I gave a presentation to OxLUG entitled “An Introduction to Embedded Linux“. You can get the slides from my talk by clicking on the link. It will need some more work before it’s a good presentation and I need to produce an abridged version for LUG Radio Live next month.
British railways really piss me off sometimes. I’m all for advocating public transportation over using cars and other alternatives to meeting real people and experiencing the joys of getting from a to b, but sometimes even I will admit that it all just sucks. Like tonight. I turned up at Reading station just before 17:00 to get to Oxford to give a talk at 18:30. Now, Oxford is around 30 minutes away from Reading by a fast train service and so one could be reasonably forgiven for expecting a train to actually be running on that route. “It’s a Sunday”, came the reply from the ticket office person who served me a ticket and explained why train services were being so crappy. For those outside of the UK, weekends are by now simply a synonym for “engineering works will screw up your journey”. The rationale is that people who matter only travel during the working week and the rest of us have gotten used to the pain of weekend travel by train.
After waiting some time for a delayed train, it disappeared from the information screens spontaneously and I had to ask someone before finding out that it had been cancelled (in fairness, that was due to some “youths throwing a brick at the driver’s window” – I hope the driver was ok – but then, we don’t provide many alternatives to keep the little brats occupied and away from the railway|railroad tracks. Not that riding around on mopeds is much of an improvement – there’s no real social outlet for many of the people who will be doing this kind of thing). The next train was a slow stopping local service and ran a couple of minutes late from a different platform that was annouced at reasonably short notice – picture a scene with many already pissed off people rushing to switch to another platform over a bridge. Then the train took a weird routing (that I haven’t seen done in a while) where it went to Didcot (before Oxford) and then went into reverse on some interesting trek on a bypass route to eventually reach Oxford. I didn’t mention that the trains were stopping on the route to deal with engineering, did I? Oh well. It’s not like I had to be anywhere to give a talk to a large group of people or anything.
I’d like to thank the following train companies and operators for making this evening more interesting than it might otherwise have been with just a talk to give: Thames *cough* First Great Western, Virgin Trains and Network Rail. Thanks guys. Thanks for having zero co-ordination, for not announcing engineering works obviously enough and for having a complete lack of information exchange to the detriment of the travelling public. I really hope your management teams enjoy driving home in their cars tonight (you wouldn’t want to use your own services tonight). You really succeeded in disgusting and frustrating me. Sincere congratulations.
Jon.