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>> I would suggest that you'd be insane to try to travel around central
>> London by car. It's not that public transport is superb - it isn't -
>
> The subway takes you where you need to go. I've been all over london.
Tried leaving the West End on a Saturday night just after all the shows
finish? Let's just say the trainsport system could do with about 10x the
capacity. ;-) [Although, obviously, this is infeasible.]
>> it's more that the roads are an insane nightmare.
>
> This is true in most cities that were laid out before the invention of
> automobiles.
Which isn't terribly surprising, really.
One of the things I like about MK is that it has a road network that was
*designed*, rather than having to try to fit a road network into a city
which already exists and wasn't laid out with mass transport in mind.
(Having said that, the people in charge of the city now are apparently
extremely anti-car, and are doing their absolute best to ruin the city's
great transport network to force everybody onto the busses that don't
exist...)
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Invisible wrote:
>>> I would suggest that you'd be insane to try to travel around central
>>> London by car. It's not that public transport is superb - it isn't -
>>
>> The subway takes you where you need to go. I've been all over london.
>
> Tried leaving the West End on a Saturday night just after all the shows
> finish?
Well, sure. But that's going to be congested regardless of your mode of
transport. Heck, I've been to places that when the show let out, it was too
crowded to *walk* for 15 minutes or more.
> One of the things I like about MK is that it has a road network that was
> *designed*, rather than having to try to fit a road network into a city
> which already exists and wasn't laid out with mass transport in mind.
Yep. Most of the west coast of the USA is like that. Especially where you
have mountains, so it's infeasible to have lots of little back roads running
over canyons.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
much longer being almost empty than almost full.
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>>>> I would suggest that you'd be insane to try to travel around central
>>>> London by car. It's not that public transport is superb - it isn't -
>>>
>>> The subway takes you where you need to go. I've been all over london.
>>
>> Tried leaving the West End on a Saturday night just after all the
>> shows finish?
>
> Well, sure. But that's going to be congested regardless of your mode of
> transport. Heck, I've been to places that when the show let out, it was
> too crowded to *walk* for 15 minutes or more.
Every year, MK holds a public demonstration of how awesome our road
network is. On the Saturday after the 5th of November, there's a huge
public firework display (with free entraince - not that you can really
stop people watching something that takes up the entire sky...) A
singificant fraction of the entire populus of the city is concentrated
at a single point in space. When the last firework explodes, the entire
assemblage all try to leave simultanously.
Once you get more than a quarter of a mile from the car park, you'd
never know anything had happened. The traffic disperces *that* efficiently.
(Of course, it'll take you 20 minutes to get your car out of the car
park. And it'll take 30 minutes for you plus a few thousand other people
to shuffle across the three *tiny* bridges connecting Campbell Park to
the rest of the city...)
In London, when it's busy, it's busy *everywhere*, and no matter where
you go, no matter which route you take, it's *all* gridlocked.
Admittedly London is much bigger and far more populated than MK, not
even so...
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Invisible wrote:
> In London, when it's busy, it's busy *everywhere*, and no matter where
> you go, no matter which route you take, it's *all* gridlocked.
While I've occasionally seen congested subways, I must admit I've never seen
a gridlocked subway.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
much longer being almost empty than almost full.
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>> I note with some amusement that in my country, "50 miles" *is* from
>> one coast to the other. :P
>
> In Europe, 100 miles is a long distance. In the USA, 100 years is a long
> time. :-)
In geological time, 1,000,000 years is nothing. In technological time,
1,000 days is a long time. In processor time, 1,000 ms is several Ice Ages.
(Excuse me - interglacial periods...)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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On Sun, 29 Nov 2009 08:09:07 -0800, Darren New wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> People with an accent that's difficult to understand, basically.
>
> Move to a country that's teeming with people with bad accents, and
> everyone will accommodate you. Move to someplace where everyone speaks
> the same foreign language and I'm not so sure.
That's very true in most cases - especially if one makes an effort to try
to speak in the native language (even a poor attempt is generally well-
received, certainly better than none at all).
And there's nothing that will improve your ability to hear through an
accent than living someplace where people talk with an accent you find
hard to understand - or even just working with people with a heavy
accent. I find, for example, that after a few months of weekly
conference calls with developers in India, I can usually understand even
through the thickest Indian accent now.
Jim
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On Sun, 29 Nov 2009 13:03:03 +0100, andrel wrote:
> So that even excludes living in Whales
Only if your name is Jonah. ;-)
Jim
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On Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:49:37 +0000, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> If I wanted to get a job where I get paid to write stuff in Haskell,
> that would be an unrealistic aim.
Wrong. If you wanted to get a job where you are paid to write stuff in
Haskell in an area where there are no such jobs, *that* would be
unrealistic.
Fact: People get paid to write programs in Haskell.
Therefore, saying it's unrealistic for you to get one of those jobs is
false because you start from a false premise.
> If I wanted to work for Nokia, that
> would be an unrealistic aim.
Nonsense. Nokia has jobs that run the entire range of skillsets.
> If I wanted to earn £25,000 a year, that
> would be an unrealistic aim.
Total bollocks. If you wanted to earn £25,000 for sitting on your arse
and doing absolutely nothing, *that* would be an unrealistic aim. It
*might* be unrealistic to look for jobs in your area that pay that well,
too. But finding a job that pays that outside of MK? Yeah, you could do
that, but you're not willing to look outside the immediate area.
> But I don't see why getting a job somewhere
> near to where I live would be an unrealistic aim.
Is there 100% employment where you live? I'd bet not - so that being the
case, sure, it's perhaps somewhat unrealistic to think there are more
jobs than employees in your immediate area. The fact that you've not
found anything in the immediate area would seem to belie that fact, in
fact - and so without expanding your search to a broader area and broader
selection criteria would be the logical next step.
Jim
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On Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:49:37 +0000, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I don't know of anybody who moved just to get a job.
I did. I moved from Minneapolis to Salt Lake City to start a new job. I
interviewed for the job before moving (I happened to be in town for a
conference).
When we move to the UK, I'll be moving partially for a job there as well
- that's pretty much all lined up now, just a question of "when". So
that'll be twice in my life that I'll have done that.
Jim
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On Sun, 29 Nov 2009 08:16:08 -0800, Darren New wrote:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> by not wanting to try to get around London on a daily basis.
>
> The actual nice thing about cities is they tend to be very easy to get
> around. I've never vacationed in a city that I've taken an automobile.
> The paris and london subways (as well as a few in the USA) are really
> all you need, if you're willing to walk two or three blocks or hop an
> occasional taxi cab to go too far towards the edge.
I have found that on places I've traveled to as well - NYC, London,
Boston, San Francisco, Barcelona - all have pretty good public transit
systems, and as a tourist there (or being there for work), I've found
that I could get around fine without a car for the most part.
But particularly with London, I don't know that I'd want to depend on the
public transit system for my employment - strikes seem to happen fairly
often (in particular), enough so that I might be concerned (though I know
most employers will make allowances for that).
Jim
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