Mandar Marathe

I am writing and uploading this post while sitting on a National Express train going from Doncaster to London.

I found out a while ago that National Express’ East Coast Mainline trains are equipped with free wifi for all passengers. Today is the first time I’m trying this out.

It’s really quite impressive!

I plugged my laptop into an electricity power point and logged into an unsecured wireless network called “nxecwifi”. It’s as simple as that.

The first time you use the browser it redirects you to http://www.nationalexpresswifi.train where you must sign in with your email address. This address only works on the train’s wifi system and is constantly updated with the train’s exact location, which is very useful.

After that you can surf the internet unhindered. I’ve been catching up with emails, Facebook and some miscellaneous browsing and it has made the train journey a whole lot more pleasant.

It’s not all that fast - broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk measured it at 456kps download, 65kps upload, but I’m sure it partly depends on how many people on the train are trying to access the service at the same time. So not as fast as the 8Mb broadband at home, but better than nothing.

Of course, being an unsecured network you do have to be careful that your computer’s firewall is setup correctly and avoid checking your bank balance while people are looking over your shoulder!

The “internet” is the system of data connections between different networks of computers; it can support a variety of protocols for sharing data between computers, allowing activities such as email and FTP. The “world wide web” is a system of linked documents (“web pages”) accessed via the internet with a web browser.

I started using the internet on a regular basis in 1994 while at university. We had workstations that used an early web browser called NCSA Mosaic. The number of web pages in existence at that time could be counted in the thousands. I setup my own website on the university’s servers in 1995.

The utility of the world wide web has been growing exponentially over the past 10 years to the point where many people like me can now think of it as a modern-day oracle.

This week I bought a second-hand car. Sure, I found it on the WWW at autotrader.co.uk. That itself is not surprising. It is a 1999 Ford Focus.

When I collected the vehicle, I found that the heating system was not working properly. The fan has 4 speed settings. On 1 and 2 there was no fan action at all. It would only work on 3 and 4.

Rather than taking a day off work and taking the car to a garage and paying hundreds of pounds on labour, I Googled for a solution.

After spending a little while reading through a number of forum posts, I realised that this was a common problem with the Ford Focus. More importantly, it was really easy to fix - this forum post gave detailed instructions including photos.

The next day I went to the local Ford garage and spent £11.95 on a replacement part. It took about 30 minutes to fix the problem. The hardest part was accessing the damaged component, as it was in an awkward corner behind the glovebox.

Now the heating system and fan works perfectly, and I have saved myself a lot of money and hassle.

In the past, people and societies used to consult oracles for answers to their problems. These days we have the WWW which is fulfilling a similar function.

A car park at Melbourne Airport.

Surfers Paradise is a suburb in the Gold Coast area in south-east Queensland.

This is a 3-image HDR taken from the Q1 tower observation deck in the early afternoon on a cloudy winter day.

Manchester Airport at dawn.

I had to hold the camera outside the driver’s window for this shot.

In rural Australia you can see lots of “road trains”. They are very long articulated trucks upto 150m long. They are used to carry all manner of goods. Probably the most unusual (as shown in this video) is the double-decker cattle transporter.

Road trains can be quite fun to overtake on the open outback roads.

Overtaking a road train

A 3-image HDR taken at sunset in outback Queensland, Australia.

Sunset in Emerald, a town in Central Queensland, Australia. Emerald is a service town for a large number of industries in the area, especially coal mining and cotton growing. The train line that runs through the town is an important asset and vital link.

I took this photo while driving back to Brisbane from Roma.