To the people of Greece

When your country needs as much business, tourism and good will as it can get, why are you calling a general transport strike tomorrow?

I cannot get home from my business meeting in your country any more, and at the moment feel like I won't be coming back if I can help it.

You're really not helping your cause!

Still, at least there's a pool and internet...

Sustainable public transport

We've heard it all before "rural bus service cuts". We'll it's happening in Elvington and it's all quite silly.

To give bit of background. We have a bus service (195) that runs a few times a day. The busiest times are at 7:30 to York and 5:15 from York. This service gets about 6-12 commuters from Elvington plus another 12 or so from other villages. So, it's hardly full, but it's keeping 24 cars off the road.

During the day, the other bus services (apparently subsidized by the council) have a "few" (3?) people on them.

Anyway, the morning and evening runs of the 195 will be stopped from 5th September 2011 because it's not financially viable (while the empty daytime runs continue).

The cynic in me thinks that the company would rather run an empty bus paid for by the council than one that's actually well used but doesn't have a bum on every seat.

I'm sure that the day time buses provide an irreplaceable service for the OAPS, and others who do not have a car to get into York! But stopping the morning/evening commuter services so that people end up buying a car to go to work seems completely at odds with the York City council's recently published strategy on transport! All 5 themes in the document are basically saying that it's important to stop people using the car to get to/around York.


A few suggestions:

• Think about the services that we subsidize.
  
• Plan timetables better: think about what services people will use, not what services happen to fall neatly within the bus company's schedule when they have a spare bus that's on its way back from somewhere else.
  
• Make it 30 minutes later in the morning (7:50 in York is a fraction early really for many commuters)
• Advertise it! According to the transport policy, we have to encourage behavioural change - so let's go out of our way to promote it, make it actually a viable service. Many, many people in Elvington work in York, why don't they take the bus. Who pays for the advertising? Council? Bus companies? Word of mouth? Elvington Parish Council? Actually all should play a part.

Stairs

Great idea!

Inflation again

Some time ago, I wrote about the relationship between mortgage and inflation.

Today, I came across an interesting article saying the same, but a bit better and more up to date, basically using inflation to get out of debt.

I thought it was interesting because I still get tempted to chip away at my mortgage if I ever get a bit of spare cash.

My First Shorthand Wiring

Shorthand

I have made two new year's resolutions this year.

1. More exercise (same as last year, but this time I mean it, again).

2. Learn shorthand.

And it's the second of these that this post is about. Let's start with the why.

My handwriting is terrible. It always has been. Completely illegible. It's not that I cannot write legibly (even reasonably neatly if I must), but that I don't. I have often blamed it on using computers all the time, but that's not really true - I do write too.

I have a note book that I use daily at work; each page is the same: there is a fairly neat title, then as we go beyond the first few words, I can barely decypher what it says. Actually, each word is like that too - I can only read the first letter.

I am beginning to understand the reason that I write like this: time. Once I get into the meeting/notes/whatever, my writing doesn't keep up with my thoughts, two characters into each word, and I'm needing to write the next one, so the rest of the word becomes an irrecoverable squiggle.

In fact what I end up doing is inventing a new shorthand as I write ("let's define this squiggle to mean 'upercalifragilisticexpialidocious'"). Of course, the lack of a systematic method means that by the time I come to read it, I've no idea what new shorthand notations I invented.

So, the proposed solution is is actually learn a shorthand method, one that someone else has worked out already, one that works, and one that is written down somewhere.

Types of shorthand.

So, this leaves me searching the internet for shorthand tutorials (it's a subject that's surprisingly scarce on the internet actually). The first question is "which shorthand?". There are many types, each with various merits. The two famous ones are called "Gregg" and "Pitman". Pitman requires you do do different weights/thicknesses of line, which would not be practical I think. Gregg seems more practical, very fast but very complicated - it's aim seems to be for super-fast writing, rather than ease of use.

In the end I've decided to go for a little known shorthand called "Alpha Shorthand" that has a couple of references on the internet, including a youtube video. Here's the teaching sheet: Alpha Shorthand.

Let's see how I get on...