Everybody knows that I spend most of my life searching for cheap or free things. Now I have found very cheap broadband - Go to www.plus.net ...

 

I am very busy at the moment, so don't expect too much activity here for a while...

 

I made a minor modification, and re-uploaded the picture. The modifications were to change the stations on the Circular Line in south London with Network Rail connections, from normal stations into interchange stations.

 

 

Follow this link for up-to-date information on the progress of the investigation:

 

 

Statement from the Metropolitan Police

We are aware of emails in circulation that advise the reader of the threat of another terrorist attack.

Following the attacks of July 7, extra policing patrols have been put in place across London, with officers from the MPS, City of London Police and British Transport Police providing visible reassurance, advice and support, and also to act as a deterrent.

All police forces are reviewing their own counter-terrorist plans, undertaking community assessments and considering appropriate extra patrols in potentially vulnerable areas and transport hubs.

However, we are not aware of any specific threat at this time.

We would advise the public to remain alert and vigilant, and to inform police of anything they see or hear that is suspicious. The confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline number is 0800 789 321.

 

Service Update 15 July 2005

Following agreement with the Police the Victoria line is now stopping at King's Cross St. Pancras.

We will not be in a position to add to the current level of service on the Metropolitan, Circle, District and Hammersmith and City lines for a number of days.

The service on the Piccadilly line will remain suspended between Arnos Grove and Hyde Park Corner and for the foreseeable future.

Thank you for your continued patience as we work to resume full services.

Click here to view all the live travel news

Mike Brown
Chief Operating Officer

 

Dark Fire  

Yep - It's the end of my work experience. That means no access to broadband internet for free all day any more, but it's not all doom and gloom, bacause it does mean I'll be forced to spend more time doing actual programming rather than talking about it here...Oh, yeah...I missed the whole point of work experience - I was meant to work. Well, I did work...a little...whilst I was flicking quickly between this, the TfL website, the BBC website, and the Beta version of Portable Fresh Download...Well actually I did quite a lot of work - and it has been roasting hot here for three weeks, which makes working harder. It seems I didn't miss the point at all - I just didn't notice it, I was having so much fun...

 

I'll post again soon (that is now soon as in days rather then in emptoseconds, yoctoseconds, zeptoseconds, attoseconds, femtoseconds, picoseconds, nanoseconds, microseconds, milliseconds, seconds, minutes or hours)...

 

Oh, yeah that's an idea! Here is the full list of stuff like that:

Tx        Taxo       10e+27        (unofficial)
Y         Yotta      10e+24
Z         Zett       10e+21        
E         Exa        10e+18
P         Pento      10e+15
T         Tera       10e+12
G         Giga       10e+09
M         Mega       10e+06
k         kilo       10e+03
c         centi      10e-02
m         milli      10e-03
u         micro      10e-06
n         nano       10e-09
p         pico       10e-12
f         femto      10e-15
a         atto       10e-18
z         zepto      10e-21
y         yocto      10e-24 = 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,001
e         empto      10e-27  (unofficial)

 

That data and a mention of emptoseconds in a .PDF file is where I got the name 'Emptosoft' from. (Yes, all of the officially confirmed terms below 'micro-' (Microsoft) had been taken, had '-soft' stuck on the end (i.e. Nanosoft, Picosoft, Femtosoft, Attosoft, Zeptosoft and Yoctosoft), and been copyrighted. Hmm...I should copyright Emptosoft...Oh, wait, you need money for that...I don't even have enough money to repair my computer or buy a new one...Specifically directed at William Henry Gates (commonly known as Bill Gates): If you see this, any donation at all would be welcome...

 

(You can get your employees running that .NET passport stuff to get my details so you can send donations of money, computers, software, a job at Microsoft, or anything else you can give really - I'm not picky)

 

This is a good page, with links to just about everything to do with the London Attacks:

 

Donate money to the London Bombings Relief Charitable Fund:

 

 

Add Emptosoft to your favourites, bookmarks or your MSN. Click on this link to add to your MSN:

 

 

Emptosoft is the leading one-irish-person-powered, London based, financially non-existent, gramatically correct, trustworthy source for free stuff. We're not like those websites that advertise in pop up windows, and show you a picture of something they don't have, so you will be persuaded to come to their website. We believe in you finding Emptosoft if you want it, and we are easily findable on almost all search engines and the  (I have seen some people search for things like 'Terrorists+Piccadilly+Line+Kings+Cross+Attacks+London' and 'Avoid+London+Closed+Turn+On+Radio+Photo', and find Emptosoft, which is quite disturbing).

 

When we distribute free stuff, we don't offer useless toolbars in the installers or install free spyware - You get exactly what we say you will get. No more, no less.

 

As well as all of that, we direct you to websites similar to us, offering free good programs with no catches or spyware (I try them all myself before reccomending them). We also provide links to good websites with things which will help you enjoy your time on the internet, like funny flash movies or games. We eradicate the need to waste time searching for things!

 

Also, we update our blog with up-to-the-minute major news, like the coverage of the 2012 Olympic decision and London bombings coverage we did recently.

 

I also reccomend totally random things that I do too, like what food I like (and don't like), and what I think the best PC deal is at the moment.

 

There are regular updates on progress with programs Emptosoft are making too, often with screenshots of the latest tools in development, or summaries of future developments.

 

If you found Emptosoft at Arnos Grove on the London Bloggers website (http://londonbloggers.iamcal.com/), then we also provide major travel updates for Arnos Grove.

 

Finally, we also do clever web stuff, like give you code to stop people from right-clicking on your website, and provide automatically updating images of the sun, time, weather, and Tenerife!

 

 

 

Emptosoft will never email anyone about anything (however, I do provide a link to here at the end of most personal emails), like all large internet companies. If you get any general emails from Emptosoft, and I do not say anything about them here, the delete them immidiately. That does not give any of my contacts permission to delete all of my emails...Just the general public...

How would we get your email address without hacking anyway?

 

 

As you can see, Emptosoft is a great place to visit regularly, and don't forget that if you put a link to Emptosoft on your webpage, and inform me of it and where it is so I can check it out, I will almost always put a link back to you (no gaurantees if I think your site is inappropriate for the general public. I may also take a while to add the link if I am on holiday, or busy).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the Emptosoft Owner, Administrator, Founder, Programmer, Junior Vice Persident, guy with the sunglasses, any other relevant positive stuff you can think of,

Statement of Tim O' Toole, London Underground MD, to TfL Board

I want to start out by thanking Bob and the Mayor by going to site and not relying on reports from senior people - but talking to people directly. It had an enormous impact on employees who are so grateful. I spent all day taking calls about their thanks. I don't think you should underestimate the impact that leadership has on people who have been stressed.

I think the organisation did distinguish itself in two ways:
Number one, in the way it reacted to the horror of bombs exploding on crowded carriages; and secondly in the resilience we showed in bringing the service back to a full service everywhere, except lines affected by blast sites, at first light the next day.

Timeline

I'll go through the timeline for you - of course as we now know there were 3 virtually simultaneous bombs that exploded on the LU network at around 8.50am. There was an outer rail Circle line train going eastbound between Liverpool Street and Aldgate, train 204; a westbound inner rail train going between Edgware Road and Paddington; and a Piccadilly line train - 331 - going between King's Cross and Russell Square.

Of course, at the time of the first explosion, we at the centre had no information. The following information comes from the timeline at the NCC:

• At 8.50am - almost right on when the explosion occurred, a call is recorded from a station supervisor at Aldgate saying an explosion or loud bang was heard.
• At 8.51 a shift engineer - so this is at power control centre - reported a traction current had failed on one part of the network that was being fed by a particular box supply. You will recall at this point we had been through this before, we had a rather traumatic experience 2 years ago, August 28th, where we had to deal with a loss of power on a major part of the network.
• At 8.51 again, 1 minute from the incident, the Central line control centre called to say a large bang had been reported near Liverpool Street.
• At 8.51, there was another call from the Metropolitan line control centre, saying a sound of an explosion near train 204 in the area of Aldgate.
• At 8.53 a call was recorded from the Piccadilly line saying a tunnel telephone line had been activated at Russell Square thereby discharging traction current westbound between Holloway Road and Russell Square.
• At 8.59 the GSM at Edgware Road called to say we might have a person under a train, we might have a derailed train, that a train might have hit the tunnel wall. At this time - 8.59 - a call went to London Fire Brigade and to the London Ambulance Service to dispatch units to all three sites.
• At 9.03 the London Ambulance Service called back to confirm they were en route.
• At 9.11 the Piccadilly line controller called again to report the sound of a bang in the area of Russell Square.
• At 9.15 we declared a Code Amber for the rest of the network - beginning a controlled evacuation of the network. Over the next hour we moved over 200,000 people off the network without a single injury, confining the damage to the three sites.

I can speak with certainty about this - this isn't based on some report that came to me because I witnessed most of this personally. I was in my office. I had just returned from the daily conference call with the Infracos - Tube Lines and Metronet - going over incidents of the prior day, when I received a text message reporting loss of power to the network.

Typically I would make a phone call to find out what had happened but I think because of the experience of two years ago when I saw something this dramatic I marched off immediately to the NCC.

When I went into the network control centre it was almost at the time or slightly after when Steve Goszka, the GSM at Edgware Road, made his call.

I would also like to mention something else at this time to reflect upon something the Mayor pointed out - our work with resilience. Steve Goszka had been on the job for two weeks; prior to that he had worked with us at the centre, prior to that he was on secondment with the resilience team - he was fully alert to the issues which I think is one of the reasons he reacted before anyone else did.

Code Amber

There is a complete misunderstanding by some members of the media as to the significance and timing of calling a Code Amber - the Code Amber is completely irrelevant to rushing assistance to the three sites. That was happening immediately.

Number one it was happening as employees on site were doing… I'll talk about that a little bit more in a moment…but as soon as reports came in that we weren't dealing with an incident that we had seen in the past - that is a loss of power that would have called for a re-routing of the power source which is what people were looking into - but we were dealing with a train event, we immediately called the emergency services and we got an immediate response from them.

Calling a Code Amber had relevance to all the other trains on the network - it was completely irrelevant to dealing with sites where there had been blasts. It was not a decision you reach lightly. If we called a Code Amber every time we had a dramatic incident on this old network, which needs to be rebuilt as we all know too well, we would be throwing people out on the streets on a weekly basis. Plus when you do it, it is a very difficult thing to do - to move that many people without injury, if you look at any study that the military conducts over the likelihood of injury when you move that many people, you can see that; this is decision you only take when you know you are confronting a very difficult situation.

Evacuation

Following initial reports, and as we were evacuating network, we had one team concentrating on focusing delivery of emergency resources and other resources to the sites and getting further reports, and we split another part of management to think about what we would be doing later, 4 hours and 24 hours later, because at that time of course, shortly thereafter the bomb exploded on the bus we knew we were dealing with crime scenes.

We knew we would not be given those parts of the railway, so we immediately began planning alternative timetables, and operation plans, to see what we could return to service, because our thoughts from the beginning were to get the network up and running as soon as it were possible.

It was really professionalism that took us through the day and an obligation to London and to the country to bring the network back - so we were analysing how to design the network. What would we do with the drivers? We had drivers about to timeout from early shift, would we bring in drivers from late shift? - How were we going to get them to work? We were dealing with a London that had bus services withdrawn - we weren't providing a service. We had to ask ourselves what was the smart move, were we going to consume their time and not be able to use them.

We had to consider what we would do with all those trains which were scattered across the network - how were we going to get drivers to them and get them back to the depot to prepare them for next day?

We had to determine what were we going to do about station staff - it would be one thing to perform miracles and get trains running but what if we couldn't open any stations and provide services. All those people had to be relieved and new people bought in.

Service recovery

And so we began a series of hourly conference calls with our general managers who did all the heavy lifting, sorting these problems out, reporting on the state of the network throughout the day and planning recovery of the service.

Mike Brown, the Chief Operating Officer, and his group performed brilliantly. Mike immediately split off his command. He took all responsibility from running part of the network from Howard Collins who is service director of SSL and instead put him in charge of service recovery. Howard continues on that duty and is working with the British Transport Police and our own engineers planning recovery at all of these three sites.

But of course the story is not about management. It's really about the professionalism of people in the field which is why in my mind it is so outrageous about these reports about delay.

There was no delay - people in the field reacted immediately - they acted as planned. It is interesting when Bob Kiley (Transport for London Commissioner) and the Mayor talked about the planning that was borne out. Just two and a half weeks prior to this we ran a live exercise at Tower Hill for just such an incident. That is why these people are so good, they are so practiced. There was no panic, no hysteria. They follow routine that they understand, know and trust.

We had four drivers on those trains who immediately took control of the situation and calmed people. You have read reports yourself - they are uncontradicted by the brilliant performance those drivers put in.

We had station staff and local management who plunged into tunnels unhesitatingly to deal with horrific circumstances. And I would like to point something out here - we talk about the violence in the media, on TV and in the movies. But actually it is all quite antiseptic, if you think about images shown, it's not what our people saw - they went onto trains seeing people with limbs severed, with most horrific injuries, clothes blown off bodies, only parts of chest cavities remaining, really horrific stuff. Yet they went in unhesitatingly following their training, moved people out within 2 minutes.

Remarkable

It was a remarkable performance. We had people at Edgware Road walking people out within 2 minutes. We had reports of off-duty drivers on their way to work, saw what was going on and immediately ran into tunnels to help. We honoured one of those drivers just recently who went into the train at Aldgate and was pulling open doors, moving people to safety.

Even station staff that didn't go into tunnels were receiving injured, comforting them, giving them tea, holding them, applying basic first aid.

We think we got a great service out of the emergency services. We think they deserve all of the credit they have got but fact of matter is, it is impossible to be there immediately. During those first crucial minutes it is our people that are taking the burden of horrific scenes.

Another emergency service that I would like to mention here - another group that gets ignored is the Emergency Response Unit, a division of Tube Lines that was transferred with the PPP. A group of men and women that respond whenever there is an emergency during traffic hours, if a broken rail occurs, they come and plate it until it can be fixed that night. They were there as quickly as the emergency services, and they were working in some of the toughest conditions, the Piccadilly line for example - and those people deserve a lot of credit.

Magnificent job

It isn't just about us - we are constantly reminded we are surrounded by Londoners who want to do the right thing. There are many examples but one in particular…there is a Marks & Spencer on Edgware Road. The manager without any thought, without checking with HQ, completely opened her doors to us. She emptied shelves of all food, all drink and water: provided to passengers and to staff - literally expended thousands and thousands of pounds of inventory. I went over the other day and thanked her and her staff. I have written to Stuart Rose to praising M&S as a great corporate citizen that should be recognised.

There are other examples; a church near Aldgate opened its doors. I have heard of another M&S near Liverpool Street. People generally do the right thing and it is absolutely edifying.

In short it was an awful day and the staff did a magnificent job.

 

Dark Fire  

 

London attacks page: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2005/london_explosions/default.stm 

 

 

Staff to stand alongside passengers as silence falls across the network

Transport for London staff will stand together with passengers at 12 noon tomorrow to remember those killed or injured in last Thursday's terror attacks.

Tube stations will fall silent and buses will pull over, where possible, as staff across the network observe the two minute silence. Many will be wearing black arm bands.

In the morning London Underground(LU) staff at more than 60 stations will be collecting donations from the public in support of the London Bombings Relief Charitable Fund - launched last week by the Mayor in association with the British Red Cross.

Mike Brown, LU's Chief Operating said: "It is right that we stand together with our customers to remember all of those who were tragically affected by last Thursday's awful events."

Peter Hendy, MD of Surface Transport added: "As many of our staff as possible will observe the two minute silence as a mark of respect to those innocent travellers who were killed or injured."

Ends

 

Statement from the Transport for London Board

This statement has been issued on behalf of the Transport for London Board following the TfL Board meeting held earlier today.

"The Transport for London Board would like to express its deepest sympathy with those who were killed or injured in last Thursday's attacks on the Tube and bus networks. Our thoughts are also with their families, friends and loved ones.

"The Board would like to express its heartfelt thanks to all TfL staff who worked so professionally and tirelessly in extremely challenging conditions immediately following the attacks. Their selfless actions to help those who had been injured is a testament to the quality and calibre of public transport workers in London.

"The Board would also like to thank all the emergency services, called within minutes of the attacks, for the way they worked with Tube and bus staff and the heroic efforts they made to help those who were affected by the attacks.

"We would also like to take the opportunity to praise the leadership shown by the Mayor, Commissioner, Tim O'Toole and Peter Hendy. Their professionalism in dealing with one of London's darkest days should rightly be recognised.

"We can also be proud of the fact that, within a matter of hours, the bus network was running in central London again, and within 24 hours most of the Tube was operating normally. Only those lines directly affected by the attacks are disrupted.

"The response of all TfL staff to the tragic events last Thursday was a credit to London and we should rightly be proud of their actions."

 

 

13 July service update: 1400 hours

We are working with the Police and hope to have a full service on the following lines five days after the investigations are completed at Aldgate and Edgware Road:

• Circle
• District
• Hammersmith & City
• Metropolitan

At King's Cross St. Pancras, we cannot yet predict with any confidence when the full Piccadilly line service will resume.

We will update you when we have more information.

Thank you for your patience whilst we do our best to return services to normal.

Yep...I uploaded the Portable Fresh Download screenshot, the Emptosoft 'We're not afraid logo', and a screenshot of the Emptosoft 'Not Afraid' program. Enjoy...

 

Go to www.werenotafraid.com and send them an image...

 

Here are some good images that are already there:

 

 

I've made two Emptosoft 'We're not afraid' pictures, and a program. I'll upload the pictures later, but I don't think anyone needs the program - It will just be yet another tool to be distributed with Doors.

 

It's one week on from the historic decision that billions of people watched or listened to live, work is underway to build venues and transport links for it, and yet no one cares about it any more. What is it? London 2012 of course!

 

There is a map of what the London Underground should look like in 2012, but I forgot where it was. I will put the link here as soon as I find it again.

 

Here is a link to where you can see how the London Underground map could look in 2016:

I think they're running out of colours for lines, because it is very confusing... 

Hey - I've just noticed that the 'Cross River Transit' steals the disused Piccadilly line tracks to Aldwych...

See here for more information: