serve.

Alan Davidson dead

Alan Davidson died: a great pity, a wonderful food writer, streets ahead of the jackanapes who posture as "celebrity chefs" . Times obit here . The only other obituary a Google news search turned up on the day of the Times one was in the Baltimore Sun which quaintly says "Mr. Davidson was born in what was then known as Londonderry, Northern Ireland". I think our colleagues in Baltimore ( who can blame them?) may have missed some of the nuances of the situation in the Six Counties.