Thursday, December 04, 2008
Entire senior moment
Following the recent report of a semi-senior moment we now have the real thing. From worrying about whether or not I have locked the back door, I now have to worry about whether I have locked BH & FIL in. This being what I did the day before yesterday. And given that one of the locks on our back door is not unlockable from the inside, there was a certain amount of huffing and puffing while BH worked out how to get out. Fortunately, by the time I had returned from the baker, the incident had been downgraded from sev. 1 to sev. 4.
Yesterday at the baker I learn all about the mysterious dark bread. It was, indeed, Russian bread but not particularly ryeful. Other ingredients included rolled oats, milk and what the (brown) baker called black jack - this being, it seems, a bakers' term for molasses. He promises some for general release on Friday, so I may be able to get in closer touch with the stuff.
Moving on from the fish porriage ration, we got back to chick peas, where we have not been for some months. Take three tins of chick peas for £1 from Mr S - at which price the tinned one's must be approaching the price of dried ones. Make some sauce in the usual way: fry fat pork in butter, added chopped onion, add chopped tomato & etc. For a change add a bit of sliced kabanos and some coarsely chopped button mushrooms. Stir in the drained chickpeas somewhere near the end. Not quite as substantial as the fish porriage but tendencies in that direction. Only snag being that at least one of the tins of the chick peas involved brine rather than water, so the salt content a bit higher than would otherwise have been the case.
On the strength of having used an Oyster Card at least five times in the last seven days, I have been reverse engineering the system - which I still think is rather complicated and expensive for what it does. Other people have much simpler solutions which make far less money for IT services companies.
Now a key bit of design is that you have an Oyster which records your balance (inter alia) and they have a central bunker which also records you balance. The trick being to keep these two things reasonably in step. Here, the important bit of input seems to be that if one tops up one's Oyster over the Internet, one has to nominate a tube station at which to have your Oyster updated when you next touch down. (Which, for me, makes Internet top up fairly useless. I might just as well do it at the tube station). This tells me that not all landing strips are capable of knowing about all central bunker updates to all cards. They can do on the spot deductions for the fare in question, but they cannot cope with remote updates from the central bunker. Presumably the numbers are such that a static landing strip on an underground entry point, with links to the station servers, can cope with a limited number of remote updates, and nomination keeps the number under the limit. Whereas the mobile landing strips on buses cannot cope at all. A second feature is that bus journeys are flat rate, in the sense that only one fare applies to any one bus, so only one touch down per journey is required. Whereas train and tram journeys vary a bit, so take off and touch down are required. As it were. Deduction from Oyster made at touch down. But there is a complication which I have not quite got to the bottom of. And that is that the system goes in for refunds if you spend more on individual journeys in one day than a one day travel card would cost. I presume that the central bunker collects up all the fares from all the underground stations and all the buses at the end of the day. These last, presumably, when the bus driver checks his machine into the bus station. And it is likely that there are some lags in all this, so you can't be too sure exactly when the refund will be made. Anyway, central bunker does its sums. But how does it post the deductions back to the Oysters, the opening presumption being that landing strips cannot cope with much volume and that nomination is required? Does it just post the update to an underground station it knows that you use regularly and hope that you use it again? Are the special top-up machines at underground stations capable of checking an individual account at the central bunker, rather than relying on transactions posted to it by the central bunker? Maybe an infusion of N. Brown will bring the solution with it.
One other observation in the meantime. The top up machine kept telling me that my Oyster was unregistered (although I thought it was) and that the top up transaction had been cancelled (although I know that it was not). Not the least confusing bit of user interface design.
Yesterday at the baker I learn all about the mysterious dark bread. It was, indeed, Russian bread but not particularly ryeful. Other ingredients included rolled oats, milk and what the (brown) baker called black jack - this being, it seems, a bakers' term for molasses. He promises some for general release on Friday, so I may be able to get in closer touch with the stuff.
Moving on from the fish porriage ration, we got back to chick peas, where we have not been for some months. Take three tins of chick peas for £1 from Mr S - at which price the tinned one's must be approaching the price of dried ones. Make some sauce in the usual way: fry fat pork in butter, added chopped onion, add chopped tomato & etc. For a change add a bit of sliced kabanos and some coarsely chopped button mushrooms. Stir in the drained chickpeas somewhere near the end. Not quite as substantial as the fish porriage but tendencies in that direction. Only snag being that at least one of the tins of the chick peas involved brine rather than water, so the salt content a bit higher than would otherwise have been the case.
On the strength of having used an Oyster Card at least five times in the last seven days, I have been reverse engineering the system - which I still think is rather complicated and expensive for what it does. Other people have much simpler solutions which make far less money for IT services companies.
Now a key bit of design is that you have an Oyster which records your balance (inter alia) and they have a central bunker which also records you balance. The trick being to keep these two things reasonably in step. Here, the important bit of input seems to be that if one tops up one's Oyster over the Internet, one has to nominate a tube station at which to have your Oyster updated when you next touch down. (Which, for me, makes Internet top up fairly useless. I might just as well do it at the tube station). This tells me that not all landing strips are capable of knowing about all central bunker updates to all cards. They can do on the spot deductions for the fare in question, but they cannot cope with remote updates from the central bunker. Presumably the numbers are such that a static landing strip on an underground entry point, with links to the station servers, can cope with a limited number of remote updates, and nomination keeps the number under the limit. Whereas the mobile landing strips on buses cannot cope at all. A second feature is that bus journeys are flat rate, in the sense that only one fare applies to any one bus, so only one touch down per journey is required. Whereas train and tram journeys vary a bit, so take off and touch down are required. As it were. Deduction from Oyster made at touch down. But there is a complication which I have not quite got to the bottom of. And that is that the system goes in for refunds if you spend more on individual journeys in one day than a one day travel card would cost. I presume that the central bunker collects up all the fares from all the underground stations and all the buses at the end of the day. These last, presumably, when the bus driver checks his machine into the bus station. And it is likely that there are some lags in all this, so you can't be too sure exactly when the refund will be made. Anyway, central bunker does its sums. But how does it post the deductions back to the Oysters, the opening presumption being that landing strips cannot cope with much volume and that nomination is required? Does it just post the update to an underground station it knows that you use regularly and hope that you use it again? Are the special top-up machines at underground stations capable of checking an individual account at the central bunker, rather than relying on transactions posted to it by the central bunker? Maybe an infusion of N. Brown will bring the solution with it.
One other observation in the meantime. The top up machine kept telling me that my Oyster was unregistered (although I thought it was) and that the top up transaction had been cancelled (although I know that it was not). Not the least confusing bit of user interface design.
# posted by Jim @ 2:51 AM 
