To the nice young man in the baseball cap on the train who was drinking Stella and listening to KissFM at full volume: you’ve got my brand new phone, why not get in touch and you can have the charger and hands-free kit too?
Archive for the 'commuting' Category
OR: NEVER MIND THE $100 LAPTOP, GET A LOAD OF THE £200 LAPTOP!
I’ve had my Asus eee PC for a couple of days now, and can set some thoughts down… as you know this is a tiny £200 sub-notebook computer, that almost perfectly fits my long-held dream of a tiny laptop with no hard drive which would boot quickly enough to allow me to write something on a short train journey, let me get on the net using wifi, write that coruscating best-seller!
It really does fulfill my dream. It boots in seconds and wakes from sleep even faster. The screen is a mere 800×480 pixels but it’s very sharp - quite high resolution - and most web sites look just fine. Quite a lot of scrolling required but BBC News and Flickr work ok. You can hook up an external monitor via VGA and get some pretty huge resolutions - I did this at work today and it was hard to believe that this tiny box was producing a great big picture.
The keyboard is a bit clackety, but I’m typing this on it now without too much trouble. The trackpad is surprisingly good - not up to my PowerBook’s but it does have a scroll strip on the right which is almost as good as Apple’s 2-fingered salute. Frankly I thought the click button was faulty until it dawned on me that it does left or right click depending on which side you press - double-tapping the trackpad is easier for a left-click.
It’s got 3 USB 2.0 ports, which is one more than my PowerBook that cost 10 times as much. It’s got an ethernet socket, a built-in web cam and stereo speakers and headphone and mic sockets - along with a built-in mic at the front just underneath. There’s also a slot for additional memory via SD cards, which I’ll need. My unit has 4GB of flash storage, much of which is taken up with the OS and 512MB of RAM.
Although you can install WindowsXP on it, it comes pre-installed with a special version of Xandros Linux. There’s a huge range of useful open source software included - Firefox, of course - which you can add an FTP plugin to. OpenOffice for word processing and whatnot. The media players do a nice job of playing MP3s and have coped with the few various video files I’ve chucked at them. There’s also Skype - not open source but potentially makes this device worth the money on it’s own. I’ve got the Skype 2.0 beta running using the web cam - this machine is so tiny you could just leave it on in the kitchen and use it for phone calls and checking the news headlines and train times.
Of course as a Linux machine you’re a bit limited in what peripherals you can use - no problems with my Kingston memory stick but when I plugged my Nikon D40 camera in (without much hope) oddly it mounted a drive called ‘D40′ but couldn’t see anything on it. No great loss as I can plug the Nikon’s SD card straight into the eeePC’s internal card slot - in fact this little gizmo means that if I carry it with my camera I can file pictures from anywhere I can snaffle some WiFi connectivity.
But peripherals are hardly the point - a memory stick goes a long way. You can even boot off a USB keyring if you want to try an alternate Linux flavour without trashing the default configuration. One mad fool has even got MacOS X running on one…
There are a few niggles so far - the WiFi is a bit flaky at first and nowhere near as easy to set up as a Nintendo DS (which is my gold-standard for simple WiFi configuration - those guys make Apple look sloppy!) - a couple of times I’ve just bitten the bullet and rebooted, but that itself is so quick and Firefox opens all its tabs just where you were.
Other oddities are the fact that this is a single user Linux - amazingly you cannot have multiple accounts without installing another Linux distro, which I don’t want to do. This is a pity and tragically means that I can’t let the kids have the eeePC after all, what with the lack of parental controls as well. Oh well.
Also they seem to have stripped out the option to set the clock from an NTP server, which is very very odd, especially as it’s mentioned in one of the help pages. Annoying thing for them to have dropped - quite handy when you’re out and about, to get the right time off the interweb!
But all in all a lovely dream machine… it is, as Stephen Fry would say, my mother, my lover, my strumpet of the boudoir. If only I’d managed to get one in black…
A week ago, during a stressful visit to Bluewater, I was dragging the kids around and my youngest was screaming. I wanted to scream too, but possibly for different reasons. I was in M&S trying to buy food and they didn’t have any. It had taken ages to get there because of road works, we’d witnessed the aftermath of a 3-car smash on the slip-road, had driven round for about 20 minutes trying to find a parking space and I didn’t want to go in the first place. Anyway, a foul-looking man looked at me with hatred and said “bloody kids!”. Was he never young?
Last week on the train going home from work, in the far end of the carriage a baby cried. Young woman stopped snogging her boyfriend briefly to say “bloody kids!”. Let’s hope that snogging never ends in pregnancy.
Yesterday a woman had a small dog on the train which kept barking. No-one said “bloody dogs”.
This morning I was queuing for a train ticket for Charing Cross. There were two people in front of me, both with fairly complicated queries. The ticket machines were free but I had about 5 minutes before my train was due and I prefer buying tickets from human beings.
A man pitches up behind me. He looks like he wants to get the Cannon Street train which is just pulling in. Now, if he’d said “arghhh, there’s my train!” I might have let him queue jump. If he’d said “there’s my bloody train” I might have given way. But his opening gambit was this: he said “Fuck you! FUCK YOU ALL! There’s my FUCKING train!”.
So I didn’t move, he missed his train and the next one was ten minutes late.
Notes from Overground by Roger Green, was published in 1984 under the pen-name Tiresias. It is a lyrical, madenning, poetical, brilliant work about… about… commuting from Oxford to London. No, stick with me. He made the same journey every day, but unlike his fellow passengers, he had a notebook and he wrote down what he saw, heard and thought, riffing on the subject of commuting; “man is born free and everywhere is in trains”; “commuters of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your trains!”. He wrote about places, made poems from their names, found literary connections to places and situations; he wrote about the slightly odd things most of us fail to notice or think much about. Goods wagons with fishy names. Cryptic signs - ‘Reading for engineers only’. Odd headlines - ‘Man Did Not Throw Brick’. Strange Tannoy announcements:
‘Will the Island Supervisor telephone the A.F.O.’ ‘Will the A.S.M. contact the A.M.O.’ ‘Will the B.V.M. telephone the I.H.S.’ ‘Will the I.C.B.M. intercept the U.F.O.’ ‘Will the P.M. report to the H.P. immediately.’ ‘Will the K.G.B. surrender to the S.I.S.’ Q: which of these announcements are not genuine? A: Try again. They are all genuine. Only the most hubristic commuter would deny having heard them all and many like them. Very probably the Last Trump will be heard over the tannoy at Paddington Station.
I loved it so much partly because I used to commute along a stretch of the same line, from Slough to Paddington (as part of my uber-commute from Windsor to Potters Bar) so I knew some of the landmarks and territory - not least the bizarre graffiti near Paddington that read ‘Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere‘.
The book threatened - not least according to its blurb - to become a cult classic, but I don’t think it ever did. Long out-of-print, it’s acquired almost mythical status to me over the years - my brother had borrowed it and it was in his briefcase when it was stolen. Amazingly the police recovered it and it was returned to me.
It’s almost twenty years since I travelled along that line, and a simple work trip to Slough and back was filled with queasy nostalgia and strange feelings about the passage of time.
When I got to Paddington, I already felt like a time traveller. I could just about find the ticket office - it seemed to be more or less where I left it - but everything else seemed to have changed. The Lawn - the apron in front of the platforms - had become a high-tech shopping mall with neon escalators and Starbucks. The W H Smith I used to kill time in had shrunk and gone underground, as if hiding from the modern rubbish above. A 1984 that’s a far cry from the way it was in 1984:
On Friday nights when the hordes have gone home, when 1900 becomes 7pm, out ventures the British Rail Western Region Staff Military Band to exploit the superb acoustics of The Lawn. Lumps rise in throats, eyes blur as men (predominately) and women of all ages, with beer at their feet, produce their stirring, brazen stuff. Who are they? Booking clerks? Guards? Engine-drivers? Porters? Cleaners? I know not. But their music unites them, transforms them, welds them continuously into an entitiy which transcends BR and ASLEF and NUR and commuting, which makes nonsense of everything but this, where the whole consort momentarily dances together on a pin’s head.
Hard to imagine that being allowed today to interrupt commerce.
There were still trains that looked as if they were capable of high speeds, the exciting whiff of proper travel, decent distances - but no billboard proclaiming ‘HTV - your station back home’. Yes, and that was one of the reasons I turned my back on what lies beyond the ‘Bristol end’ of platform 1: Bristol.
Going to Slough I could either wait a while for a fast train that was going on to Evesham - where my BBC career began - or a slow train to Oxford - in the very train-tracks of Tiresias himself. The Oxford train was leaving now. From Platform 13, which is so far from the main concourse you almost need to get a train to reach it. Or I could go mad - go to Cornwall, go home to Bristol.
Platform 13 was irresistable. A mad dash and I was aboard and off.
Outbound journey was a failure - sitting on the left, facing south. Dazzling sun prevented me from taking any photos or indeed seeing very much. I was nursing a much-needed scalding hot cup of coffee, so I couldn’t really move. Resolved to sit on the left, facing north, going back so I could see more stuff.
Climbing over the foot-bridge at Slough station, suddenly it seemed like very little had changed. I used to cross this bridge twice a day to get the train that shuttles between Slough and Windsor. Looking at the woodwork on the handrails and the walls, it could have been unchanged since the Second World War. The further you get from London, it seems, the slower time gets.
Right outside Slough station a high-tech office block from the 1980s was derelict and in decay. The sign has been vandalised and seemed to read ‘Commuter Sciences House’. I couldn’t help thinking that Tiresias, obsessed with commuting and the condition of the commuter, would have approved. I trudged off into Slough, trying to find an industrial estate; like looking in a haystack for - a piece of hay.
Work done; just missed a fast train back to Paddington, so I sat on Slough station eating my sandwiches and taking photos. A man waiting for a train with his grandson while someone runs for the Windsor shuttle; he’s probably running faster than the train he’s trying to catch will ever go.
Finally en-trained and off, I was facing North, the sun behind me; I started snapping and looking for familiar landmarks. I didn’t do too well. The closer to London I got, the more of a derelict industrial wasteland I seemed to move into. There was the odd building I recognised, a gas holder, a water tower…
I used to dream of living in that tower - it seemed so big, so spacious, so many windows. Tattered curtains were hung at some of its windows, and I used to imagine some young poet or sculptor, surfacing very occasionally from the bed he shared with a succession of nubile young women, to knock off a minor masterpiece that would lie unappreciated until after his untimely death. The curtains are still there, but the poet in my head is gone. All I see now in that tower is a TV make-over show.
But where were the other landmarks? Where, for example, as I pulled out of Hayes and Harlington station, where is the mighty EMI? The Greatest Recording Organisation in the World. Well, how the mighty fall… my brother - he of the stolen briefcase - spotted it amongst my photos. Its windows broken, its walls sprayed with graffiti.
Back at Paddington I re-emerged into the other-wordly station; the ceiling as I walk out from Platform 11 seems to be made of huge, white cushions. The concourse was a confusion of people, people going in an unfathomable number of different directions; some commuters making short hops, some travelling the length of the British Isles, some having just got in from Heathrow, coming close to the end of journeys thousands of miles long.
In the end Tiresias escaped - he escaped his job (his marriage?) and moved to Hydra to write poetry. At the end of my journey I decended into the underworld, the Circle line. Comfort, briefly as I headed back to work. When I started working at the BBC, I couldn’t sleep, except on trains. Tube trains were my pillows, my bedroom, my only rest.
The full photoset of the journey can be seen here.
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