Aquarionics

Commute

Commuting is more difficult than I thought it was going to be.

First, there is the whole ‘getting on the train’ thing, which involves getting up at 7am, and not – for example – then falling asleep and dreaming about matches for three quarters of an hour.

Second, there is the trip from Reading to Paddington. The trip from my home to Reading station is reasonably simple, and nobody has managed to muck that up for me yet, but the train from Reading to Paddington has a number of interesting qualities, and some of which are these:

First, it either comes from Swansea or Swindon, depending on which train I take. Reading is the last stop before Paddington, which is quite lucky because by the time it gets to Reading every seat is filled, not a person more, not a person less, meaning that anyone who gets onto the train at Reading will have to stand until Paddington. This has failed to be true twice, the first was when I caught the early train from Swansea which gets into Reading at 7:15. I caught this train at 8:20, when it was rolled into the station empty. I’ve caught trains at about 8:20 every day this week save one, and every day I’ve caught a train that was supposed to be there at least ten minutes previously. The only time I’ve managed to catch the 8:20 from Reading was when I arrived at the station at 8:45.

Also, I’m not sure why commuter trains require a travelling chef on each, but I digress.

Second. I have a week season ticket (1 day Reading -> London at peak: 25. one week Reading -> London 77), and I’m really glad I didn’t go for the month one. In the past week a grand total of three ticket machines have choked on my ticket, meaning I have to seek out a London Underground Bod to get through gates until I can leave it (the ticket) between two heavy books.

So, basically, Grumble Grumble British Rail Grumble Grumble Too Hot Grumble Grumble British Weather Grumble Grumble Grumble.

OTOH, the job itself is fun :-)

Morning Broken

Last night, I forgot to set my alarm clock.

Despite this, I appear to be up (It’s somewhere in the region of half-past seven) and have been for the last hour and a half. I appear to be being turned into a morning person against my will. Scary.

Stuff’s happening. I’m seeing a huge gap in the blogging world for Threadnaut, which I’ll eventually a) code and b) announce, but right now I’m sort of caught up in this whole “Paid Employment” thing, mostly because I’m trying to turn it from a great idea (which it is) to an idea that’s firstly usable by me and secondarily marketable. Let others in the company do prioritize this the other way around, my mission is to execute this nicely.

In doing this I’m learning more about DHTML than I thought I’d ever need, and more about the JavaScript security model than I ever thought necessery (In particular, I’m discovering that there is one, and that IE supports it the same way Moz does, and that this is bad for my freedom of code, but I digress), and this is leading to research into such fun things as XUL, Sidebars (Both IE and Moz) and such. So generally I’m having fun, and getting paid for it, which is always a bonus.

Be prepared for an article on why I hate XForms, possibly entitled “A mark-up and formy blight”

Lessons

Today I learnt that I don’t hate Java, I hate what Java used to be.

I learnt that sitting though three hours of lectures recognising one acronym in three is not a phemomenon unique to university.

I learnt that SAP makes people rich because it’s so mind-numbingly boring.

I learnt that it can take three hours to get home from London, and that this is a natural concequence of skipping out early.

I learnt that the Hilton Metropole Hotel is rather nifty.

I learnt that paying 300% normal cost for a cup of coffee does not make it taste any better.

I learnt that not only does there exist in the world an electric Ukulele, but also a man who is able to play “I can see clearly now (The rain has gone)” upon it.

I learnt that if you pay said person enough money, he will eventually go away.

Today, I learnt Valuable Lessons.

Also, I got a nifty pen.

Unwashed

So, from mid-March it becomes a race to see which of the people who want to employ me get the funding/contract/offer first.

I wonder how I explain that to the unemployment office.

Sweepstakes, anyone?

Unwashed cleaned up

Since I apparently wasn’t clear in the previous post on the subject:

1. I stop being paid on the 17^th
2. A number of groups have expressed the intention of hiring me
3. Neither are able to do so right now
4. Therefore, as of the 17^th I’m unemployed until one of the groups gets the ability to employ me.

This could take anything from three weeks to – as has previously happened – nine months.

So, just in case anyone remains confused by the above set of statements, the below expression of paranoia, and the general level of luck I have finding employment, this comes under the heading of being “A Bad Thing” but not as bad as last time.

I’ve spent large parts of today outside lifting things. First, we had a rockary delivered and me and Brother Two helped unload it. (During this, I mentioned that I’d specifically gone into a career of indoor work with no heavy lifting. He noted that in return for a lack of heavy lifting, I get extra doses of stress while he – who shifts stuff around warehouses – gets the heavy lifting but no stress at all. He does have a point). Later we fetched a van to load my life’s posessions in ready for the moving in bit tomorrow morning, loading it from the piles of boxes that have been sitting in my grandparents’ garage for a month.

The whole ‘months gap between moving’ thing isn’t going to happen again.

Admittedly, I said that last time.

Anyway, so at 9am tomorrow morning we will be signing contracts for the new house. Yay. A week after that my paycheque stops, Non-yay.

On the other hand, Shaun of the dead opens next month.

This week in brief

So, since I’m still in a state of employment limbo, I’ve been Expanding My Skills Base in preparation for diving into either unemployment or the new project as soon as it’s confirmed one way or the other.

This means that I’ve spent a week mucking around with mod-python, vmware, X-Servers for Windows (a combination of the last two have given me access to Konquerer from Windows, which is useful), perl and IRC bots.

IRC bots? Well, yes… I was introduced to IdleRPG last week, an IRC-Based RPG system where the idea is – basically – to idle on channel. This is neat, and everything, but I’ve never been particulally good at participating in things without seeing how they could be better, so it was kinda inevitable that I’d end up finding the source and hacking around on it. I tested it on a channel I’m on, and it took off remarkably quickly. A few modifications – to give a bonus instead of penalty for talking, as benefits a live channel rather than a dedicated Idling one – plus a host of decision-by-committee enhancements to the formulas have kept me working.

Plus, the RSI is back, which is… well, yes.

Another five minutes of editing Mockingbird (That’s “Five minutes of story to edit” of the next eight minutes of the file, taking about – oooh, an hour?) and I’ll be ready for the next stage, which is finding samples of bird-song to put into the background.

So, life is ebbing and flowing. It usually is.

Course of action

So, being as it looks like my job isn’t going to pay me in time for my rent, the lack of PHP contracts being flung my way, and the general lack of money in my life, I’ve taken the only logical course of action.

I redesigned my website.

Not this one, the other one

It worked. Within seconds of writing the first line of HTML, I got an email with a possible job.

I find this funny.

6am

So today I got up at 6am because it seemed like a good idea.

I went out to the petrol station for some milk and discovered that “24/7” means “Opens 6:30”

I went to the newsagent and got some milk and went home. I had tea, I had breakfast.

It’s 9am, and I’ve spend a third of my day reading random quotes from bash.org

Just so I don’t waste my day, I’m going to make sure I play some Baldur’s Gate II later.

By which you can gather that none of the people who want to employ me can do so yet.

Because it's cruel to cats (It's cruel to cats)

My back garden is a veritable feast of campanology now. Some mean, cruel and nasty person has attached a bell to one of the cats which wanders around, I watched it yesterday attempting to pounce on raindrops (Preferably without getting wet) and every stealthy step it took was accompanied by the jingling of bells. It was not a happy kitty.

Yesterday was not just a bad day for cats, in fact. It’s a long running in-joke that either me or LoneCat can be employed at any one time, and so it’s only logical that with BrowserAngel putting me on notice that they have a new grant and will be reemploying me forthwith, LoneCat has been placed on her mandatory 3 month notice of redundancy.

Not that this has stopped me applying for other jobs, I point out. Optimism is for people with savings accounts.

On top of all this, I went head over handlebars yesterday when a fuckwitted moron decided that cyclists didn’t deserve roundabouts and pulled out in front of me. My immediate reaction was to slam on the brakes, but since my right hand brake is the front brake (And I’m right handed) this didn’t have the desired effect, as whilst much of my forward momentum was curtailed, it transferred into a graceful arc around the radius of my stationary front wheel, depositing me nose to tarmac. Shortly afterwards my rucksack, which happened to be full of library books due to be returned, continued to follow its own interpretation of the laws of momentum and comedy to hit me in the back of the head.

The car behind me was tolerance itself, waiting almost two seconds after the crash before it beeped for me to get out of the way, whereupon I dragged my bruised – but otherwise unharmed – self and my unscathed cycle to the side of the road where I waited until I had stopped shaking sufficiently to go and be patronised by the Job Centre.

And the causing car? Drove off without even noticing me.

All motorists should be forced to cycle on main roads for at least two weeks every few years.

Mostly

argh

Everything sucks.

Unix/PHP/Usability/Web Hack for hire, going cheap. Will sell soul for three months rent. Scratch that, Six months rent.

Looking Up

Okay, life’s getting interesting again.

First, I got a phone call that might get me a short term perl/sql contract and net me enough to get out of my current hole, which is nice.

Next, I’ve been whining for a while that one of the memory sticks in my computer has died, leaving me with a mere 256mb memory where once there was half a gig. Then, I remembered that last time I upgraded I was feeling flush, and so bought branded memory. This means it might have a warrenty of some kind…

Indeed it does. Lifetime, even. So I rebooted just to check. 256mb.

So I took out one of the memory sticks, turned the computer on… 256mb.

So I swapped the other stick back in… 256mb.

Wha?

So I put the other stick back in. 512 again. Woot.

This morning, I was called to be told I have an interview next thursday, which is really quite Neat. On one hand, it might mean abandoning BrowserAngel on a more permenant basis than I was planning on, on the other hand I’ve been waiting for three months now, and I’ve pretty much run out of people who I can borrow money from to pay rent. On the third hand something might be Happening by monday morning, which might render all this speculation void.

TBH, I’m not sure whether I should go for the Sysadmin job (the interview) anyway, since it’s quite a bit more stable than the funding-driven work at BrowserAngel. OTOH, it’s not half so interesting. OTTH, it’s less than half the commute.

We shall see what happens, I suppose.

Yeah, I know

Yes, I know about the blogroll. It’s a CSS argument I haven’t won yet.

“That which is also” archives are now integrated with the rest of the archives. That day’s blinks are under the posts for that day. It’s a fugly hack, but it’s fixed the fugly hack that was doing the date headers, so it’s only the same number of fugly hacks, rather than more or less. Plus it means I can do cool things later without more fugly hacks.

aqWiki has authentication support (including the ability to add users without mucking around in the SQL) and cookie authentication that actually works. Only collision detection and docs to go before version one…

The Cantrip (The project formally known as PFd4-II) Diary will continue when I’ve finished transcribing the document into SQL. Currently, all my “learning” resource is being spent on devouring the cubic foot of hard-back books (that I’ve never read) on Windows 2k server administration in preparation for the interview on Thursday. (Actually, this is an excuse, since turning the design doc into SQL isn’t learning, it’s just dull, which is why I’m working on aqWiki instead. Besides which since aqWiki is my default brain-dump location I get an instant productivity bonus when it’s actually working properly.

So the “eat your own dog food” theory goes, anyway).

Job Centre

Today, I visited the Job Centre.

Although I have the interview on Thursday, and should really be spending most of my time bringing my Active Directory skillz up to scratch, I’m obliged to visit the Job Centre a couple of times a week to see if they have anything new. I can do this online, but I wanted the exercise.

The touch-screen terminal asked me a number of difficult questions (“What industry”, “Do you have a car”) before giving me both of the possible jobs on offer this week for a l33t Web Developer with sysadmin skills.

I could either work in Scotland (Which is, apparently, within 10 miles of Letchworth or London) as a VB Programmer.

Or I could work as an assistant for a marital aids mail order catalogue.

Somewhere in here is a lesson about meta-data, and it only being as good as whoever types the document in, but to be honest, I can’t be bothered.

So I’m baking a fruit cake, before I become one.

Interview

Today, I had two interviews.

Tuesday was a day of Recruiters. I was woken up by a recruiter, I was then phoned by two more in the next hour, one of them set up an interview for a Helldesk role for the following day. I pointed out I already had an interview for that day, but she said I could come in later, which was nice of her.

Wednesday was a day of researching, where I spent most of it learning why I hate Active Directory, which is a simple idea that someone has tacked ‘functionality’ onto in the hope that one day someone will shout “Jenga” so they can start all over again.

Thursday was today, and began early.

I arrived an hour early for my interview. This was almost deliberate. I’d aimed to arrive half an hour early, because then I’d have half an hour to find the place before I needed to be there. The job was at HIBT to be, basically, network admin, help them develop the network, and bring my l33t linux skillz to the department. I think I did fairly well (I hope I did, I find out in a few days).

Then I went to London to talk to the recruiter. The recruiter told me that I should get a suit and a haircut, and rewrite my CV slightly, but that my interview technique was good and the CV was well written (apart from the missing bit). They didn’t put me forward for the Helldesk role (overqualified) but they’ve another coming up soonish.

Then I bought tea (Drury is great) and came home. More stuff to write, but pizza is here.

Employment

I appear to be employed again.

Which is nice.

false alarm, again

Employment

Okay, I *am* actually employed. Heisenburg state is over. I’m back at BrowserAngel. One day I hope to be able to explain what the hell went on this week, but right now I’m happy just to be reemployed.

Now to tell the Job Centre where they can put their forms…

Apologies for the lack of entries over the last couple of days, the above has got me somewhat stressed to the point where I wasn’t actually doing anything, let alone anything useful.

Did I mention that though the power of the Information Super Highway, Blogging, and the Spirit Of Cooperation with Open Licencing, two people were able to colaberate (for strange and difuse values thereof) on something which has been valued as being “Quite good?”

When I emailed BB about the completion of the project, and to point the location of the MP3, I said ”[...] release it on an unsuspecting world, so they can ignore it at their leisure, coz it isn’t encoded in XML, written in python and hosted by Google.” I didn’t expect to be quite so accurate.

Bootstrapping

So, if you’ve been unemployed for three months, how do you afford to buy the train ticket to get you into work for the first week back?

Once again, I’ve found, applied for, interviewed for and got a job (Okay, they weren’t all the same job this time, but still) in the time it’s taken the Job Centre to process my Dole claim. As a result, I can’t buy the ticket to get to work.

So, we found a solution. Easy. Get a Season Ticket form, get our office to fill it in with all the credit card details and send me trundling off to buy the ticket. This morning…

No, they said. They needed, they said, the card itself to swipe though the machine, which I didn’t have. So I went home and phoned them up, ordered the season ticket, giving them the credit card details over the phone, and they’re now posting the ticket to me.

sigh

AqWiki got another round of updates, including the prep for the first public installs, indexing being unbroken for the new base system (was broken for oneWiki) and such stuff. On target for provisional release date. Scary.

Topped

When I left for work this morning, my office desktop was screwed. I’d wiped the Linux partition (I never used it at work anyway) to make way for more MP3s the previous day, and forgotten that was the drive grub needed to access to boot. Desktop screwed. Since I’d forgotten the admin password for XP, I couldn’t fix it.

This morning I came in early, brought Knoppix with me, and lifted all the user data off with that (About 2mb, all told. I run Teflon Windows installs, nothing sticks to the main box for long, it’s all stored on the server, so I can wipe it clean again), reboot, reinstall WindowsXP, drink tea (And repair the W2k box. This is a 1998 era box running W2k on a 2gig drive – not big enough, so someone’s compressed the drive. Since the swap space is now compressed, it took me two hours (click, boil kettle, click, pour water, click, type, ok, take out teabag, click…) to get it back (and put the swap on the TOTALLY UNUSED 10GIG PARTITION instead) and turn off all the prettiness enhancers. Today’s job was to reinstall W2k so our mac-bound Designer has something that runs Win/IE – the main platform we’re developing for – and can test on.)

So, WinXP, turn off prettiness, install Firefox, Thunderbird, XChat, Gaim, Plugins for each. Then O (Who is the accountant, along with other things) came in and said I was to get the new laptop. This new laptop was gained when a friend of a friend would rather buy a new laptop than fix the old one (and this is a nice laptop). So I’ve now got a nice new laptop to play with, and can IRC from the living room.

I find it amusing that whilst the laptop doesn’t have Wireless networking, my heavyweight desktop does, so I can use the wire that used to go to that for the Laptop.

Currently, I’m seeing how long the battery lasts, with MP3s playing, networking working, and everything going. I’ll be watching DVDs in a bit. So far, it looks like about 5/6 hours. I spent the train journey home using it as a thousand dollar MP3 player to catch up on four missed episodes of LUGRardio.

Note to future self, berate Aq about ntop and Advanced Unix Development next time you see him.

Here and back again

Things that have happened in the last five days since ‘Threadnaught’:

• I’ve learnt that the secret to chocolate sauce is to shake the bottle with the lid closed.
• Brown shows up on white curtains, seven feet from the table where there was ice cream and a limited amount of chocolate sauce.
  • And the carpet.
  • Also the television, speakers, post and furniture.
• Do not follow Aquarius blindly when he says “Kernel-image-2.6.4-k7” as your laptop is not a K7 and this won’t work.
  • 686 works better
  • XF86 doesn’t like your laptop much.
  • Project Utopia is Neat.
  • Debian Rocks.
• It’s a good idea to pay your rent
• You should remember that you’re getting paid by cheque, and these take four working days to clear.
• My bank has just decided that cheques now take six working days to clear. The age of communication is upon us, and Halifax is going backwards. May it fuck off and die, and take my overdraft with it.
• Buying a Young Persons Railcard is cheaper than the discount it gives you for a ticket to Durham.
  • ...yet despite already having a Railway Photo Card (for my Letchworth/London railcard) I need another photo card for the YP Railcard.
  • I still don’t deal with photo booths well.
  • Using the advice a model gave me on how to not look like a serial killer in passport photos makes me look like a male model.
    • Who is also a serial killer.
    • Train compains remain morons.
  • RedDragDiva’s Mushroom Thing is really nice.
  • It’s vitally important to take your keys when leaving the office
    • Especially when the following day you can’t get out of the house because your girlfriend deadlocked the door (your keys for which are in London) and the back garden backs onto three other back gardens.
    • The spare keys are in LC’s room, on the dresser.
    • You moron.

I’m off to Durham for the weekend. TTFN

410 - Site owner is feeling nihilistic

Last night I considered deleting Aquarionics and replacing it with a 410 – Gone. Not “BRB”, Hiatus! or “Sorry I haven’t posted anything for a while”, but getting rid of the whole thing.

Mostly, it’s because lately I haven’t done much that’s interesting. I mean, currently I’m writing an interface for BrowserAngel that uses DHTML and stuff to create an application that “feels” like a desktop app, in that the response times are really damn quick and it doesn’t reload the entire page just to react to your latest desire. Sound familier? Yeah, BA has been doing stuff similier to the GMail interface since Prototype One, twelve months ago. I haven’t talked about any of this, mostly because I’m not allowed to give away what we’re doing. Yet.

Surfice to say it’s pretty cool, and that an A-List Blogger recently described exactly our product as an example of “Things that would be cool” and it nearly made me drop my tea. We may have more funding, meaning I’m not job hunting (again) in October. Yay.

Gets a phone call

Bother.

Okay, so I’ve been offered a job. 35% pay rise, regular pay, commute to Bedford (not really good, takes ages) but place is a Python shop, so I’d be paid to learn Python. OTOH, we might get refunded here, and then I could be here when BrowserAngel (which is really cool) takes off.

OTTH, that might not happen.

They want an answer tomorrow morning.

That wasn’t how I was going to end this entry, but now I’ve got a fuck of a lot of thinking to do.

The explaination & Python

After a number of similer requests, I’ve done a Goodbye Browserangel FAQ at holistic.

I leave BA on Friday 15th October, I enter Those Who Evolve so that’ll be fun.

Today I’ve spent attempting to work out how to do Python Web Apps sensibly without being tied to Zope. I’m grasping the Python Way, I think, but I still think in PHP and Web Dev terms, so actually learning by creating a site – rather than the abstract card games I’ve been doing – would probably be more useful.

So far I’ve been playing with Quixote mostly, but since Evolving seem to have centralised on Zope, that would probably be more useful. Thing is, every time I look at it I think something along the lines of “Crikey, that’s a bit overkill for this” and look for something simpler, but the more I go into it, the more Zope looks like The Thing I Should Know, since all the alternatives seem to start with comparing themselves to it. Input from those who know more about this than I do would be handy :-)

Nothing moves slower than money

We live in a world of instant communication. In the last twenty four hours I have received more emails than I have letters in my entire life, I have organised future events over Instant Messenger, had arguments with people on other continents over IRC, and played computer games against real people who I will never meet or speak to again. Within minutes of any major event, someone I know will know about it and probably pass on the information. This website, hub of everything I do on the net, is hit by some kind of program – on average – once every six seconds (Down somewhat majorly from last year, but I’m writing less) and it’s only a tiny personal website, a boil on the arse of the revolution.

Yet it takes my bank seven working days to clear a cheque.

This I absolutely fail to understand. Up until last month it was five working days, which was excessive. Seven days to validate a piece of paper – signed, dated, and individually numbered – is incredible. But this wasn’t the worst of it. I asked why it would take seven working days (and this was nine working days ago, so my memory is a little rusty) to validate this small piece of paper, almost identical to the one they validated this time last month, and if there was any way I could make it clear quicker. Posting it, for example, I posited sarcastically.

They could, they admitted, send it by first class post. This would cost me £20.

Bu…

I mean, I know the cost of stamps has risen slightly in the last couple of years, but £20 to upgrade to first class post for a cheque seemed a little beyond my ken. But worse than this, even, was what it actually means. It means that usually the cheques are posted by second class mail to some obscure destination (Probably Halifax H.Q.). From there they are probably posted to the original bank (The companies) for further validation. This would explain the five days thing, waiting for post is time consuming. But second class? The HBOS group recently posted its interim results for 2004, posting a Profit Before Tax up 21% to £2,161,000,000. That’s two billion one hundred and sixty one million pounds, surely they can afford a fucking stamp! Or fedex, even, if they send lots of them.

But yet, it gets worse. After seven working (ie, nine real) days the cheque clears into my bank account (this was Friday), and I can pay people. My Landlord has been complaining that my rent was late (Waiting for cheque to clear), my credit cards want paying, and I need a new mouse. At this point I realise that I haven’t seen my bank card in a few days, nor the rest of my wallet (Working from home + Train ticket not in wallet = wallet location irrelevant), report it as missing and pay a large lump to the card, leaving enough so I can pay for my new season ticket (monthly, £266) by cheque.

Since I don’t have my bank card, I can’t withdraw the money for the season ticket in cash (I can get small amounts by answering five correct questions from the game show host bank teller on such subjects as the history of egg sandwiches in World War 2 My mother’s maiden name and banking history (Mine, not hers) but they won’t give me enough for the season – or even a weekly – ticket. So I’m forced to pay by cheque, which I hate doing. I Don’t Like Cheques.

Nevertheless, I rise at Six AM Monday Morning (yawn), dance down to the station waving cheerily at the lolly-pop lady (We actually have one! I thought they were abolished at about the same time as free milk) as I cycle over one of her charges, park my bike at the station (Which I can do one day a week, any more than that and I need a pass) (Which, incidentally, are issued quarterly, and thus will be useless to me in exactly one months time), and stroll genteelly up to the ticketing counter.

Actually, what really happens is that the moment I commit to going by bike (Realistically, at the end of my road) the heavens open and I’m absolutely drenched. Hoping my laptop and phone are okey, I get to the station where I attempt to lock my bike to the rack, cursing my damp fingers and the annoying lock) then squelch up to the counter, dump my belongings in a deliquescing heap beside me and go though the transaction for a new season ticket, before finally presenting a damp, signed cheque for the full amount.

At which point, I’m told that they don’t accept cheques without a guarantee card. Most cheque guarantee cards in my existence have only guaranteed up to £100 on any cheque, falling far short of the required total, and my current bank card isn’t a guarantee card anyway. And besides – and more importantly – every bank card/guarantee card in this country is also either a Switch, MasterCard or Visa card too, and if I’d had it with me, I’d have put it on that, you stupid moronette.

Instead of presenting this logical answer to a drone who can do nothing about it, I swear under my breath and hand her the Visa card.

Which fails.

I go home.

It had, I observe, stopped raining the moment I entered the ticketing hall.

Bloody weather.

Next day we repeat the procedure, only without the rain or the cheques, but still with the Visa and the failing, and I’m told (By Barclay) that the reason it failed was that my balance transfer on Friday (this was Tuesday) takes three working days to clear. Try tomorrow (Friday/Monday/Tuesday, Will clear Wednesday)

This doesn’t make sense either. Where is the money? Halifax have taken it out of the account (instantly, it was gone when I hit “Submit” in the browser), and Barclaycard know about the transfer, but the money won’t clear for five days, and this isn’t a matter of physical bits of paper being shuffled, there is no practical reason why the payment shouldn’t be instant, or at least overnight.

I won the star prize at the Halifax Quiz show, and won enough money for a return ticket to Kings Cross. I went to work.

This morning the person at the train station was sarcastic at me, which I didn’t need. Same person as Monday, with a Brand New Computer System, which will Save So Much Time, and thus explains the queue for tickets that stretched out of the ticketing hall. Visa Failed.

Phone Barclaycard, am told “Probably tomorrow then”.

So I’m working from home today, because WAGN won’t sell me a season ticket, and it’s so far from cost-effective to buy daily tickets that I’m willing to let the company shout at me rather than go in.