The human race can be its own worst enemy in terms of waste and efficiency. What point in spending money when there's an excellent alternative that should be available for free? Ah - the point might be simply that you don't have to co-operate with other human beings in a way outside the norm if you choose to spend more money.

What am I on about?

a) The restaurant at my hotel if offering "Two for One" meals, all day, every day. That means that you buy any two main courses from the menu, and the cheaper one is free. It's a huge encouragement to Milton Keynes locals to bring their boyfriend / girlfriend / mother / boss in for a meal and the place is busy ... but it could also be a serious saving for the businessman travelling alone, like me if only he would team up with another similar lone businessperson for the purpose of ordering food.

b) As I drove the three or four miles from Furston Lake to the Open University yesterday morning, I observed the number of cars on the road (it wasn't quiet) and the number of people in the vehicles coming the other way. 19 out of 20 vehicles had a single occupant and all (except the grass cuttng machine) had spare seats. That could have been a serious saving of fuel / costs if only people had paired up and travelled together - it's not exactly as if there's a lack of vehicles on the road.

c) Our local Train Operating Company, First Great Western, sells a "Group Save" ticket where a group of 3 or 4 people travelling together can travel for the price of 2. So there's a potential saving of 50% for each off peak traveller (it only applies to off peak if only people would co-operate with each other.

If you start adding these things up, you're looking at a considerable overall saving - personally and (in the case of the car driving) for the greater good too.

All it needed, on Monday evening, was for me to say to the next person in the queue "I'll get your main course for you if you'll get me my drink" and we would both have both been quids in.

All it needs on the road is for me to hold up a sign saying "Anyone got a spare seat to the OU?" and there's a car journey saved - and if this became the norm, some traffic jams reduced and some major road capacity improvement expenditure saved.

I HAVE seen sharing work - in different contexts - on rail related issues on occasion, and heard of further instances too. A cancelled service from Melksham, and the person who has driven his / her car to the station offered the others a lift. I have personally been offered (and accepted) a lift when enquiring about the next bus of train to Melksham at Chippenham, and I have been at Chippenham station to drop off / pick up customers, and brought back with me other surprised - but very much grateful - stranded travellers.
(written 2008-08-21)

 G909 - Well House Consultants - Spam, Spamming and Spammers
  [259] Responding to spam - (2005-03-27)
  [268] Information request forms, cleaning up spam - (2005-04-05)
  [276] An apology to Mr Boneparte - (2005-04-11)
  [338] OO techniques are hard to teach - (2005-06-06)
  [347] Frightening and from-friend viruses and spams - (2005-06-14)
  [417] Telephone Preference Service - we're registered - (2005-08-17)
  [495] More spam - a success story - (2005-11-13)
  [872] Email metrics - (2006-09-20)
  [1037] Impact Engineering and Backscatter - (2007-01-16)
  [1115] Unexpected visitors to our site - (2007-03-22)
  [1523] Ive just received an email from myself. Should I be worried? - (2008-01-29)
  [1532] Comment spam blocked. Please comment via Forums - (2008-02-05)
  [1817] Marc Schneider is still having email trouble - (2008-09-30)
  [1978] From spam to mod_alias - finding resources - (2009-01-05)
  [2019] Baby Caleb and Fortune City in your web logs? - (2009-01-31)
  [2177] Preventing forum spam - checks at sign up - (2009-05-12)
  [2179] Offers that I can refuse - (2009-05-12)
  [2276] Who is Marc Schneider of Multilingual Search Engine Optimization Inc - (2009-07-10)
  [2398] Websitemediasolution and a goldfish called Carl Johnson - (2009-09-06)
  [2697] Email metrics and filtering - (2010-03-28)
  [2884] Hotlinked images onto adult material sites - (2010-07-23)
  [3016] The legal considerations of your web presence - revisited - (2010-10-26)
  [3166] Well house is strong - confirmed? - (2011-02-11)
  [3190] What do the following web sites have in common? - (2011-03-03)
  [3316] Twitter Phishing Trips ... and a great new alert service - (2011-06-04)
  [3352] World Trade Register - Certainly NOT worth 2985 Euros. - (2011-07-09)
  [3506] Cold call contacts - preference services and turning off spam sales approaches - (2011-11-03)
  [3661] Keeping forum and blog comments clean - (2012-03-19)
  [3910] Identifying your real customers and keeping them well informed fast - (2012-11-02)
  [3912] Sand to Arabia, Coals to Newcastle or Woodburners to Russia - (2012-11-04)
  [3946] Moving from a warning system to a control system - PHP, forum spammers - (2012-12-07)
  [4135] Introducing your product to Well House Consultants - single, personally tuned email please - (2013-07-08)
  [4315] Welcoming genuine forum posters quickly - but turning away off topic advertisers - (2014-11-16)
  [4520] No cold sales calls please - but delighted to hear from others! - (2015-09-29)

Back to WEB-INF (Tomcat) and .htaccess (httpd)

Previous and next or Horse's mouth home

Forward to Yank and Push - copy and move in vi

mod_proxy and mod_proxy_ajp - httpd
Diagrams to show you how - Tomcat, Java, PHP
Dialects of English and Unix
Yank and Push - copy and move in vi
Co-operating to save, yet we dont
WEB-INF (Tomcat) and .htaccess (httpd)
Logging Cookies with the Apache httpd web server
An opportunity for something new
While the world sleeps ...
Lindors Hotel, near St. Briavels, Wye Valley