drplokta

Birds: 53 Black Swan (not a native species, but the three on Greenland Dock are undoubtedly wild ones).

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I'm disappointed in the phishing community. I've not yet received a single email saying "Our records show that your personal information was compromised in the HMRC leak. Click here to reset your access details."

I think Google's Public Transit Planner still has a way to go with its new UK coverage. My commute is 35 minutes, with the Jubilee line from Canada Water to Waterloo and the Northern line from Waterloo to Tottenham Court Road.

It does not take 4 hours 37 minutes, and it does not involve going via Gillingham. Also, due to my shameful inability to walk on water, it's going to take me longer than 18 minutes to walk from home to Stepney Methodist Church.


Public transit
Travel time: about 4 hours 37 minsShowing Trip 2

Walk to Ratcliff, Stepney Methodist Church
About 18 mins

Bus - X10 - London - Pitsea - Southend - Rochford
Service run by Stephensons of Essex
6:06pm Depart Ratcliff, Stepney Methodist Church
6:12pm Arrive Poplar, Canada Square North

Bus - C4 - London - Gillingham
13 mins to make transfer
Service run by The Kings Ferry
6:25pm Depart Poplar, Canada Square North
7:16pm Arrive Hempstead Valley, Wigmore Road Bredhurst Road (SE-bound)

Bus - 007 - Deal - Dover - London
29 mins to make transfer
Service run by National Express Shuttle
7:45pm Depart Hempstead Valley, Gillingham Medway - Hempstead Valley Coach Stop
9:05pm Arrive Victoria Coach Station

Bus - 010 - London - Cambridge - King's Lynn
55 mins to make transfer
10:00pm Depart Victoria Coach Station
10:10pm Arrive St James', Embankment (London Coaches)

Walk to London, Middlesex, W1D 3QU
About 15 mins

Hmm, it's awfully close to the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (now officially called High Speed 1), which is due to open on Wednesday. I wonder if there's any connection, or if the opening will be delayed.

As others have posted, there's a huge plume of smoke over east London, which I easily saw from street level in Soho a few minutes ago. It appears there's a major fire here, which is near the Olympic site. The Met Office says that the prevailing winds are light but westerly, so the smoke should mostly get blown away from central London (and our flat in Rotherhithe).

BBC story here.

On the Jubilee line train at Canada Water this morning, the canned announcement said "Change here for East London line replacement bus services" -- a bit premature, given that it's over a month until the East London line actually closes.

I just entered the rather dangerous command "apt-get dist-upgrade" on my headless hosted Linux server, going from Debian 3.1 to 4.0. Wish me luck, because it might be tricky to recover if it goes wrong.

I'm delighted to discover that GE have finally figured out how to make a fluorescent low-energy light bulb the same size as an incandescent, so that it will fit in the same light-shades. Now if they can just sort out the warm-up time, the harsh spectrum, the inability to use them with dimmers and the inability to activate light-sensitive devices, the government's stated aim of banning incandescents might start to look remotely possible.

If you friend me, and I can't work out who you are in real life from your LJ profile or your posts, I'm highly unlikely to friend you back.

Impressed with it so far. Never mind the headline features, it's packed full of small improvements. My Desktop icons now know that the Dock is on the right and arrange themselves so as not to overlap it. I can have iChat logged into Google Chat and LJ Chat at the same time. I get previews of fonts. Spotlight is much faster, and usable as an application launcher. It will read 2GB SD cards on my USB card reader. And so on and so on.

Apart from that, Time Machine is pretty but I'll need to remember to plug in the external drive from time to time. Coverflow looks actually useful for browsing directories with images in them. I don't mind the translucent menu bar. Safari still doesn't have a good adblocker, and several of the existing ones don't work any more, so I'm sticking with Firefox for now -- hopefully 3.0 will look more like a Mac application.