Several of my friends-and-readers are subject to the British rail system, or other dysfunctions. Let's face it: travelling by Deutsche Bahn today, I've actually got it pretty good. I have a comfortable seat in a quiet compartment in a train which stands an excellent chance of actually arriving at its destination in Switzerland ( Read more... )

My journey back to Switzerland is heavily delayed because some abject little scrote thought it would be a good idea to throw stones at the train, breaking a window. Impressively enough, the Deutsche Bahn managed to get the window replaced in less than an hour, but the delay to my journey is much longer because I was on the last clean connection ( Read more... )

Somewhere in southern Germany, a Deutsche Bahn train has fallen off some Deutsche Bahn rails. I kinda thought they weren't supposed to do that ( Read more... )

It's hard to write much about Further Confusion. What happened? Nothing of vast consequence. How was it? Bewildering. What did I get up to? Only a few special things-except for finding, and meeting, and hugging, and snuggling up to, endless people whom I've met and liked in my travels, or talked to online, or loved for years and frequently ( Read more... )

Nothing fixes jet-lag but time. I've tried various regimes of brute-forcing my diurnal cycle with drugs and exercise and food and forced wakefulness, and it never makes enough difference to justify the effort and fuss. The biochemical diurnal rhythms of the body just have too much inertia to be easily affected by that stuff. These days I just ( Read more... )

I'm very fond of California ( Read more... )

I'm flying to England tomorrow, so I am first taking a complete backup of my system, then doing a full-disk encryption ( Read more... )

So, I'm sitting in this long-distance train which is currently running about an hour late. Fair enough; the weather's bad for trains. I chose this train specifically because it gets me from Cologne to Basel, into the reasonably-safe hands of the Swiss rail system, without the need to make train connections which the Deutsche Bahn is pretty much ( Read more... )

It's cold in Germany-a bit below zero, cold enough that you don't really want to be standing around on a platform in the wrong town in the wrong state in, arguably, the wrong federation. But here I am, having fallen asleep on the train, slept through my connection in Mannheim, ended up in Stuttgart, waited there for the next train in the right ( Read more... )

Zugausfall. Train cancelled ( Read more... )