No geek
is an island

I may not be the train regulator, but… One of my eight wishes for 2008 was:

That the majority of my commuter trains into London are on time (December’s score: 0%).

Two months into 2008, how is Southern - my local train operating company - faring? I’ve crunched the numbers and the answer is that they’re getting better, but are short of my target.

Based on the wording of my wish, these stats are limited to journeys I’ve made into London for work, and only count the train I actually took: if I got to the station and a train due earlier than the one I was aiming for arrived late and I caught it, that counted as a late train; but if it was so busy that (rather than squeezing in) I waited for the next train and it was on time, that counted as an on time train.

On the one occasion that the train I went for was cancelled, I’ve made an exception and counted that as a particularly long delay (17 minutes; the longest delay otherwise was 9 minutes).

Here are the stats:

So my morning train did manage to be on time the majority of the time this month, but, averaged out against January (when I caught more trains), the proportion for 2008 so far is 45%.

Not great, but only a little way to go to get over the key 50%. And what a triumph that would be.

Not this one - this one.

And probably not. But still…

Whenever Barclaycard staff are recruiting new customers/borrowers/credit monkeys - usually at stations - I always turn them down on principle. The reason I give is that I already have one, which is true, but even if I didn’t I would refuse.

Because Barclaycard are Evil.

I am not, I confess, the sort of person to carefully pay off my balance every month and get the advantage of Nectar points/0% interest/cashback without paying any interest. For that reason, it’s all the more important that I have a sensible credit limit, so that I’m never tempted to book a round the world cruise on the assumption that I’ll pay it back one day when I’m rich.

A few years ago, when I was a student and very short of cash, I asked Barclaycard to increase my credit limit by £50 so that I could buy some new glasses (all the better to see things with, which was handy at the time). They duly increased my limit by several hundred pounds. It wasn’t long, given the option of some “free” money, that Student Me had spent it.

Occasionally, Barclaycard write to me and congratulate me on having earned another credit limit increase. These letters always insist that for “security reasons” they can’t tell me in the letter how much the increase is. I have to log on to their account management website or wait for a statement before I can find out, an implicit direction to just get on spending it without thinking.

I logged in this week to discover that they’ve increased my credit limit yet again - by £1,000. I’m now going to have to go out of my way to request they reduce back to what it was (and probably lower).

This kind of behaviour by credit card companies has fuelled the massive rise in personal debt in the UK, the sort of carefree lending that leads into a credit crunch. It’s irresponsible lending that will see families with existing debt problems getting further into trouble.

So boo to Barclaycard.

My highlight of the blogging year is back.

As I’ve plugged in previous years, Mike at Troubled Diva has been conducting an annual assessment of the last fifty years of pop music. Which Decade Is Top For Pops? reaches its sixth year this week with the first daily instalment, today featuring the single at Number Ten in the charts this week (Goldfrapp’s A&E) and its precessors from 1968, 1978, 1988 and 1998.

Head on over to Mike’s to hear today’s five tracks and to cast your votes.

In honour of the weekly Gossip on the Underground:

“I’m rubbish at geography. I thought Asia was a small country, but it’s the massivest, massivest continent in the world.”

One of the problems with living in London is the sheer number of times in a week that you find yourself invited to the pub - or, indeed, to go out more generally. Not that I’m complaining, you understand; just making an observation, and one which may explain why, despite a week off work, I still feel like I need a holiday.

On Friday (although, having been off work all week I kept mistaking it for Saturday), I went to The Ship and Shovell near Charing Cross to meet Gordon, stalwart organiser of Scottish blogmeets and webmaster of the temporarily out of action Scottish Blogs.

Gordon being as well-connected as he is, there were rather a lot of bloggers in attendance which put me to shame for neglecting this place, and prompted me to get around to writing some of the posts I’ve had in the back of my mind for weeks (if not months).

I did my best to memorise who everyone was and which blogs they wrote, so I apologise to those I’ve inevitably missed. There was Tom Reynolds from Random Acts of Reality (and here’s his book, Blood, Sweat and Tea: Real Life Adventures in an Inner-city Ambulance); the eponymous Diamond Geezer; Gert from Mad Musings of Me; Adrian from sevitzdotcom (I read his latest blog posts on his lovely iPhone); Graybo from grayblog; Ann from pixeldiva; and Anna from little.red.boat. I’m at least two short from that list but hopefully Gordon will provide some links himself.

(Update: Thanks to Gordon I can make my apologies to Hydragenic, bob’s yer uncle, and the girl with a one-track mind, another one of those clever people with a book.)

Several new blogs there I didn’t know before and will be adding to my feed reader.

And while resolving to write more on here, I’ll also be resolving to log in to that more often too.