So on Wednesday night my broadband connection disappeared. I was too busy that night to do anything about it and in any case I wasn’t too worried — outages like this, though annoying, are usually short-lived. However, on Thursday night the connection was still down, so I phoned Telewest.
“Yes, there’s a problem in your area,” the helpful tech support man informed me, “but it’s 75% fixed and should be resolved within nine hours.”
NINE HOURS?! Bear in mind this was 7.15pm, so my connection would have been back up at… 4.15 the next morning. That estimate turned out to be overly optimistic, as it was still down when I checked it at 8am this morning. Ah, well, it’s back now and that’s all that matters, I suppose. Hm, yes.
Consensus on uk.railway is that Merseytram was something of a white elephant anyway, running through an area that is already well-served by train and bus routes (albeit a bus company run by a bigot). On reflection, I’m inclined to agree, although a sizeable chunk of the Merseyside Local Transport Plan was reliant on the tram going ahead, and will now need to be redrawn. And, at the risk of sounding like a whinging Scouser, I bet the £170m will go to London.
Meanwhile, Transport for London have a poll on Tube etiquette, where you can vote for the most annoying passenger habit. Unfortunately, it’s only possible to tick one option, whereas pretty much everything about train passengers pisses me off.
An enterprising RISC OS user has converted Power Carols to MP3 format. These festive Tracker tunes were given away on Acorn Computing cover discs back in the day and are fun to hear, if slightly cheesy. Definitely music to read Ceefax to.
Oh, and Firefox 1.5 has been released.