Booking and finding timetables for trains here in the UK sucks. The worst, for me, is when you don't know which London station certain destinations start from. For example, if you're going to take the train to Aberdeen, do those starts start from Victoria, Kings Cross, St Pancras, Paddington, Euston, Liverpool street or London Bridge? Sometimes you even have to know which train company to use!

Accessible UK Train Timetable seems like a great website to remedy this. You can enter a search for something like "London" to "Aberdeen" and it magically works out that Kings Cross is the London station you have to tube yourself to. They've also got this great map which I haven't fully understood yet but seems work. The URLs when you do a search become really friendly too. For example:

 http://traintimes.org.uk/london/aberdeen/10:00/2008-09-03

...when I've done a search for London to Aberdeen today. And if you want a timetable that isn't for a particular day just change the URL to this:

 http://traintimes.org.uk/london/aberdeen/10:00/

One last thing. Several months ago I found another website for booking trains and finding timetables. It had a blue background I think and was almost equally user-friendly. Only problem is that I can't find it again or remember what it was called. But I think I'll stick with traintimes.org.uk for now.

Here's a great blog tip: Weird Asia News, China, Japan, Korea | Offbeat, Strange, Odd, Crazy, Engrish

It's a constantly updated blog about all things weird happening in Asia. After a quick look it seems most of the entries are about China and Japan but that's fine. I'm definitely bookmarking this on on my Netvibes

It helped me find this awesome documentary about North Korea by VBS.tv. Do check it out.

My good friend Chris West has finally launched his blog

Chris is not a designer or hacker but he's done the design himself and learnt Django to be able to code it. I haven't helped at all other than listening which has just meant that he's discovered the solution himself.

I think the site looks great and has a unique feel to it and very user-friendly. There is a really interesting blog post about olympic superstitions that you should read.

Back in 2004 I used to sometimes read a blog called My Secret Life As A Prostitute which was both sexy, sobering and kind of educational. That blog was also a callgirl who wrote about her work-experiences, sex life in general and problems she had with her boyfriend. Sadly that blog disappeared suddenly. Perhaps the girl who wrote it got "discovered". By that I might mean that a colleague of hers at some investment bank found out what she was spending so much time on in her lunch breaks. Jokes aside, it's hard to tell if this is for real or just made up based on someone's fantasy of being an escort girl. Sometimes the blog gets very technical to the point that it's hard to imagine her not being a real call girl.

As I'm skimming through this new blog I find that it's so similar to the one I was skimming back in 2004. She's very blunt and has the same sense of humor and just like the 2004 blog every now and then, as she describes her encounters/jobs she also describes how she herself gets off on it.

Another similarity is that reading this gives the same feeling of shame of reading it. I'm obviously not so ashamed that I can't confess that I'm reading up it does feel a bit intimate and "dirty" at the same time. It's like reading an Bret Easton Ellis book which is sold in respectable normal bookshops but whose content is sometimes worse than porn.

And for people who've seen Flight of the Concordes, check out this post

I don't shop from Ocado anymore but maybe I should start doing that again. The reason I only tried it once was that I wasn't able to find as many products on their website as I needed plus if you're not a big family it often doesn't make sense to buy too much fresh food in one go.

They're cleverly keeping me in check by sending sporadic emails very rarely about changes to their features and other bits and pieces. I'd call it "spam I don't mind" and I don't get annoyed when I get them because they're so rare. And here's one that arrived the other day which I actually appreciate a lot. Basically, they've gone out of their way to improve their image on the environment to send me another email. It's well phrased, humane, well layed-out and informative.

Keep up the good work guys!

If you like Dilbert there are now a bunch of really nice widgets of different sizes that you can put into your Netvibes, MySpace, Facebook or Blogger. It's just a flash widget that shows the latest Dilbert plus an ability to see past ones. It looks very promising to me. I like the fact that these are coloured whereas the same strip on www.dilbert.com is black and white.

I did load one into my Facebook and one into my Netvibes start page but because it's flash and takes several seconds to load it slowed down my Netvibes front page so I'm kind of putting that on hold.

Clearly web services has taken off in the world of network plumbing and the higher level equivalent for non-programmers is widgets. I don't think Youtube was the first to do it but was clearly what proved it to be a working idea in the mainstream.

This time it's an e-commerce site called Comfy-Feet which seems to have been developed with Frontpage 5.0 and that doesn't surprise me at all.

I remember hearing somewhere that turnover on e-commerce and "good design" don't have any relationship. In other words, just because you're making an e-commerce site prettier doesn't mean you'll sell more. Well, I beg to differ that that rule must have some extreme exceptions.

A few quick things you immediately notice:

• Why two large Union Jack flags?
• blue text within black text making you think they're links
• no consistent layout when you drill down into various pages
• title tag doesn't even include the word "Comfy-Feet" just "Buy: Shoe Insoles, ..."
• If you add something to the cart, the click the "Back to store" button they ask you which site you want to go back to.
• I don't think a single page I clicked on was without error message in the validator

Actually, I feel a bit guilty for complaining about this site since it's probably as far from corporate as possible can be. It was one of few decent sites I even found that sells insoles with a decent range. I just hope these guys didn't pay anybody (lots of money) to work on this. If not, I'm sorry. If so, get a better web designer company next time!

I'm currently not in urgent need for one of these (in other words: I'm single) but if I wasn't this might be a really cool thing to try: The Love Mattress

How many times haven't you gone to bed tucked up close to someone warm and soft and then your arm painfully falls asleep before you do? Many! I say. This invention makes it possible to wrap your arm around and under someone without this person having to feel like sleeping on a exhaust pipe across the shoulders or neck.

I guess the only criticism against this invention is that sleeping in a snuggled up position is only a very small part of the whole sleeping (or "jumping") experience a bed attempts to make as comfortable as possible.

Anyhow, I like the cuteness of the idea enough to blog about it.

I haven't fully explored this site yet but it looks great. Some sort of blog about themed around Frank Zappa.

This site has got a great discography and lots of other misc stuff that looks worthy of some decent reading time. I also very much like the name which I guess you have to be a Zappa fan to appreciate.

I wouldn't call myself a diehard fan of Futurama but I sure as h**l love that show.

"Futurama was killed, but like some B-movie cyborg it refused to stay dead. The fans watched the 72 episodes religiously in syndication and shelled out $170 to get the entire run on DVD. So, in 2005, Fox green-lighted 16 new episodes. Cohen and Groening have reassembled many of the hundreds of writers, animators, and voice artists who'd gone on to other projects to create four DVDs of new material, including sexy robot stage shows. The first DVD hits stores on November 27, and the features will then be divided into half-hour episodes when the entire run of the series begins airing on Comedy Central next year."

I'm actually re-watching all of the previous 5 series at the moment at home and hopefully by the time I've watched it all, the new series will start to become available on DVD here in the UK (unlikely but one can hope).

I totally don't approve of what they're doing but what they're doing is totally impressive.

It's a long clip of a couple crazy couriers racing through the streets of New York crossing red lights and zebra crossings and going in the oncoming traffic lanes. Mental!

It's been a while since I last ranted about some website looking not only totally unappealing but also barely usable. This time it's called The Backyard Comedy Club and it's a quite simply, a comedy club near where I live. The sad thing about this site unlike other sites that I've criticized as being butt-ugly in the past, this one is actually quite new. The footer says "Copyright Backyard Comedy Club 2007 ©".

Maybe the intention is that the whole website is a joke. Kind of to get you in the right mood for the comedy acts.

I've always considered the "personality" test even of beauty competition such as Miss World as a chance to go away and get some food or a toilet break and it's really only the bikini event that matters. It's time to revise that now maybe. Until this clip I've always thought what the beauties say just stupid, now I'm going to consider it amusing instead.

What's South Africa got to do with it?

A lot of news sites have started publishing reviews of the new iPhone by Apple. The review I chose was the Wall Street Journal column by Walter Mossberg. It's a great review from a user experience point of view too. You start by watching the video clip which is nice and then if you're interested in more details you move on to actually read the article.

One thing I appreciated about this review was that I was able to skim the article first whilst waiting for the video to first show the ad and then do the buffering. Very practical.

Oh yeah, the phone looks pretty exciting too. Shame about the Edge and being totally stuck on ATT. Don't know what that ATT deal means in terms of getting an iPhone here in Europe.

Today Pandora went into a "Day of Silence" as a protest for the fact that "an arbitration committee in Washington DC" has decided to charge excessive amounts to Internet radio stations like Pandora making it virtually impossible to afford the licenses to play music on the net effectively putting businesses like Pandora out of business.

This is sad. I've signed the petition (as a european you have to be inventive to sign it) and tried to spread the word to as many people as I possibly can.

I think it would be very sad if internet radio like Pandora would disappear since for someone like me who doesn't like Britney Spears or Michael Jackson there really isn't many good alternative sources with fresh ideas for good music. All the CDs I've bought in the last year has been by being inspired by songs played on Pandora. If the RIAA manage to close down Pandora I'm going to stop buying CDs and stubbornly only download songs from pirate bittorrent sites. There you have it!

Try to participate if you care about evil corporate organisations damaging the arts.