It will just take two or three thousand more words to tie everything up and then the whole heap of crap should be in a semi-readable form.

Page 86:

“As a child I had always suspected that adult life was dangerous in an appealing sort of way, and when I drank that first beer it only further confirmed my suspicions. Years later, I would feel exactly the same way when I made love to a girl for the first time: it was an exciting and seductive taste of freewheeling adulthood. Horribly misleading for sure, but exciting and seductive nonetheless.”

News: I now have a casual job at BWS. I also had a job interview at a school today that went reasonably well - it’s a very long shot, but I gave them some good reasons to give it to me and they seemed happy enough. Now I must continue my novel, because I’ve done nothing yet today :( Here is an angry letter I wrote to Transperth because their website is shit. I wonder what they’ll say in reply?

Hi,

I’m writing to complain about the website. Looking for a bus timetable using dialup internet is excruciatingly slow.

Including pages that timed out, it took me half an hour to find and load the correct timetable this afternoon. Even if I’d had a link saved, it would still have taken five minutes to load the first half of the timetable and another five minutes to switch to ‘reverse journey.’ In other words, it would have been quicker for me to get in the car, drive to the bus stop, read the timetable there and drive home again.

I might add that it also took fifteen minutes to load this complaint form. That’s including one timeout. It would have been quicker to walk to the letterbox and post a letter.

I have some theories about why the website works so slowly:

1) The pages are enormous. A timetable page is over 500kb, when most web pages are under 100kb. That isn’t due to there being a large amount of useful content on the page, either. It is due to a mass of embedded code that runs behind the scenes. What is this code for? And is it really necessary if all I want is a simple table that corresponds to a three-digit route number and a day of the week?

2) The server seems slow. I may be downloading through a 56k modem, but my incoming data meter is only giving isolated spikes, as opposed to the steady stream of data that comes from iTunes or my email server. You probably have lots of demand, and not much money to invest in hardware and bandwidth, but if you insist on serving up enormous pages then please make sure they arrive as quickly as possible.

In conclusion I’d like to remind you that public transport is for working class people, and a lot of working class people still use dialup internet. Make it easy for us. Please.

Mark Kingston