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When trains stop at stations but passengers can’t use them…

Posted on Tuesday 23 October 2012Sunday 4 November 2012 By Mark Wilson

This content is 12 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

As I paid for a ticket to for the rail journey into London this morning, I was reminded of my anger and frustration the last time I made this trip, herded like cattle onto a packed commuter train, whilst being refused access to one of the many trains that stop at my station but which travellers are unable to use because they are either “to pick up” or “to set down” only.

As a nation, we tend to blame all that is wrong with our railways on privatisation but this practice is not new. Indeed, it serves to show that, even in the halcyon days of nationalised rail service, some ludicrous decisions were made – and that some of those decisions still stand today.

I live just outside Milton Keynes, a town 50 miles north of London with a generally good rail service, from two train operating companies, London Midland and Virgin Trains. London Midland operates stopping and semi-fast services whilst Virgin runs the express (formerly inter-city) trains (Southern also operates services via west London). But there is a flaw – and it’s a big one. Between 07:14 and 09:19 southbound, and between 15:43 and 18:43 northbound, passengers are not allowed to board Virgin trains that stop at Milton Keynes. And yes, you read that correctly, passengers are not allowed to board trains that already stop at their station at the busiest time of the day!

Last week, faced with huge queues for a the 16:48 London Midland service for which the inbound train had not yet arrived, I tried to board the 16:43 Virgin train instead. At the ticket barrier I was told “this train doesn’t stop at Milton Keynes” but, when I pointed out that it does, at 17:13, the Virgin Trains official still refused me access to the platform.
How do I know about the unadvertised stops? Well, aside from working timetable information being available online, looking at Milton Keynes arrival and departure information on the public timetable clearly showed a train at 17:13 which was the 16:43 from Euston.

I can understand the desire to keep seats free on long-distance trains for long-distance travellers: that’s why seats are sold with reservations and also why there are fare structures that limit travel on peak-time journeys. I can also see the timetabling logic (when I have travelled to Manchester, trains are often “late” when they stop at Stockport “to set down only” but “on time” when they make it to Piccadilly a few minutes later, due to the recovery time built in to the timetable). But there is a difference here: Milton Keynes is 50 miles from London; it’s not a suburb of the same conurbation, like Watford is to London or Stockport is to Manchester. Preventing travellers from boarding/leaving trains here is equivalent to saying that passengers can’t use Virgin trains from Wolverhampton to Coventry or from Manchester to Stoke-on-Trent and that they should use local services instead. Madness!

When I vented my frustrations on Twitter, Virgin Trains backed up their position, but some people suggested that those with cheap tickets shouldn’t be able to use the fast trains. Let me just be completely clear: there are discounted Virgin-only or London Midland-only fares but I was attempting to travel with a full-price peak ticket – in other words a ticket that should allow travel on any service between Milton Keynes and London.

So, what’s the real point of this 500-word missive?

Give Milton Keynes the express train service that it deserves! Network Rail spent millions adding platforms to our station so that more trains can stop here, yet one of the train operating companies doesn’t let the passengers get on or off at the busiest time of the day.

The trains may be privatised but the railway is a piece of national infrastructure, and Richard Branson et al would do well to remember who their customers are when complaining about losing lucrative franchises to rival bidders*…

*I appreciate that this decision was later reversed due to issues with the bidding process – that doesn’t change the fact that Virgin Trains sometimes seems to forget who its customers are.

A little consideration please…

Posted on Saturday 20 October 2012 By Mark Wilson

Over the summer, in common with a lot of Britain, I’ve got more and more interested in cycling. Maybe it’s the Olympics, maybe it was Bradley Wiggins’ success in the Tour de France, or maybe it’s just that a lot of my friends from the running club are also cyclists. Regardless, that’s meant that I’ve started reading more cycling magazines, listening to cycling podcasts, etc. and it strikes me that there’s a very “them and us” view with cyclists against the world.

I tend to walk rather than take the tube in London and, as a pedestrian, I regularly have skirmishes with cyclists who don’t feel the need to stop at zebra crossings. I know the argument about lost momentum but I’m afraid that’s no excuse. Imagine if a car driver used the same excuse (considering the environmental impacts of stop/start in urban areas)… it’s no reason to ignore crossings, stop lights, etc. and the argument just doesn’t stack up.

Then, last Thursday, in Guildford, I was driving at night and I (only just) spotted a cyclist coming towards me a hundred metres or so away on a road I was just about to pull out onto. I stopped and waited but, as he passed me, the cyclist abuse me with a four letter word. Perhaps I would have seen him sooner if he had proper lights – instead, he had a flashing green light on the front of his bike (and no white light)! As it happens, I probably had time to pull out anyway, but flashing lights make it difficult to judge distance and speed so I played it safe, avoiding a potential collision between 2.2 tonnes of car and 100 kilos of vulnerable cyclist, yet resulting in abuse because I was a metre over the give way line…

Today, I was a cyclist, on an organised ride in Epping Forest. I slowed down on a number of occasions to be considerate to horse riders, families with small children, and dog walkers but it was amazing how many people seem to think it’s fine to wonder aimlessly across a wide track or to stop in the middle of a path. On one occasion I was riding along a track and met a dog walker coming the other way, with two dogs, a small one dashing around and a large one, lumbering along. I slowed to a walking pace but he did nothing to call his dogs to safety. Then, as I passed the large dog, it moved suddenly, I slammed on my brakes, and my pedals left a nasty gash on the back of my leg. The result: in order to avoid inflicting injury on a dog, I injured myself instead… great.

Pedestrian, equestrian, cyclist or motorist, it really shouldn’t matter. We all need to share roads, paths, etc. and co-exist, so how about a little consideration for others? Is that really too much to ask, or are we all just too caught up in our own worlds?

Passion

Posted on Thursday 18 October 2012Friday 19 October 2012 By Mark Wilson

I had lunch with a friend today who has recently given up his corporate job in order to build a business with his wife. He and I were talking about the need to have passion in one’s work – if you don’t believe in what you’re doing, how can you expect others to?

Then, at an event this evening, Euan Semple (@euan) spoke of brands allowing people to be advocates and to show their enthusiasm about working for a company (and how, if they are not enthusiastic, the company has a problem). Again, he used the word “passion”.

It felt a bit serendipitous – two discussions, both touching on the same topic. Maybe it’s a mid-life crisis thing… but it’s given me some food for thought…

McAfee, Internet Explorer and a lack of quality control at Toshiba

Posted on Wednesday 17 October 2012 By Mark Wilson

Last week, I wrote about helping my father-in-law to ensure that the insurance company wasn’t fleecing him whilst replacing his stolen laptop. His new machine (a Toshiba Satellite C855-12G) arrived this week (although it appears to be a discontinued model, which is presumably the reason it was discounted…) and I’ve spent part of the evening on family IT support duty getting it set up for him.

Unfortunately, I also found that the webcam is faulty (at least, neither Toshiba’s webcam application, Windows Device Manager nor Skype can see it, despite having downloaded the latest drivers from the Toshiba website), suggesting that Toshiba’s quality control is pretty shoddy (this doesn’t appear to be an isolated incident – see link 1, link 2, link 3). Back in the day, Toshiba was a respected notebook PC brand but I guess I should have insisted on Lenovo, Samsung or Dell…

Anyway, the real purpose of this post was to record some of the issues (and resolutions) that I found whilst removing the “crapware” from this new PC. To be fair, I’ve seen worse and the main thing to remove (apart from a non-English version of Windows Live Essentials) was McAfee Internet Security. It never ceases to amaze me how many people will shell out cash for this type of application when there are perfectly good free alternatives, so I replaced it with Microsoft Security Essentials.

Unfortunately the McAfee uninstaller wouldn’t run, displaying an Internet Explorer-esque “Navigation was cancelled” screen (but without any chrome). As Skype was also having problems adding contacts, I started to suspect something was blocking web traffic and that hunch turned out to be valid. Disabling Internet Exploder 9’s Content Advisor did the trick. How anybody can use it is beyond me (I had to enter a password four times just to switch from Windows Update to Microsoft Update) but, once Content Advisor was disabled, both Skype and the McAfee uninstaller worked as they should.

Selective sharpening of an image using the high pass filter

Posted on Wednesday 17 October 2012Tuesday 18 August 2015 By Mark Wilson

With a few notable exceptions, I dislike photos of myself. I like to be behind the camera, taking pictures not starring in them, but sometimes it’s necessary to have the camera turned in my direction.

For instance, over the last few months, it became increasingly obvious to me that I needed a new profile picture. The last one was taken in 2008 when I was a) younger and b) heavier, but I’ve been struggling to find the right image. I was going to ask one of my many photographer friends to take one for me but then, whilst at the recent B2B Huddle, I found myself in the company of John Cassidy, who was creating fantastic headshots of attendees for a very competitive price.

In just a few minutes (John normally spends more time with his clients), shooting tethered into Adobe Lightroom with a Nikon D3, 85mm f1.4 lens and a collection of lights and reflectors, John managed to create the proverbial silk purse from a sow’s ear in that he made me look quite presentable! In fact, I was amazed at what he had done with me*. One of the resulting images is now my profile picture on most of the websites that I use (I keep finding odd ones with old pics that need to be mopped up, and I still use an image for my Flickr profile that Benjamin Ellis took of me, “caught in the act” of photography, although he’s since removed the image from his photostream).

I also wanted a higher-resolution image for my about.me page but, to my eyes, the image I’d selected seemed just a little soft around the eyes. It was taken at a reasonably narrow aperture (f5) but I wanted to sharpen up my face (just the face – as sharpening my suit created some strange results due to the weave of the fabric). A few minutes in Photoshop was all it took to create the effect I required for a punchy on-screen image, although it would be inappropriately sharp for a printed version:

First, I created a copy of the background layer.
Then, I created a new layer and applied a black mask before painting over my face with a white brush.
Next, I applied the high pass filter with a value of 3.0.
Finally, I set the blend mode for the high pass layer to Overlay. Soft light will also work for a more subtle effect.

These are before and after images, at 25%:

It’s a useful tip, and I’m not the first to write about the high pass filter – it’s all over the ‘net – but it’s a technique that’s worth knowing about if you really like a shot but are finding it just a little too soft for your taste. In addition, the eyes may be sharper now but it does have the side-effect of enhancing wrinkles, etc. in my skin. That’s probably OK for a 40-year-old man but not too flattering for a woman so more selective editing may be required.

* My wife used the word “handsome” but I wouldn’t go quite that far.

Comparing PC specifications for average family use

Posted on Monday 15 October 2012 By Mark Wilson

A couple of weeks ago, my parents-in-law were unlucky enough to be burgled. Thankfully they were not at home at the time and the thieves didn’t manage to take too much. One thing they did take though, was their laptop computer.

The insurance company made an offer for a comparable PC to replace the stolen one (new for old) but, as four years is a long time in computing, I wanted to be sure that they really were getting a similar specification in 2012 terms. I’d been careful when I bought the original for them to get something that was OK for standard web surfing, email, etc. but not too expensive. Similarly I didn’t want anything bargain basement as it would only cause me “family IT support issues” later.

My normal answer, when asked for advice on buying new PCs, etc. is to look at the PC Pro A List to see what’s currently rated. Unfortunately that doesn’t help so much when taking a bottom-up view (i.e. starting out with a proposed model and seeing if it offers everything you need, rather than a top-down approach with a purpose in mind and choosing the model to match).

So I turned to the ‘net for advice. As helpful as my Twitter followers were, “what is a decent PC spec for the average home user?” is a pretty subjective question and the answers ranged from “I love my Core i7-powered beast” to “Core i3 should be fine”, with some suggesting that i3 might not have enough grunt and I should get an i5 instead. As it happened, there was a similar Core i5 model at the same price as the i3, but with 4GB RAM instead of 6GB, so I got the insurance company to plump for the faster processor (I can add RAM later).

Wikipedia was also useful, for reading up on graphics chipsets (to work out why the Intel HD Graphics 3000 chipset was an improvement on the Intel GMA X3100 in the old PC – don’t be fooled by the smaller number, it seems), and to confirm that I wasn’t getting a modern version of a budget Celeron processor.

One website really stood out though with great advice on the various processors and how they compared to each other. That site was notebookcheck.net (I was looking at the Intel Core i3-2350M and Core i5-2450M) and I’m pretty sure I’ll be revisiting when I need to compare specs again in future…

Innovation abuse

Posted on Thursday 11 October 2012Thursday 11 October 2012 By Mark Wilson

Last week I was attending some product awareness training where claims were being made that a particular vendor’s servers were “innovative”. “Really?”, I thought, “how’s that then?”. I decided not to ask as I’d already been quite disruptive about the presenter’s use of out-of-date analyst reports on CIO priorities but they may well be – I just want to know how.

A day later, I was presented with a pop-up ad for the latest version of Microsoft Windows Server, with a big neon sign that says “Insert Innovation Here”. Sounds interesting – but a click through leads me to a standard marketing web page about the product’s capabilities – nothing obvious about how it will help me be innovative.

Let’s be clear – innovation is far more than just a buzzword on a website or a slide deck.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve worked alongside the guys in our organisation that run services and networks (communities) around open innovation within our organisation and with our partners and customers. I haven’t been directly involved, but one message has hit home pretty hard.

Innovation is about:

Problem + Solution = Value.

In other words, I have a problem (generally a business problem) to which I would like to apply an (innovative) solution to increase the value. Innovation is not to be confused with invention but it is about finding new and better ways to do things.

Marketing materials promoting innovation are generally just that – marketing. Maybe next time you see someone claiming to be innovative, you might ask them how they are – what is it about the way they work that captures innovative ideas to apply to business problems and derive additional value – at the very least it will be an interesting discussion.

Could not read the calendar. Outlook cannot open this item. The item may be damaged!

Posted on Tuesday 9 October 2012 By Mark Wilson

Somtimes, I could cheerfully dump my corporate laptop* and this week has been no exception with abysmally slow performance, new software installs that require reboots and then, after working well (so nothing to do with the Cisco unified communications integration components that I installed yesterday), Outlook decided that it didn’t like my calendar any more. Other people’s calendars were fine; other folders (Inbox, etc.) were fine; and the calendar data was fine, as long as I didn’t want a day/week/month view.

Could not read the calendar. Outlook cannot open this item. The item may be damaged.

OK, but which item? I could take a guess that this was something to do with a corrupted offline folders (.OST) file but a bit of Googling turned up a fix. In a TechNet Forum post Exchange MVP Rich Matheisen suggests deleting the OST file (the location of this can be found from Outlook’s Account Settings), then running outlook /cleanfreebusy to create a new .OST and pull down the free/busy calendar information.

One slight snag was that I couldn’t rename/delete the existing Outlook.OST file because it was in use. This time, Windows was a little more helpful with its error reporting, telling me that the Microsoft Windows Search Protocol Host had the file open. The answer was to open services.msc, stop the Windows Search service, then work on the Outlook.OST file, before restarting the Windows Search service.

Outlook is now happy again, but I’m not convinced it would have been any quicker to go via the official support channels (probably would have necessitated a visit to the office for the deskside support guys to take a look) than to self-support… which makes me wonder if corporate IT budgets would be better spent on providing cross-platform technology services, rather than maintaining and supporting standard PC builds?

* I make no secret that I’m not a fan of standard operating environments (“gold brick” PC builds) with layers and layers of “security” software. Even though I spent many years implementing such solutions (and reaping the rewards in terms of reduced support costs, etc.), it’s an outdated model that has no place in an age of consumerisation (for many knowledge workers at least – of course, there are exceptions, e.g. in heavily regulated environments). There are many who will say, “so what do you suggest instead?”, to which my response is: a) read this post; b) think about how to secure your data, not your devices; c) empower users to choose their own devices/apps where they wish (accepting that a bring your own model is not for all, but it’s time to move away from a device/operating system centric model to one that focuses on data and applications).

Re-imagination and business: Antony Mayfield at #SMWB2B

Posted on Wednesday 3 October 2012Tuesday 9 October 2012 By Mark Wilson

Last week, I wrote about the first keynote speech at the fifth B2B Huddle, from Microsoft’s Dave Coplin. It’s taken me a few days to get this post up but the next “act” was Antony Mayfield (@AMayfield), who spoke about advanced persistent opportunities: re-imagination and business (in other words, looking for new ways of working that are not from past business models).

One of the early points that Antony made in his presentation is that there are no real case studies for this topic (everyone is at the start of a journey – there is nothing definitive) which is an interesting observation. He did suggest though, that there are some useful resources out there in the form of Mary Meeker’s [and Liang Wu’s] State of the Internet report and Kevin Kelly (former editor of Wired)’s What Technology Wants. Another interesting quote that Antony used was attributed to Marc Andreessen (web browser pioneer turned venture capitalist) who was cited as saying that “the future is six months away” or, in other words, the limit for any sure-fire bets in the world of the Internet and social media is much shorter than the business and marketing plans that we use, so we need to find a new way of working…

One area where people constantly have to re-imagine models is that of security – with constant threats and risks. One particular form is that of the advanced persistent threat (APT). These are not one-off attacks but are very serious and often related to organised crime although hacktivists and governments also represent APTs.

Applying the same thoughts to social business, there is no such thing as the definitive social business strategy – strategy is seen as something distant. Strategy should be thought of as an advanced persistent opportunity. Strategy is fluid and social media is the context. Social media is a proxy for change but it is an approach, not a technology.

Antony then went on to talk about social marketing and its relationship with social brands and social businesses, building up to “six brilliant things” for successful brands to follow [in their social media marketing].

Leadership: Mandate and licence for change is clear. Antony cited Burberry as a case study where the CEO ambition was one of a digital brand. Following successful pilots, Burberry built an in-house content team and a social media approach based around a community that, once built, drives the brand.
Vision and values: They know what and who they are for. In place of the recognised purchase funnel (awareness, consideration, decision, buy [, loyalty]), today’s decision journey is one of a “loyalty loop” (as described by McKinsey and Company as far back as 2009). Brands like Nokia are embracing this cycle of consideration, evaluation, purchase but then building enjoyment, advocacy and bonding with the brand and a Harvard Business Review article looks at branding in the digital age and how many organisations are spending their money in the wrong places.
Principles: How they will operate with social/digital. Again, Nokia was the case study cited by Mayfield (Brilliant Noise has a paper on Nokia’s global social media strategy), with six principles for digital engagement – effectively “the right ways to behave”: 1. Consider the social opportunity in everything we do; engage in better conversations with more consumers; deliver personal experiences, be authentic, and earn trust; sharing is more important than control; define clear objectives from the outset; invest and commit to social presences. These are a great starting point for developing a set of principles for an organisation but, to give another example, the UK Government Digital Service sets out its own seven digital principles to follow:
Pilot and scale: [Have the] Will to try things, [and the] will to scale things that work. Nike was the quoted case study here, building relationships and viewing campaigns as an investment, rather than straight spending.
Frameworks and governance: Systems to guide pioneers and connect key stakeholders. IBM’s investment model has moved from a traditional campaign model of spend, followed by attention to one of consistent spending targetted on building a community (creating an “S curve” of attention, rather than peaks) – but this is hard work and requires a continued focus.
Digital literacy: investing in skills across the organisation. Examples here are the Nokia Socializer and the Dell Social Media University.

Antony Mayfield believes that social business is a journey and, just as we embark on personal journeys to move from reading, to marking favourites, sharing, commenting, posting, creation, and [perhaps] starting a group in an ever-more-steep curve there are Business models such as Red Ant’s 5 stages of: traditional experimental, operational measurable and fully engaged social business. Some organisations might want more detail

Some organisations want detailed ideas but ultimately, says Antony, we need to re-imagine everything (or someone will do it for you…).

Video

For those who would like to watch Antony Mayfield’s B2B Huddle presentation, a copy is embedded below: