TFL's SMS Alerts For Next Bus Times

I love inventive uses for SMS. A communication mechanism that is now pretty much well universal. Sure smart phones may be taking over , but the only thing in common that runs across almost every single mobile phone is SMS. It doesn't matter if you have an iPhone, Android, WP7 or any phone what so ever. SMS just works and people just know how to use it. SMS is not dead! ;-) Arguably voice also runs on every mobile. When was the last time you made a call on your mobile though? ;-)

Earlier this year The Postal service in Denmark announced that you could use SMS to purchase a stamp. Fantastic! In Copenhagen you can also use SMS to purchase klippekort, which provide you with 10 bus and train tickets. So no more strips of paper tickets, simply a SMS with your ticket details.

Transport For London have now implemented a nice use case, albeit a blindingly obvious one (although you do need the accurate data to provide the service), whereby you text the code of a bus stop to 87287 and they will send you back a text with the arrival times of the next bus to your stop. The detail on each bus stop can be seen on the above photo.

In central London this information is typically displayed on most bus stops via a dot matrix display, however when you get to the sticks few bus stops actually have the displays. SMS is the next most obvious solution to provide the service! Sure you could provide a link to use in your mobile's web browser, or create an app that will automatically detect your location and then provide bus timetable information, but then you have to develop for iPhone, Android, WP7, etc... When SMS is ubiquitous why not provide such a simple use case via it. Then it simply works everywhere for everyone. Tidy.

The response from TFL's service can be seen below



When I used the service it was absolutely spot on. A minute after receiving the above text, along came the E2. Excellent.

Cheers

m

Battery Life Issues Have Turned The iPhone 4S Into A Real Lemon

Sorry I couldn't resist. For some reason it made me smile. I am of small mind nowadays and very tired ;-)

Photos Of Pitshanger Park

In April I blogged about Pitshanger Park and how much I loved it. I still spend a load of time in the park, although due to the fact it is now dark when I get home of an evening, typically visits are now limited to the weekend when we walk Peter around in his pram during one of his sleeps!

This past weekend was no different. On Sunday the fog really made the park feel quite mystical, as the above photo shows. It was not actually possible to see from one side of the park to the other, as can be seen below. It made for a great walk.



Also spotted on the weekend, on Saturday before the fog, one of the many Pistshanger Parakeets burrowing away in a tree branch. Although a little hard to see the photo below shows the birds backside as it digs away! I have never seen a parakeet do this but they clearly do. The amount of digging into the branch was pretty significant given the amount of wood chips on the ground below.



Although the following photo was taken last Autumn, I have seen the 50% off Autumn scene again this year as well. How is it possible for the leaves to be so neatly separated? I guess only the person with the leaf blower knows! ;-)



Another Autumn carnage photo from last year!



Have fun

Cheers

m

The Cost Of Petrol And Diesel - Who Gets What?

The above diagram which was from a BBC news article shows the breakdown of the cost of a litre of petrol and the cost of a litre of diesel, in the UK, during October 2011.

Looking at Diesel, as it's what I use, the total average cost is 138.4p/litre. Of this there is 58p duty and 23.1p VAT, so a total of 81.1p goes to the government. that equates to 58.6% ending up in government coffers. This is a pretty nice little earner for the government!

That being said I can see how it's really not enough and I think, come the new year, they really should increase the duty by another 3 pence per litre. I think that at all costs the Government should be getting at least 60% of the cost of a litre of diesel and petrol. Really how else will we ever recover from the banking fiasco of 2008. I think everyone should have to pay for this as everyone is responsible for it...... oh hang on no that might not be right.

Cheers

m

Yahoo! Fail! Removes! Pulse! Blogs! Doesn't! Tell! Users!

The above picture, titled "Is This What Happens When Redundancies Attack", was taken at Yahoo! when the international mobile team in London were closed down for delivering the award winning FIFA World Cup 2006 mobile site. Not soon after the announcement this wall caved in!

It now seems appropriate again when talking about Yahoo! After all they have been going down the toilet for sometime now. Shareholders must still be cringing about not being taken over by Microsoft, for 40 USD, a share a couple of years ago! Ho hum. On the other hand Microsoft shareholders are probably still celebrating!

The latest piece of news about Yahoo! that has annoyed me greatly is the fact that they seem to have removed all blogs from their Yahoo! Pulse product. This has affected me directly and they didn't have the courtesy to actually let me know they were going to do this!

Sometime around 2005, Yahoo! launched their social product - 360 in Europe. I was an avid user and over the course of a couple of years blogged about 400 times using it. When Yahoo! 360 closed down (seriously how could Yahoo! fail at a social product with 500 million users in an era when social web sites were exploding? It's beyond me - but that's another story) Yahoo! allowed users to migrate their 360 blogs to Yahoo! Pulse. I gladly did as I didn't want to lose all of the work I had put into my blog. My 360 blog sat quite happily within Pulse until recently.

Today when I looked I found that it was no longer there. After a quick look on the internet a couple of Yahoo! answer users had pointed out that the blogs have simply been removed. Apparently Pulse users were alerted by a banner ad. OK as far as I am aware one of Yahoo!'s biggest products is email. They couldn't spend the time to actually let Pulse users know this would happen via email? Shocking!

I Guess not? Communicating with your Customers via your biggest distribution mechanism seems to be a step too far for some companies! ;-)

Yahoo! Should learn from the mobile carriers of this world. I mean even Vodafone can alert their users via SMS when they are closing, oddly coincidentally, their 360 product!



I am not sure how much longer I can support the ever flagging Yahoo! After this I think I am going to move permanently away from their email service as well. Not sure what to do about Flickr. I really love that product. Maybe that's the only tie I will have to Yahoo! Who knows. Next thing you know that'll be closed down without notification!

I loved working for Yahoo! and loved their products. That love has waned dramatically since they lost seemingly all creativity. It's a real shame they are going the way of the above pictured toilet.

Cheers

m

The Garden Is Slowing Down For Winter Hibernation

So right now the garden is really slowing down for its winter hibernation. I finished the lawn scarifying and trimmed the hedges the other weekend. I think that will be the last attention that the hedges get until next Spring. I probably have to mow the lawn and do the edges one more time. Then the odd piece of clean up of dead perennials, but that's it. Things have really started to time out for winter.

I should probably protect my hedge trimmings from the cold and possible snow, but I didn't do this last year and all of them made it through the coldest winter in living memory, so probably won't do anything different this year either! If I know that it is going to hit -18 degrees Celsius again this winter I might move them inside the garage for the cold spell ;-)

So all in all the gardening blog entries will probably diminish for a while. Never mind there will be mobile related blogs! Yay! Well maybe not. I am sort of on a small hiatus with the mobile stuff right now. Things aren't inspiring me to write about mobile currently. It's not that I am over mobile technology, I think that it is just at the moment I feel so far removed from it that I don't get day to day inspiration from it. Currently I feel about as far away from mobile development as I have in a long time! Possibly since I started working in mobile almost 20 years ago! Crazy .... almost 20 years is a long time!

So for the time being, until inspired again, mobile blogs will possibly be thin on the ground as well for a little while.

I still love writing though. I find it to be a great escape and it is probably my largest hobby. I might not do it well but I have done a lot of it! ;-) So I think this blog might well become a little more eclectic over the coming months. Think I will blog about stuff in general as opposed to a specific category, or possibly categories of content. I was looking through a book I wrote in 2004/5. I might even rehash some of the content from there. Might at least rehash some of the photos.

So I guess for the next while you had better watch out for random crap as opposed to mobile crap and gardening crap ;-)

Cheers

m

The Garden Still Thinks It's Spring

It has been so warm and dry in the UK in September and October that a load of plants think it is Spring rather than Autumn. In September the temperatures were regularly hovering at or above 20 degrees celsius. Things have cooled down in October but we are still getting 18 degrees during the day, on occasion, although the nights are considerably cooler. We almost had a frost out at Ealing but only on the parked cars ;-)

The hollyhocks in our garden are all sprouting as if it's Spring. The picture above shows the new growth. Also the hedging plant in the front of the house is also starting to flower again, as seen below. They are in for a rude shock I think as summer time ends this weekend!



Not only has it been warm it has also been super dry in London. The only serious rain I can remember was last Wednesday early morning where we had 14mm of rain. Apart from that almost nothing. My water tanks are empty now. The fact I have to water at all seems very odd at this stage of the year. My pot plants would have been long gone dead and bloated if I hadn't kept up the watering regime. As it stands last years Christmas tree is still going strong ;-)

Due to the lack of rain the ground is simply too hard to complete the Autumn lawn care. No chance for me to aerate the lawn as it is almost impossible to get a pitch fork in the ground! It's a hard job when the ground is moist so forget it when it's dry!

Still a manic Saturday morning of gardening saw various shrubs cut back and the Chilean Potato Tree and the Climbing Roses on the back fence cut back. Not sure this is an Autumn task. It should probably have been done earlier in autumn at least, but again the Spring like weather has them growing manically. The results below.



The results for the council are four bags of garden cuttings to take away when the garbage is picked up ;-)



Maybe if it rains in the next week or so I will get to finish aerating the lawn but if I don't get it done soon I won't be using any Autumn fertiliser. Deadline for this is apparently mid November! Ah well can always aerate in the new year ;-)

Cheers

M