SJ... beware!

Wow, on the train still. 12 hours and counting. Countless bad decisions, bad information. Passengers missing plane connections, passengers with 6 week old babies told they need to take the taxi for hours in the middle of the night, because SJ will not pay for a hotel room.

The train had no food and no water and whatever provisions they took in disappeared in minutes. And to sum it all, we left Sundsvall at 16.00 and estimated arrival is at 23.00. You can take a moped and make better time. We have had to stop for every cargo train and passenger train on earth.

Until SJ shows a commitment to their customers, I will not take the train again.

SJ and air travel

If ever you need to fly from Stockholm and think about taking the train to Stockholm and fly out from Arlanda, you need to remember two things:

1. SJ / Banverket is incompetent and they are late a significant amount of the time. (I am writing this from a train that is 5 hours late for a five hour train.) When something happens, you always get the feeling that no one is working behind the scenes to figure out the best possible way of solving things for the passengers and confusion reigns.
   
2. SJ has no guarantees about connection to a flight. You are screwed if they screw up.

In this day and age where everyone is pushing train travel, it seems SJ / Banverket have a lot to learn from the airlines in punctuality and how to treat customers. The green party wants to eliminate domestic air travel in sweden... they should fix the state own rail system first and make them take their customers seriously.

Next time we ride to Östersund... it will be in the Subaru.

Great picture set of Endaveour

Look at the pics from this post. Absolutely stunning.

Spotify

I have been fighting iTunes DRM on my machine for the past few days, because of an old email address that some music was tied to and now will not play. That made me look into alternatives. I need my Ozzy!!!

While Apple tech support tries to help me (they are very responsive BTW), I have started to look at alternatives. I got an invite from Spotify. Amazing selection of music, streams incredibly fastly and the quality is pretty good. The spotify team is smart... they started by focusing on the basics... music and will probably add a lot more features as we go forward.

What I would like to see more of in Spotify, which I think could make it become a worthy contender to iTunes. (except for iPhone support)

1. Much better social. Hook it up to Google's open social or to facebook and let me share my music!
2. Support for AirTunes
3. Link the song titles to Billboard history
4. Don't let it take 10 % of a core2 duo while idling (on mac os x). If you are caching... then say so!
   

I have no clue how to make spotify portable... or how to have my playlists move from iTunes to Spotify (product idea!!!) . I think that as they get adoption, they will figure this out.

Great service... go Spotify!
Anyhow, here is my first Spotify music list!