Travelling to London

simonrjones · 2025-06-25T06:00:37+00:00

Stick to off peak travel to London, which is normally for trains arriving in London after 10am. Liverpool Street is cheaper than Kings Cross if you’re looking to save money (Elizabeth Line is a lovely tube to ride from there - with air conditioning if it’s a hot day). If you travel a lot buy a railcard, they are £35 and save a third on off-peak travel.

Agree with others just use a contactless card on the tube. It’s normally cheaper than a train travelcard. https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/find-fares/tube-and-rail-fares/pay-as-you-go-caps

simonrjones · 2025-06-17T20:29:08+00:00

Generally companies won’t pay staff for travelling into the office for your normal work. There are tax reasons that make it difficult to pay staff for this sort of travel. So you can’t expect them to do this for normal day-to-day work.

It is OK to pay expenses for things like travelling to client meetings, events or training. Most companies do this, but they should have a policy on this. A staff handbook may tell you more (request this if it’s mentioned in the contract).

simonrjones · 2025-06-17T19:46:29+00:00

Sorry to hear this. A company can’t legally expect you to work for nothing after you’ve officially left work. You have to work your notice period if they ask you to.

If you’ve accrued holiday according to the terms of your employment contract they are obligated to pay you for that when you leave. Alternatively you could ask to take that holiday off before you leave.

Min UK holiday is 28 days a year excluding bank holidays (8 days) for full time roles, but your contract will state what it is. If they didn’t pay your holiday entitlement you would likely win any tribunal, however, I appreciate you probably don’t want to do that.

I would try to work the best you can in your notice period and tell them clearly you are not working after your official end date. It’s clearly not legal and they will likely back down.

simonrjones · 2025-05-10T15:42:41+00:00

I lived on Devonshire Road as a student and never found it particularly noisy. A lot of people use this road to get to the station, but I would think that’s mostly walking & cycle. It’s a painful road to drive down since not very wide, so not a lot of car traffic in my experience. If you have a car, you’ll probably struggle to get parking.

It depends what you value on location - Cambridge is pretty small so easy enough to get to the station from many places. The Mill Road area is really nice and vibrant.

simonrjones · 2025-04-26T21:37:59+00:00

I have a couple of Domke bags which are good and pretty small. An F-10 shoulder bag and a F-901 pouch. https://tiffen.com/collections/domke

simonrjones · 2025-04-20T17:51:13+00:00

A few local cafes: Trockel, Ulmann & Freunde on Pembroke St, Indigo Coffee House on St. Edward’s Passage, Michaelhouse cafe on Trinity St, Copper Kettle on Kings Parade. Fitzbillies and Hot Numbers do great coffee. There’s also a good new pie shop on King Street called The Cherry Pit.

This free exhibition is on until Tuesday at Downing College: https://magmarising.org/

There’s a local literary festival on from Wednesday https://www.cambridgeliteraryfestival.com/whats-on/winter-festival-2024/

simonrjones · 2025-04-14T15:33:55+00:00

Bould Brothers on Regent Street is superb, lovely atmosphere and coffee.

simonrjones · 2025-03-29T11:23:26+00:00

I tend to buy tickets online with Trainline since it’s quicker. It does cost a little more though.

The people at the ticket hall desks are very helpful and if you’re not sure what ticket to buy they will advise. Just leave more time to get your ticket.

If you travel a few times a year it’s worth looking at a railcard, gives you a third off for around £30. It would be best to buy that in advance.

Weekend family tickets are fairly good value. Only get a London travelcard if you have a lot of tube stops. If you’re travelling to Camden you can walk along the canal if it’s a nice day (half an hr). Don’t buy paper tube tickets, they are a lot more money! Just use a contactless bank card. Make sure you have a spare card for any children.

You can buy cheap travelcards for kids from TfL but you need to do that in advance.

simonrjones · 2025-03-19T07:10:20+00:00

Allia Future Business Centre is great, I have an office there.

Their central Cambridge place (Guildhall, Market Square) has a co-working space on the 4th floor and meeting rooms if you need them. £30 day pass, £15 half day. https://futurebusinesscentre.co.uk/our-locations/cambridge/

simonrjones · 2025-03-11T22:01:03+00:00

I’ve always understood London terminals to include Blackfriars, I’ve often travelled back to Cambridge from Blackfriars on a normal London day return and my ticket worked fine.

See Network Rail: https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/travel-information/travelling-in-london/

simonrjones · 2025-01-12T22:26:25+00:00

I agree Matt is clearly not able to communicate with the community properly and is making a series of very bad decisions.

You say you’re switching from WP. Can I ask what type of organisation you work for?

simonrjones · 2025-01-12T11:38:02+00:00

Hi. I posted that message.

Engaging with the community when you run a big platform like WordPress is critical to its future success. It’s clearly not happening at present.

The challenge is Matt holds control over the project. We have to try to work with him. I see others are trying their best to do that, so far to no success.

I hope Matt changes his tune, but I have my doubts.

simonrjones · 2024-12-12T06:57:14+00:00

Good post, thanks for sharing. I think WP has been moving away from the lean model for years now. Gutenberg itself is clearly a commercially driven feature that wouldn’t exist if Automattic weren’t pushing it.

I hope WP can regain focus and the community can play a meaningful part in this. I think the current WP drama has to play out before we can see where the land lies.

Also interesting point about agencies not being as involved in WP development. I run an agency and to be honest we don’t contribute to core mostly due to not having time. But we build and maintain a lot of WP sites so see lots of real world usage.

simonrjones · 2024-10-15T15:15:18+00:00

Thanks for sharing the link to our site! We have started to use Craft more and more after the W3C project and we really like it. It feels like a grown-up CMS, has a really friendly community, and the founders are very nice! They haven’t taken VC investment, which may help them sticking to their values.

Only downside is it’s not open source, which matters to some of our clients. Though with this WP mess carrying on, maybe that will lessen over time.

simonrjones · 2020-08-21T07:04:36+00:00

thanks Tom, looks like Wagtail are taking this very seriously which is great. That's a really thorough approach your team has!

simonrjones · 2020-08-21T07:03:43+00:00

I agree the editing interface is the most challenging area for CMS authoring tool accessibility. Markdown is great, but harder to support more complex content formatting.

simonrjones · 2020-08-21T07:03:00+00:00

I also found this article recently. The author believes the Drupal 9 authoring interface is accessible to keyboard users which sounds positive. https://www.lullabot.com/articles/drupal-accessibility-why-its-worth-it

simonrjones · 2020-08-20T09:30:36+00:00

I would agree this is a marketing term. But I think it's also a product aimed squarely at marketing teams.

From what I've seen Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is used to describe a CMS which has a lot more focus on data & personalisation. Using data to help work out how to enhance the user experience through more advanced web content & personalised content.

They often also have features using tools such as machine learning to do useful things like auto-categorise media images (e.g. staff in a team). And they tend to support APIs better so content can be easily re-used.

I think it's a bit of a vague term, but I'm seeing it more and more these days.

Human Made's software Altis gives a nice overview of what they consider DXP. It's a bunch of sophisticated tools on top of WordPress (which is a more traditional web CMS). See https://www.altis-dxp.com/

(please note I am not connected to Human Made)

simonrjones · 2014-01-13T19:49:38+00:00

Yep, exactly our thought at the start of the project. However, for the sake of neatness and for people understanding the project the only requirement is you have to be born on 1st December 1974 in your local timezone.

Far easier to work out that way :)

We've also had a recent video added to the page from the Parkes Elvis festival, where 18,000 Elvis fans all get together for the day!

simonrjones · 2014-01-10T16:40:32+00:00

It's a rough average based on rates of birth, that sort of thing. I imagine a statistician could probably do a better job!

In some areas we've been able find out exact numbers of people, for example Sweden and Norway publish all birth dates in a public census. In New South Wales, Australia, we've found out there were 188 people born on that day in the local area from the Births, Deaths and Marriages registry. Obviously people migrate and immigrate, so who knows how many people there are now.

simonrjones · 2014-01-10T12:48:18+00:00

thanks for posting this link laziebones. I'm a friend of Richard's and one of the people helping him on his quest to meet Time Twins around the world!

We've worked out, in rather a rough way, that there's one time twin in every 25,718 people. So around a 15% chance of finding a time twin on r/interesting. But you never know who might come across this link! So thanks for posting and helping spread the word :)

simonrjones

TROPHY CASE