I understood that we operate a national rail network and I expect the signalling and train running information to be standard across the network. Apparently not so, according to FCC who tell me that data would need to be provided to them manually by Southeastern if it is to be included on their displays. I was particularly consoled by the closing line of FCC’s reply:

Unfortunately information systems are very complicated, we will continue to look at ways to improve our services but we have to be realistic about these goals.

Trusted Places have launched something not a million miles away. Except this is about reviewing restaurants, cafes, bars, pubs, shops an the like. It’s suitably web2.0, and it still needs a bit of work on the search, but it is generally quite an interesting site. All it needs now is for you to make some contributions.

It makes you realise how much corporations will begin to worry about the public voices of their employees. With topics of discussion as diverse as ‘How close have you been to being sacked???‘ and the particularly DPA un-friendly ‘Funny Customer Names‘, a high-profile public forum is surely corporate PR nightmare waiting to happen.

This morning I discovered the answer, while backing up the database that stores all of the photo metadata. The database was over 2gb in size. Upon further investigation, it contained over 1 million comment spams. 1 million!

No wonder 4angle has been running slow of late, with the database getting hit that hard by spammers!

Remedial action taken: commenting disabled, since I didn’t use it anyway.

First if all I found Flavorpill, and then Kultureflash – these were a start. The problem is that they don’t tell me what events are coming up in the longer term. Being in London, this is a problem because anything vaguely good seems to sell out very far in advance. Finding out that something exciting is happening next week is often not very useful.

I was over the moon when I realised that last.fm, my favourite online source of music, not only predicts what music I would like to listen to (based on what I have listened to in the past) – it predicts what gigs I might want to go to. This was great, except I had to keep checking back to see what new events were being recommended. Then I realised that they also provide RSS feeds of London-based events that are likely to be of interest to me. You too can keep up to date with what is of interest to me! Or alternatively, set up a profile, train it to your music taste, and then let it predict gigs of interest to you.

This new finding led me to purchase tickets to see Slint in August at Koko in Camden. Magic.

let’s hope Apple find a real fix soon.

I was intruiged by a robot (although it doesn’t look like one) that we discovered in holiday. At Kolding Library (Denmark) they have a nicely automated book return system. Not only does this allow you to self-return books, but it automatically categorises them using a series of conveyor belts, placing them into boxes based on their subject.

Unfortunately, I failed to take a photo, so rely on somebody elses to illustrate. And unfortunately x2, the photo isn’t great.

If you ever get a chance to visit Kolding, I highly recommend a trip to their library.

What I can say is that things have been out of the ordinary.

I was particularly organised – see here, my organised reading. This demonstrates the classification of my reading into subject categories. From above, it is hard to get a sense of depth, but I assure you that these piles are substantial.

Pictured below is my collection of laptops, acquired in order to perform some (large) experiments. Stage left is my new laptop, next is a laptop donated by edward, and stage right is my old laptop. You can also see my general working environment.

www.jajah.com

I just discovered bigbarn.co.uk which facilitates searching for some local food, close to where you live. Nice.