Little Storping-in-the-Swuff

My frisky frogs have brought about the most exciting thing to happen in the pond since the baby fish 18 months ago: two great lumps of spawn (the smaller one is pictured).

The frogs were introduced to the pond as spawn themselves two years ago. Disappointingly there was no spawn last year. Meanwhile, there can be no doubt there are no longer any fish in the pond, and while I will reintroduce fish later this year, I shall be waiting until the tadpoles can leave the pond under their own steam.

A brief, and very enjoyable trip to Paris last weekend provided me with my first experience of the Eurostar and the Channel Tunnel. Incredible to think it’s been going for 13 years.

You’ll have to excuse me if, with all the excitement, I temporarily go into nerd mode…

The Trains

• The Eurostar trains, Class 373s in Britain, are essentially TGV mk3 sets.
• Differences from other TGVs include:
  • an especially designed nose to minimise shockwaves as they cruise the 31 mile tunnel at 99mph
  • third rail 750VDC pickup (which caused all the delays when the service began, and is to allow them to run, very, very slowly across our commuter lines)
  • they are seperable in the middle, a tunnel safety feature (TGV have shorter carriages which share a truck under the couplings).
  • they are equipped for three voltages: 750VDC (UK third rail), 25kV AC (high speed lines) and 3kVDC (French and Belgian lines) with some equiped for 1.5kVDC in Souther France
  • besides being equipped for different voltages they can cope with different heights of catenary: regular height French and Belgian, the special low height on TGV lines, and extra high in the tunnel (where the double decker lorry cars require it).
• The 18 coach Electic Multiple Units (EMUs) are 394m long. That’s approximately 180m longer than one of our 8 coach InterCity 125s. It’s also about 1/4 mile in imperial!
• They achieve speeds of up to 186mph in France, and on the new section of the high speed rail link in the UK (which, when it opened, cut 20 minutes off the journey time). They hold the UK rail speed record at 208mph. This compares with 125mph in service for our InterCity 125s, which hold the record (at 148mph) as the world’s fastest diesels.
• Some sets not used by Eurostar are in use in France as TGVs by SNCF, others have been run by GNER from Kings Cross to Leeds (until December 2005).

Waterloo International

• The station consists of a viaduct supporting 5 platforms covered by a 1/4 mile glass canopy.
• The award winning design is by Nicholas Grimshaw, who was also responsible for the Eden project.
• I’m sure I recollect somewhere, but can’t confirm it, that the elevated 400m station can compress by up to 2m to absorb some of the momentum of the 752 tonne trains braking.
• It will cease to serve as the terminus for Eurostar trains on November 14 when the high speed link to St Pancras is opened.
• Alternative uses for the site under consideration include a shopping centre, offices, or use by South West Trains. The latter, whilst the favoured option, is complicated by the work that would need to be done on the approach roads (or the building of a flyover at Clapham Junction). This might mean mothballing the station for up to five years, although it’s more likely it will be used in the interim to provide capacity for other upgrades to Waterloo. At 400m the platforms might be shortened in favour of some retail.

Having enjoyed the version of Dalek on YouTube with John Cleese voicing the titular “Metaltron”, I have now discovered there’s a small industry creating Monty Python/Doctor Who crossover videos.

Check out

• The Third Doctor and Sarah Jane watching the killer rabbit decapitating cybermen in the death zone, and
• The new cybermen in cyberspamalot.

We apologise to you, faithful reader, for any turbulence you may have experienced today. Our no-good hosts tried to upgrade to a new web platform (supposed to resolve all those downtime issues) but it didn’t work:

Unfortunately, during the migration process we identified an issue which was causing the new webserver platform to become overloaded and, for a period of time certain websites were either unavailable or running very slowly. Our migration process was being very closely monitored and as soon as our engineers realised the extent of the issue we implemented our roll-back plan. This roll-back plan has now been completed and your website has reverted to running on the original f2s webserver platform.

We regret that some data loss may have been incurred in the period between 12:30 and 16:00 today and that you may find that database updates during this time have been lost, we sincerely apologise for this and any inconvenience that this may have caused you.

So there may be more interweb turbulence for us in the near future…

…And Claims The Doctor Would Use a PC

The Guardian’s wittiest columnist has managed to pen 900 words on why he hates Macs in response to the British version of those awful “I’m a PC” ads.

I rather like Macs, I love OS X, and I try to avoid having to use Windows like the plague, but the article’s rather accurate.

1. PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people.

They surely are. Check out Mini-ITX to see PCs built in shoes, hat boxes, old vacuum cleaners etc. It’s easy to modify a regular PC, there’s a ton of room inside. Plus, you’re not going to ruin the design; most PCs are designed to be functional rather than quiet or beautiful.

2. The Doctor would use a PC.

It’s true, the TARDIS is unreliable and always needs fixing. However the Doctor “hates computers” (presumably including K9) so the point is academic.

3. Better at “fun stuff”, my arse.

This is the real reason, in my opinion, that PCs are still so popular: you can play games on them. They’re so often multi-purpose family machines; a lot of people will compromise on the operating system because you can play games and still word process, burn CDs, etc… But if you’re running Windows and you don’t play games, what the hell are you doing?.

4. I feel an unexpected crash coming/Charlie listened to the Windows startup jingle every 10 minutes as his PC repeatedly rebooted itself.

However smug some of its users may be, OS X is incredibly stable.

However, I will pick on a few points that suggest Brooker last used a Mac in the 1990s:

1. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults

Er, no. Windows XP’s default theme is stuffed with Fisher Price buttons, while OS X not only looks great but runs on top of Unix. I suspect that this is a reference to older versions of the Mac OS, and he’d have a point there.

2. Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?

It hasn’t. It’s got two, and a trackball scroller.