jonathan.rawle.org

Today the BBC News Magazine has an article on the consequences for people who have been caught drink-driving, which is to be the theme of this year’s Christmas anti-drink drive advertising campaign.

I left a comment via the form, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, they didn’t publish it. So I’ll repeat it here instead (expanded slightly, but I’ll still keep it brief).

People who are convicted of drink-driving shouldn’t just “get their licence back”, as some commenters referred to it. They should have to retake the driving test: far more inconvenient and humiliating for them. And if they are ever convicted again, they should be banned from driving for life. A short spell in prison would be a good idea too. Just a few days – not enough to add to the current prison capacity issues, but a shock to the system that would make them think twice next time.

Drink-driving among the middle classes particularly troubles me. They see drink-driving as an issue for poorer people, the alcoholics who drive back from the pub every night. Around Christmas or a special event, they think, “just once isn’t going to hurt”. In fact, it is going to hurt the people who may have to spend every Christmas for the rest of their lives without their loved one.

Drinking alcohol is not a necessity, and driving is a privilege. Adults can make a choice whether to drink or not. But those who believe their pathetic alcohol-dependent social lives are more important than the lives of others are simply arrogant; no punishment is good enough for them.

And before anyone comments on this post, I’d suggest you read the comment at the bottom of the BBC article by M Lendrick of Oxford.

From today, many of the trains serving the UK’s National Rail network will be operated by different companies. One of the changes sees Midland Mainline’s service, which connected cities such as Leicester and Sheffield with London, merged with local services on the eastern part of the network formerly operated by Central Trains.

I for one was quite disappointed when it was announced earlier this year that Midland Mainline’s parent company, National Express, had lost the new franchise to that purveyor of unpunctual bus services Stagecoach. Midland Mainline was consistently voted the top train operating company in both customer satisfaction surveys and for punctuality. Their trains still retained many of the features that should define intercity rail travel. Many of the services were still operated by the 30-year-old trains that have never been surpassed in terms of top speed or passenger comfort by any diesel-powered locomotive anywhere in the world. On board, the trains were reasonably clean, there was a buffet serving hot food, and best of all, all passengers were entitled to free tea or coffee. This last gesture, which can only have cost the company a few pence per passenger, made passengers feel that little bit more special. Before you knew it, the Gothic towers of St Pancras were on the horizon, the journey having captured some of the romance of the bygone age of rail travel.

With their track record (no pun intended), how could Midland Mainline lose the service to a different company? Unfortunately, we have to consider the other part of the new franchise, which was previously operated by Central Trains. Their trains were the antithesis of Midland Mainline’s. Dirty, overcrowded, noisy, and often late. If you were lucky (and the carriages weren’t packed full of standing passengers) someone might push a trolley through offering coffee and bags of crisps at inflated prices. The trains were far from pleasant to travel on. Yet Central Trains was also owned by National Express. How could a company make such a good job out of running one service, while another was so dismal? Unfortunately, this would seem to suggest that the good service on the Midland main line was at least partly an accident of circumstances – the line must be less congested, and the onboard service is simply what distinguishes any local train from an intercity express.

So what do Stagecoach have in store? For a start, the free tea and coffee is going to stop. To make matters worse for regular commuters, the buffet service is being withdrawn completely, with hot food not available for standard class passengers. Instead, they will offer a trolley service. Already it sounds as if the result of the merger is that the intercity part is going to be reduced to the level of the local services. It would be nice if the ticket prices could reflect this: in the past, unless tickets were booked at least a fortnight in advance, a ticket from Leicester to London cost a small fortune. Somehow, I suspect a reduction in prices won’t be on the cards.

Living up to title of best train operator would never be an easy task, but it isn’t a good start to make passengers feel less important than they used to. Everyone knows rail companies are there to make money, but they can at least try to give the impression that they value their customers. It’s a pity that, just days before the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras opens, widely heralded as the start of a new golden age of rail travel in the UK, the trains using the other end of the station are losing the edge that made them that little bit special.

Footnote: as I no longer live in Leicester, I no longer need to use the Midland main line very often. What are people’s experiences of the new East Midlands Trains service? Do you have any memories to share, good or bad, about Midland Mainline? Please leave a comment.

When booking tickets for a concert or the theatre, there is often a “booking fee” to pay on top of the advertised ticket price. This can add 10% or more to the cost of the ticket. Now, I’m not referring to the fees charged by ticket agents here, but to tickets bought direct from the venue – in the former case, I expect the fees are even worse.

In many cases, the booking fees can be avoided by buying tickets in person at the box office. The problem with this is that a lot of the venues are in London (or other big cities) while the people who go to see the shows or concerts come from far and wide. It simply isn’t possible for those people to pop in to buy a ticket. Travelling to actually see the show is already a costly business for people who live outside London, with many people having to stay overnight too. So an extra ticket-buying trip is out of the question. Booking fees are therefore particularly unfair for people living outside London.

It seems illogical for there to be an extra fee payable for booking by telephone. Whether booking by phone or in person, there still needs to be an agent there to deal with the customer (in fact, in many venues it is the same people). The same computer systems are used to book the ticket, and the ticket is printed on the same paper. It’s rare for the telephone number to be a free number: indeed, in many cases, it’ll inevitably be an expensive 087 number that generates additional profit for the venue. The only extra cost is the cost of postage. I’m sure no-one would object to paying 50 pence or so for a stamp and envelope. Yet the booking fees are much higher than that, and are applied even if the tickets are kept at the box office to be collected before the performance, in which case there is no excuse for an additional charge.

Internet transactions also attract booking fees. This is even more unbelievable when you consider that retail prices are usually lower online than in the high street because of reduced costs. It should cost the venue less to accept an internet booking as no-one needs to speak to the customer. Yet they still charge extra.

One strategy a regular concert-goer can adopt is to buy the ticket for the following concert while already at the hall for a performance. This often works, although here I have to name and shame Cadogan Hall, who recently refused to sell me a ticket for a different event on the night of a concert as they claimed they were too busy giving out tickets for that night’s event. That effectively closes off the only opportunity for people travelling from outside London to avoid the booking fee. (Incidentally, there is no mention of this policy on their website.) Cadogan Hall is just one venue of which I have experience. I’m sure there are others, so if you know of one, or know a venue that charges a “booking fee” even if you are there in person, feel free to add a comment.

I can’t find a reference now, but I seem to remember Andrew Lloyd Webber saying that booking fees were essential for many West End theatres to be viable. If this is the case, it would be much fairer to increase the cost of all tickets slightly, rather than to penalise those people who live outside London (or whichever large city). And as with budget airlines and their “fuel surcharges”, the price of the ticket should be all-inclusive. As the booking fee is unavoidable, there’s no reason for it to be added on afterwards as a hidden extra. It’s time for the booking fee to take a bow and make its exit.

Yahoo’s photo service closed for good on 18 October in favour of the Flickr photo sharing site, also owned by Yahoo. Users had been given some warning, and were given the option of transferring their photos to Flickr or to another photo-sharing site, or ordering a CD with all their images on it. Many users are annoyed by this move as it was possible to store a greater number of photos at Yahoo Photos without paying for a “Pro” account.

However, a separate Yahoo photos service is still up and running for users in China. Could this possibly be because Flickr is blocked in China?

If you try to visit the former Yahoo Photos homepage, you will be asked to log in to Yahoo if you aren’t already. You will then see a message saying that Yahoo Photos is closed. If you try to view a photo that used to be in a user’s album, you will either see the same message, or will see a message saying the account is locked. Yahoo albums included in Yahoo! 360 pages either show a broken image icon, or display the thumbnail which just takes the user to one of the messages described above when it is clicked. Yahoo are probably going to replace the photo function of Yahoo! 360 with Flickr at some point, but at the moment it looks quite bad.

Chinese user’s albums, however, are still up and running. There are hundreds of thousands of pages on photos.cn.yahoo.com. Yahoo Photos China appears to be integrated with a blog and other features. However, if visitors are logged into non-Chinese Flickr accounts, when they try to view a China user’s gallery, they are redirected to the “Yahoo! Photos is now closed” message in their own locale, making it difficult to view photos belonging to Chinese users. If a photo page is accessed directly, by clicking it on a blog page or following a link from a search engine, it can be viewed, and the gallery browsed using “next” and “previous” links. Browsing top-level albums, however, is only possible after logging out of Yahoo. You can try it yourself by visiting any of the albums found by a Google search.

If anyone who doesn’t know otherwise tried to view a Chinese user’s Yahoo album, they would believe it had been closed down along with services in other countries. I don’t use any Yahoo services other than Flickr, yet they had remembered my details and took me to the “closed” message. Yahoo seem to think that people only ever view photos from people in their own country. Yet again, this is an example of corporations putting barriers between users in different parts of the world in what used to be the world-wide web, just as they are attempting to do with online radio.

Yahoo might not be entirely responsible for Flickr being blocked in China (although given their attitude towards it, they are not entirely blameless); but that doesn’t mean they have to prevent the rest of the world from viewing photos from China. And the very fact that they have a separate photo service for China shows that they are accepting that Flickr will not be usable from that country for the foreseeable future.

I am going to re-think my own use of Flickr, and may well return to hosting all my photos myself. I’m not happy with Yahoo’s business practices. But also, the closing of Yahoo Photos – a popular site that hosted around 2 billion photos – shows that if you rely on a particular external service, you can never be sure that the service won’t change significantly or even disappear completely. Instead of paying for a Flickr Pro account, perhaps my money would be better spent on increased web hosting capacity. At least my site is visible to visitors from every country. I suppose it could always fall victim to state censorship, but not to arbitrary segregation by a commercial company.

As a footnote, I should add that obviously I can’t test Yahoo sites and accounts in combinations of every locale. So please let me know if there are any other Yahoo Photos sites up and running, or if you notice any restrictions placed on Yahoo users from a particular country.

The launch of the BBC’s long awaited iPlayer has been controversial due to their decision to support only Windows XP. Users of Apple Macs, Linux, or even Windows Vista are currently unable to use the service, which allows the last seven days of BBC programmes to be downloaded, and then watched at any time in the next month. This clip, from BBC News, explains what it’s about.

Today, it was announced that the BBC has signed a deal with Adobe to provide Flash versions of their video content, including the iPlayer. This will allow users of other operating systems to access the last week’s programmes, but only to watch it as live streams. It still won’t be possible to download the content to watch later. The BBC Trust quickly responded to say that the BBC must still provide the full download service on other platforms.

Flash on websites used to be nothing but a nuisance. Sites would have annoying intros, or even worse, the whole site navigation would be slow and virtually unusable. Happily, with the coming of Web 2.0, far more sites use standard HTML and realise the importance of search engine optimisation. Flash has been given a new lease of life as the technology behind sites such as YouTube. Flash is ideal for this. In the past, streaming video embedded in news sites often didn’t work on people’s computers as they would be lacking a plug-in or codec. But where a Flash player is used, all people need is the Flash plugin. It’s only since the invention of Flash-based video players that watching streamed video online has really taken off.

As some people will know, Flash-based video players actually play video that is streamed in FLV format. There are numerous websites and downloadable tools that allow users to download the FLV content, meaning the content can be watched while offline and kept for posterity. If the BBC use Flash on their website, this will most probably mean that the content can be downloaded – without Digital Rights Management to delete it after a month. Some video sites attempt to obfuscate the actual URL of the stream using multiple Javascript calls, but this is quickly figured out by hackers. A site as popular as the BBC will soon be cracked. But then, we are often told the BBC aren’t he ones who want the restrictive DRM: they don’t own most of the content, so are forced to add DRM by the programme makers.

The announcement suggests that Flash is to be offered for all video content in the future, including video clips on the BBC website. At present, these are offered in either RealPlayer or Windows Media format. There were nasty rumours a while ago that the BBC were planning to scrap RealPlayer, and move over to Windows Media-only. The addition of Flash will mean that, even if RealPlayer disappears, the content will be available to everyone. (Hopefully it won’t be too much harder to download the clips, should you want to, than it is at the moment.) In fact, Flash video on the BBC website isn’t a new thing. They have been trialling it on their technology pages for a while. If you watched the clip about the iPlayer above, you’ve already tried it! If you click through to the BBC website, there is a link to “Watch in the News Player”, which shows the same video in RealPlayer or Windows Media Player. This is the shape of things to come! From this clip about the $100 laptop, is also seems the quality isn’t bad. Now all we need is a decent size for the video…

P.S. You can download the video about the iPlayer in FLV format (yes, the streaming-only Flash video!)