The world's busiest bus station

If, like me, you spend time in west London, you will be used to the pretty constant stream of aircraft passing overhead, at least when the wind is from the west.  This is inbound traffic to Heathrow, variously claimed to be the busiest, or perhaps busiest international, or just most depressing airport.

A problem with Heathrow is that it only has two runways.  Except when someone crashes an aircraft on one of the runways and blocks it, one runway is used for landing and the other for take-off.  With only two runways and lots of traffic, bad weather or other problems end up causing huge delays.

In other words, the airport is full.  The "slots" allowing an airline to run a flight at a particular time, are very valuable and change hands for substantial amounts of money,  leading to some odd behaviour.

Lots of airlines would like to run more flights, and BAA, which owns the airport (along with Stansted and Gatwick, the other main London airports) wants to make more money from selling stuff to the passengers trapped there, its main source of revenue.

As a result, there's a big argument about whether the airport should be granted permission to build a third runway. 

A third runway would break promises made by the UK government that there would be no further expansion of Heathrow after 5th terminal was built.  Terminal 5 was completed earlier this year but was not a resounding success.

More air traffic at Heathrow would breach air pollution rules, and mean that more conversations in west London would be interrupted by low flying aircraft.

The infrastructure around Heathrow is creaking.  If you travel to or from Heathrow by road, you will know just how frustrating this is.  Travelling from the west of England and Wales, you approach along the M4, a heavily overloaded motorway.  At peak times, you will probably be stuck in traffic for ages.  

Travelling from London means a journey that can take well over an hour from the middle of the City, sometimes much longer.  And from north or south, you are likely to encounter the M25, London's orbital motorway, where cars frequently become obsolete and their drivers old while waiting to reach their destination.

Aha, the proponents of Heathrow will shout.  But what about Heathrow Express?  Well, yes, there's now an excellent train service from Heathrow (£32 return, minimum, for a 15 minute journey.  It should be excellent).  

Heathrow Express takes you only to one destination, London Paddington.  If you want to go to Paddington, that's great.  If you're travelling elsewhere, like anywhere north of London say, you will then have to drag your luggage onto the tube and endure that for as long as it takes to get to St Pancras, Kings Cross or Euston station, depending on your destination.  

Oh, and if you're travelling to Euston, be prepared for a long walk or a complex journey as there isn't a direct line from Paddington.  Or you could get a cab.  Good luck.  Take some food and a hot drink to keep you going while you wait in the queue.

How does this compare to European countries that have a transport policy designed to actually move people around?  At Schiphol airport, near Amsterdam, there's a real railway station at the airport.  You can get trains to more than one place.  Same thing at Zurich.  No such luck at Heathrow.

The proposed third runway will do nothing to fix any of these problems.  BAA doesn't care; it just wants more shoppers.  

British Airways, which runs most of its flights from Heathrow, wants to be able to compete for more of the transfer passenger market - that is, passengers not travelling to London, but using it as a place to transfer from one flight to another on a longer journey.

Now we get to the nub of the problem.  Transfer traffic used to be a small proportion of Heathrow's business, less than 10% in the early 1990s.  It's now significant, at around 30%.  It is claimed that if the third runway isn't built, these passengers will go elsewhere. 

My immediate reaction is "good".

If the price of having these transfer passengers is another runway at Heathrow, I'm not sure I want them.  They don't do a whole lot for the UK economy if they never leave the airport.  Sure, British Airways will suffer and BAA will lose some shoppers, but perhaps that's a price worth paying.

What's so glamorous about an airport anyway?  It's nothing more than a glorified bus station, and I'm not too keep about having one of those in my back yard either.

At the margin, some routes that you can currently fly direct from Heathrow will go away and that will be an inconvenience for those concerned, but at least they will get to change planes in an airport that is better run and less likely to lose their bags than Heathrow is.

Sailing round the world

I like sailing.  I suspect my love of sailing dates from childhood reading of the "Swallows and Amazons" series of books, written by Arthur Ransome. Happy days.

I started sailing in dinghies, originally on the River Dee in Chester, a sailing location so placid (the river in Chester is narrow and frequently overhung by trees) that boredom is probably a greater danger to health than drowning, but I loved it, and was given the freedom to sail whenever I wanted.

I particularly remember an idyllic summer when I would cycle down to the Chester Sailing Club with the sails for our Mirror dinghy in my rucksack, then spend the day exploring the river.

Much later, when I went to University, I started sailing on the sea for the first time.  Still in dinghies, I came to the realization that the gentle sound of water trickling around the bow of the boat was not an indication of great speed after all.  All the rules I had leaned from sheltered river sailing were void.  The water could be three-dimensional rather than a two-dimensional plane, and with a strong breeze, and some decent-sized waves, the boat would surf at a speed that was both exciting and exhausting.

Since then, I've graduated to gradually larger boats, learned the rudiments of navigation (just early enough to not take GPS completely for granted) and have cruised far and wide.  Well, far and wide to me means France, Ireland and Scotland, so not really very far in global terms, but holidays are short.   I have yet to summon up the courage to give up work and head off over the horizon long term.

I love sailing, but the British climate tends to make it a summer pursuit, so in the winter (which seems to last at least half of the year) I often escape into accounts of sailing written by others.

My latest reading experience (it's now November, so actually going sailing is not totally compelling) is A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols and highly recommend it.  It is a gripping account of the Golden Globe, the first non-stop round-the-world sailing race, which started in 1968 and finished in 1969.  

I started the book on Saturday afternoon and finished it on Sunday.  Extraordinarily readable, even though I've read about the race many times.  If you have the slightest interest in sailing, and perhaps even if you don't, you should love this.

Glorious Music

What is it about music?  That transcendent quality that can transport the listener to another place and another time.

At 1pm today, I was lucky enough to be transported.  I was listening to a church organ that was originally played by Henry Purcell in 1684, in the church where William Boyce was the Director of Music.  The organ sits in St Michael's Cornhill, a short walk from Bank station.  

A church has been on this site for perhaps 1000 years, a few hundred yards from the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange in the middle of the City of London.  The current church, like many in the City of London, was designed by Sir Christopher Wren in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London around 1670.

And the music?  I'm a sucker for Bach and the two preludes and fugues were as wonderful as you would expect.  The other music, pieces by Reger, Gigout and Elgar, were also excellent.

But perhaps it is the sense of history, listening to an organ that predates American independence, in a church that sits incongruously in the middle of London's financial district, that makes the experience so special.

If you're in the City on a Monday lunchtime, like music, and have a little time to spare, you might want to think about going.  It certainly beats a sandwich eaten crouched over a computer keyboard.

The "Apple Tax" is actually a "Microsoft Tax"

Or: How to alienate and antagonize your customers

Microsoft is clearly feeling some pain from Apple's growth, as demonstrated by the recent interviews given by various of its people who are now more urgently repeating messages about PCs being better than Macs and about what they like to call the "Apple Tax".  Two nice examples are the late September interview with Steve Ballmer in pcmag.com and one with Brad Brooks in CNET.

There's much in these interviews that sounds like desperation and I have neither the time nor the patience to dissect them in detail.  I'd just like to focus on one thing, the statement that "you don't really get full Microsoft Office [on the Mac]."  

Well, whose fault is that, Mr Ballmer?

I use a Mac at work (through choice) and I use Microsoft Office because that's what everyone else uses.  On the whole, Office 2008 on the Mac works pretty well.  But, as Steve Ballmer says, it falls short of Office on Windows in a couple of respects.

The first is compatibility with the Exchange, the widely used mail and calendaring server.  In years gone by, Microsoft used to sell a version of Outlook for the Mac that worked pretty much like Outlook on Windows.  But then Microsoft dropped Outlook on the Mac for something called Entourage, and Entourage is what you get with Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac.  

Entourage is fine as a mail tool and while there are some bizarre bugs with font sizes (thanks to deficiencies in the HTML it generates) it works pretty well.  

On the downside, its integration with Exchange is deficient.  You can't book resources (meeting rooms, for example) using Entourage, and checking another user's calendar is a long-winded process.  Some of this is simply because Entourage simply doesn't have access to the full set of APIs that it needs to work well with Exchange.

If Exchange were a third party product, that might be excusable.  But it isn't.  Microsoft makes Exchange and defines the APIs.  It also makes Entourage.  Can it get them to talk together properly?  Apparently not.

The other niggle is Excel.  In Microsoft Office 2008, Microsoft have dropped support for macros.  Microsoft now says that this support will return in a later release, but once again, this is Microsoft failing to support its own customers.  Fixing the problem cannot be impossible - apparently OpenOffice has VBA support on the Mac (and other platforms).  

Neither of these problems are show stoppers for me, though the VBA one is for quite a few people.  The reliability, freedom from viruses and overall performance of the Mac makes it a pleasure to use, even with these shortcomings in Microsoft's software.  But it does annoy me that Microsoft have clearly chosen to try to degrade the user experience of their customers who fail to loyally keep paying for Microsoft Windows. 

Here in the UK, Microsoft are selling Office Ultimate 2007 for £38.95, including tax.  You need an ".ac.uk" email address to get this price (it's aimed at students).  Funnily enough, the offer seems only to apply to Office for Windows.  Office 2008 for the Mac (Student Edition) is £79.97 on Amazon, while standard edition is £329.98.

Apple Tax?  Or Microsoft Tax?