Central Line woes

A good slice of the Central Line was shut down this morning, which made getting to work somewhat fraught. One thing I discovered is that if there's one thing that's hotter and less comfortable than a deep-level Tube line, it's the lower deck of a Routemaster bus.

Apparently the cause for the shutdown was the usual signal failure. Why is it that the London Underground cannot run a service without signals failing? Could it be that the companies which maintain the tracks maximise their profits if they let the system run down to failure, rather than keeping it running smoothly?

My way or the spam filter

Hotmail is about to suck even more.

Microsoft have just announced that Hotmail will start blocking as spam any mail from servers not running Microsoft's Sender ID system. Sender ID is a technology to prevent spammers from using bogus email addresses; however, it is not a standard but a proprietary Microsoft technology, which competes with several other similar systems, including open-source ones. Consequently, if Microsoft go ahead with their plan and the rest of the world doesn't all line up behind the One Microsoft Way of doing things, it's likely that Hotmail will start classifying much incoming mail as spam, with Hotmail users wondering why their non-Hotmail-using friends have stopped mailing them, or fishing through their choked spam folders for legitimate emails "sorted" there.

Which makes it a good time for anyone still using Hotmail to consider moving,

As it happens, I have quite a few Gmail invitations to give out. If you still don't have a Gmail account and want one, enter your email address in the poll below: (It's readable only to me, so you won't get harvested by spammers.)
[Poll #519245]