andismith.com

Another day, another cancelled train service.

It’s been over two and a half months since First Capital Connect were able to provide a reliable train service. I’ve seen more reliable Skodas. Actually, my Dad has one of the new ones which has provided a great taxi service over the years (thanks Dad).

Why am I so annoyed about the train service today, as opposed to all the other days it’s been delayed or cancelled? Because on Friday they promised that ‘normal’ train service would resume at the start of this week. ‘Normal’ lasted all of a Monday morning, and this evening we were back to broken down trains; which I guess is normal for First Capital Connect.

The poor service began last October just before I went to Egypt. Trains were fewer due to “staff training”, which escalated to driver’s walking out over a pay dispute whilst I was away wandering around Rameses II’s tomb.

Freshly tanned, I stumbled in to the driver mess which continued right up until the snow started settling. Then things developed from bad to worse with trains becoming fewer and further between, and they also began to get shorter. I’m not quite sure how snow reduces the number of carriages, but it does.

Last week saw the event of two late arrivals in to work thanks to a service which got stuck outside London Bridge for 2 hours (just outside my old flat, to rub salt in to the wound) and a service which got stuck at Loughborough Junction, which meant walking to Brixton underground station, getting a tube to King’s Cross and then going to Farringdon.

I guess a poor train service shouldn’t come as any big surprise. Right from childhood I was taught train services were unreliable with Gordon being unable to get his passengers up a hill, Henry getting stuck in a tunnel and Thomas finding himself down a coal mine. As much as the adventures of Thomas the Tank Engine tried to prepare me for disaster, the train service on Thameslink is far worse than anything on the Island of Sodor.

So I’ve done something about it. I’ve wrote to the MD of First Capital Connect; I’ve written to my local MP; I’ve written to BBC Watchdog; I’ve signed to petition to scrap First Capital Connect of it’s franchise and I’ve joined the quickly growing Facebook group.

All I want to do is get a train to work, it really shouldn’t be that hard. Should it?

Your email is only the start of it,
A flooded inbox & now I’m a part of it,
Now you’ve broken it,
Andy will fix it for you,
And you and you…

There must be something,
That this was meant to do,
Just one thing,
But no-one seems to have a clue,
Now it’s failing, Andy’ll fix it for you
And you and you…

Theo Chakkapark.

Without Theo, who knows where I’d be. Frustrated and uninspired by having to learn Java at university thanks to C++ being removed from the syllabus after I enrolled, and at a time when Java felt incredibly primitive and like it didn’t really belong as an application on a web page – which the university were advertising it as. Learning the ways of the web was a way forward for me.

I’d learnt HTML at college in my spare time whilst creating both a simple college site for my friends and a Red Dwarf fan site (space background, the usual). Not that I had the Internet, so it could never go live. Some months later I was online and started my own website using the trusty HTML tables I’d learnt all by myself to distribute some crappy games I’d made.

“Why not try using Server Side Includes?” asked Theo. “They’ll let you include common content on every page without having to repeat it in your code.”

I was confused. “But I can use frames, and they are better! Look, I can scroll the sidebar independently of the main site!”

Thank goodness Theo stuck with me. Not only did he convince me Server Side Includes were better than frames, but he gave me an opportunity to run my site on his network, where it eventually became an incredibly popular community with over 10,000 registered users. His introduction to a basic feature of classic ASP led on to me producing a whole community site, with dynamic updates, commenting, membership and skins. Unfortunately, the site got so popular I was made to move to my own server as I was eating bandwidth like it was one of those bags of Haribo which project managers keep leaving on my desk – but my hunger for learning never stopped.

I went on to build an e-commerce site for my dissertation; learn ASP.NET and work on high profile websites such as Barclays and Sainsbury’s. Theo helped me get a step on the ladder by teaching me how to improve on something I was interested in.

Now we are reaching a time where HTML5 and CSS 3 are slowly coming of age in a world which is also rapidly evolving thanks to jQuery. I’m no longer working as a web developer, so I have to learn these skills in my own time or be left behind.

Hence the re-introduction of my blog – a chance for me to share some code, write some tutorials and perhaps fill in the gaps of the life of Andi that you’ve all been pining for since my last post.

At work, I find myself becoming Theo and trying to convince the web developers to start learning HTML5 now. Once HTML5 has arrived, a lot of what we do now will be outdated and developers still using HTML4 will be given the equivalent of HTML emails for the next generation (probably making sites specifically for Internet Explorer 6).

As they say, you snooze you lose. Thanks Theo, wherever you are. I don’t think he realises quite what an impact he made…