It's interesting to say the least. Things that I think are unusual about the "system":

• 14 day advance purchase tickets are not necessarily available 14 days in advance. Sometimes only 3 day advance tickets are available.
• It is not unusual to have over 10 different fares available for a single one-way journey.
• Sometimes a return journey costs less than a one-way journey.
• Sometimes it costs less to buy two tickets than one (ie split the journey in two).
• Different ticket-sellers have different definitions of 14 days. thetrainline.co.uk appears to be the only one where 14 days means 14 * 24 hours. The others look only at the current date.
• Despite allowing foreigners to purchase tickets for collection at the station, the website is designed only to accept UK addresses. However, it is possible to trick it.
• The availability of cheap tickets does not seem to correspond to actual seats on the train. For example, cheap tickets may be available for Coventry to York via Birmingham, but not from Birmingham to York, even though this journey utilises the same train.

• Refused to pay £46.50 for a train from Oxford to York. It would have been possible (but inconvenient) to go for £24. Instead paid £9 to get the bus.
• Booked a York to Edinburgh 14 day advance ticket for £11, exactly 14 days in advance.
• Saved £4 on a Bath to London journey by buying a return ticket, even though I have no intention of using the return portion.

Another happy banking story

Citibank continue to impress me. Their card security people called me up yesterday to ensure that my train ticket purchases were legitimate, since they are apparently a popular way to test stolen cards, and are an unusual purchase for someone who doesn't live in Britain. Nobody at work knew of any other bank that does the same.

I've never known a bank to piss me off as little as Citibank do. I'm even recommending them to friends (and the 5,000 point referral bonus doesn't go astray either).

Credit cards

Amex want me to have a gold card with no annual fee. I'm considering accepting their kind offer. One day in the not-too-distant future I expect it won't be easy to find a Visa or Mastercard that gives one frequent flyer point per dollar. If that happens, having an Amex might come in handy.

gcc

Spent most of the day trying to get our software to compile with gcc 3.3.2 (we're upgrading from 3.0.1). There were quite a lot of minor problems that we got away with in the old version, but which the new version is more strict about. One thing that surprised me was discovering two declarations of the same constant #defined to different values. I have no idea why the old compiler let us get away with that.

I ran into a bit of a problem late in the afternoon. Whenever I #include signal.h, and I have the -ansi flag enabled, I get errors about the type uint64_t being used as a type, but not defined as a type. We don't really want to remove the -ansi option. I tried typedeffing uint64_t to unsigned long long, but the compiler didn't like that because it thought uint64_t was already a type. Odd. At that point I decided to give up until tomorrow and go to my French lesson.