AndrewC

Happy Appearance day ID and congratulations on completing another solar orbit.

Crisse tabernac

After 5 months of DuoLingo my Dutch is still very basic, but I found the same last week. Ask in Dutch, get an answer in English. Most of the people I talked to asked me "why bother?" On the other hand my even more limited German was encouraged.

I have a feeling the oil reacted with both the plastic and the concrete. Perhaps a plastic safe silicon spray would be better for our Swiss evil correspondent. When we had our house built in 97 we were told not to start developing the basement or put up a vapour barrier for at least 18 months to allow the concrete to cure quicker. Putting up the barrier would have slowed the curing by up to 10 years. (so they claimed)

Good moaning all. Back in the boring borough after 8 days schlepping about. Highs: (not involving Amsterdam coffee shops) Much good beer and food. BXL Jazz weekend and Amsterdam Red Light Jazz. New places discovered, old favourites now back open after the last lockdown. The knee held up quite well with an average of 12,000 steps a day. Lows: Eurostar doing their best to make train travel as unpleasant as the airlines. At least we weren't travelling from Paris. We'd still be there otherwise. DB making SouthEastern look good with massive delays and our carriage locked off meaning our first class compartment couldn't be used and we had to cram into an already full peasant carriage for 5 hours. Now attempting compensation other than bloody useless vouchers for both the fare differential and the 80 min late arrival. Back to work today. Meh. Wish I'd taken an extra couple of days off to recover from the days off. 😃 First day of my 4 day week schedule. We'll see how that goes as I've already had to dump half a dozen meeting invites for Friday from people who should know better.

That was almost how my poli-sci teacher way back in high school defined politics. She described it as more of a horse shoe. Left and right bend closer to each other at the bottom but never quite touch.

This has brought back a lot of memories and emotions from 25 years ago. Mum had also prepared everything in advance. I had a complete instruction sheet of everything that needed to be done. It kept me busy for the first few weeks. Apart from a few special things the bulk of her flat was donated to a women's shelter that used donations to set up homes for abused women & children who were trying to start new lives. My 2p of advice is to make time for yourself and keep your memories close.

Many years ago I was friends with a sci-fi modeller. (Haven't seen him in 20 years). He actually made props for Superman, Stargate SG1, and Andromeda. When a new kit or figure came out he'd buy three. One to build/keep, one to save, and one to sell in the future. Luckily he had a large house with 2 spare bedrooms to store his hoard. He kept a book as his inventory. Moaning all from the borough that is quite boring. Little else and I'm off for 10 days starting tomorrow. Enjoy the day.

When my FiL retired he was constantly stating that he didn't know how he had the time to go to work before retiring. Sadly lockdowns basically shafted their last 2 years of retirement globetrotting. They used to love cruises but have now said they'd never set foot on one of those plague ships again. Looks like we'll be "Goin' to Winnipeg" a few times in the not too distant future.

Good moaning all from the boring borough. 1 1/2 working days until a 10 day break. yay. Loads of high speed trains in my near future. Brussels, Cologne, Berlin, Amsterdam. Tomorrow will be my last working Friday. Starting in June I'll be on 4 day weeks until retirement. Looking forward to "train day". Although with my luck it will become "everything else that needs to be done except play with trains day". 25 years ago I did a stint working in Houston. To say that bunch are gun fetishists would be an understatement. The building I was working in had metal detectors on each floor in the lift lobbies. The shopping mall across the street was called Greenspoint, nicknamed GunsPoint. They had armed guards with golf carts to escort you to and from your vehicle. There was a running joke that in Texas you can buy booze, pills, and guns without ever leaving your car and use them all before you got home. It wasn't the kind of place I'd ever live in. Obviously the same could be said of several of my work colleagues who had transferred, only to transfer back within a year. Healthwise, the NHS has finally fixed all the screw ups with hospital visits, calls, urine tests for the call, etc. The GP called last week (shock) and apart from high purine levels my internal chemistry is mostly on point. (cholesterol is actually down .4 since last summer, without even trying hard) The upshot is Allopurinol is on the menu despite no actual signs of gout. Feeling a bit old about that as apart from one off prescriptions, mostly anti-biotics, I've never had any ongoing medication in nearly 61 years. Back to meetings, enjoy the day.

Pretty much the same as my symptoms a month ago. Didn't go for the trial. Figured by the time they got through the red tape I'd have recovered. Take it easy, get loads of rest. You'll be back to abby-normal in about 3 days.

Converter theft is rampant in the UK as well. Story of one that was chopped out mid afternoon in the parking lot of our local Horrorsons. There are a lot of scrappies down along the Thames in Erith and Thamesmead. The old Bill check them pretty regularly. Covid and Brexit have put paid to most of our metal fairies but the hard core cat thieves are thriving. The trouble is even with marking etc, the thieves just load them up into a container and export their "goods" to another country where they don't care if the metal was stolen. There are loads of websites that will sell you add on plates and other goodies to make the theft less easy. The scum will still get their quota of converters but will take the path of least resistance and pass your car by for an easier target. It is the same with any theft. The thief will 99.99% go for the easiest target. Et voila, the orign of the phrase pork barrel politics. Moaning all from the boring borough. Drizzle is today's magic word. Meh. Work is work. Currently mulling over an offer. Basically the same crap, different pile but for about 12% more £££. Trying to see if I can negotiate a 4 day week. If so, I'm off. Other than that, looking forward to the Chelsea Flower Show member's day next Tuesday. Hoping to keep SWMBO from spending too much. ooo look, another meeting. <sigh> Enjoy the day.

Moaning all from the tropical paradise of the boring borough. Almost half way through the week already. Holy carp where did the last 2 days go? Last Saturday I noticed a £0.00 transaction on one of my credit cards. Normally this is a pre-authorisation for something. However, I'm not prone to shopping with JC Penny in Texas. A quick call to Capital One. Answered very quickly. Nice Indian lady took me through the security questions. I was then transferred to the fraud department. Card blocked, investigation started, new account number created, new card dispatched. It arrived yesterday. I have to say I couldn't have asked for better service. Turns out there were a couple more £0.00 pending transactions that hadn't shown up in the app yet. We are quick to criticise but slow to praise, so three thumbs up to Capital One. Lesson learned: my precautions mostly worked. Inconvenience level 2/10. 1: use a low limit sacrificial card for most online transactions. (£500 in this case) That way anything large gets declined quickly. It also means that if it gets compromised, you can live without it for a week or two. 2: don't let the merchant store your card number. (I made that mistake once and that is likely where they got the number from) 3: use a phone app to keep your eye on all of your cards and banking. I check mine daily so the transaction was quickly spotted and stomped on. Coffee time then more meetings. Enjoy the day.

Happy Birthday Rick. I think my warranty expired in my early 50s. I've been a slowly decaying wreck ever since. At this rate I'll be in the knacker's yard by the time I'm 65. On a sad note SWMBO's manager's husband passed away in the night. I'd met him a few times and he was the nicest of people. He was originally given 6 months. He managed 7 years. Then a few weeks back he began to deteriorate quickly. They gave him another 6 months. He lasted only a couple of weeks. F*ck cancer.

Normal Motorway indications. no restriction = minimum 80 60 = try to keep it under 80 50 = best slow down a bit to 60ish 40 = you'll be lucky to get faster than 10.

Nothing new there. UBC (University of British Columbia) has been long nicknamed University of a Billion Chinese. U of A (Alberta) is University of Asians. Moaning all from the boring borough. Fear mongering of a weather apocalypse from the usual sources turned into a not as damp as expected squib. Instead of a major light show and ark worthy rains, we got a bit of fog overnight. As always any interesting astronomical event was obscured by clouds. Little of note. A quiet weekend in the garden helping SWMBO battle the encroaching menace of bluebells. She let them flower this year to help the bees but they've got out of hand so out they go. Same too with many of the other bulbs which have reached the end of their flowering lives. A major schlep to the garden centre will be required after next Tuesday's visit to the Chelsea Flower show. Bulk BBQ time also saw me on the patio at midnight Saturday, slow smoking several kg of pork shoulder. This has now been shredded, vac packed, and frozen to provide quickie meals. A couple of kg of pork belly ribs became our dinner for the past couple of nights. On that note, I must now go in search of coffee. Enjoy the day

One of my biggest hates are businesses that can't properly keep their operating hours up to date. Restaurants & bars seem to be the worst offenders. Only last week we schlepped a good km out of our way to visit a brewery tap room that said it opened at noon on their website, Google, and on the f*cking sign on the door. Did they open at noon? Did they b*llocks. We got there at 2:30 and they still hadn't opened. No response from their social media either. Asshats. It seems to be a British & European thing about not posting hours or adhering to posted hours. Ahh, we'll open when we feel like and close when we can't be arsed to stick around. Then they wonder why they are going out of business.

I know the original post is now moot but it brings up a good talking point around how big is too big. A few years ago Joe Fugate (he of Model Railroad Hobbiest) relocated. In doing so he ended up scrapping what had been close to 20 years of basement empire. Since then he has adopted and been promoting a concept known as TOMA. Basically it's part way between a full modular standard and permanent layout. The idea is to build parts of your empire as semi-self contained segments. By build, they mean to near completion before moving to the next one. Some people never get past the first section. Others find new incentive with every segment. https://forum.mrhmag.com/post/using-sectionalmodular-methods-on-a-home-layout-toma-12204673 In my case I've got a 12 by 24 space. At the moment it houses 4 discrete NMRA-BR standard modules. Each can be operated stand alone, taken to a modular meet, or all together in a multi-level figure 8 ish continuous run. It also means I've got space to pack away one or more to give space to build a micro or 2.

Moaning all from the boring borough. NTSC, Secam, PAL. Takes me back 40 years to my television/radio BA days. Today's trivia, the frame rate for each system was originally based on the AC current frequency. NTSC being 2 complete scans per second giving 30fps. That is why it has a lower resolution of 525 lines as it only has 1/30th of a second to create a single "frame" With that, the colour signal had to be stabilised in a single line of colour bars in the video blanking area of the frame. Any disruption to that meant wonky colour. Hence the name Never Twice Same Colour. PAL and Secam on the other hand were 25fps based on 50hz power. More time meant more lines per frame and a more stable picture. The data for Ceefax etc, could be embedded in the much larger blanking interval. It also meant converting 24fps cine film to video was more robust than converting to 30fps. Today's digital formats are either 50fps or 100fps depending on the resolution. It's amazing the crap one remembers from years ago, yet I can't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. Back to yesterday's clinician appt stupidity. Another read of the "phone" consultation is asking for a urine sample. Yes they are literally now taking the p*ss. I have a feeling the admin person used the wrong document template. Wish me luck while I try to sort this out over the phone. The Jewish community has the perfect Yiddish word for this. Schemozzle. Coffee, meeting, coffee, meeting, lunch, meeting, etc Enjoy the day.

I have visions of 1800's style prospectors sitting downstream from the sewage works panning for gold nuggets. <blech>

They should never be connected to both. Either track or loconet + separate power. Preferably loconet + 14v. It is a known issue that was finally resolved after 12 years when the DS74 came out.

B*gger. I just used up most of the last of the cable roll I had. Could have done one for you. <grrr> Back from the tulips. Knackered. Need another holiday to recover from this last weekend. Received an appointment finally for my elbow. It has only taken 9 months, 2 GP visits, multiple X-ray & Ultrasound appts, 1 physio, bloodwork, 1 rheumatologist drilling a hole to extract a sample, before they've finally allowed me to see a surgeon. But wait there's more...... Dated 2 days later is a letter for a phone consultation appt with a different rheumatologist for the same issue. (Are they like busses and can I expect a third appointment?) On that note, time for a break. Enjoy what's left of the day.

Trawling back though this thread, you mentioned DS64 connected to the track power. Are these on the same districts powered from the DCS? If so you can run into several known issues. Best practice has long been to isolate DS64 from the track power and only run them with an external power supply and connect them to Loconet.

For what it is worth, this is what I did and my shed is now 14 years old. Apart from re-staining the outside a couple of times, and a refresh of the insulation after the original (not foam backed) started to crumble after 10 years, little has changed. Shiplap shed from a commercial supplier. Concrete base with their standard floor. I used Halford's interlocking "rubber" flooring which can be replaced easily if there is an accident. (like when I dumped 2 litres of deck stain when the tin's lid popped open) It is also great to kneel on when working under the layout. The walls and inside roof were sealed with a vapour barrier and 50mm foil backed foam insulation sheets. The interior is then lined with OSB. In winter a greenhouse heater & thermostat keep the inside temp above 7c when not in use. I also have a semi-portable heat pump unit which can bring the shed temp up to 20c in about an hour when the outside temp is -5c. In summer this reverses and it acts as an air conditioner which means I'm comfortable even on the hottest and sunniest day. We installed a freezer about 18 months ago too. All of this gives me a working space that I can use year round. (24 by 12) My only wish is the height was a bit better. I'm stuck with the 9' maximum peak the council allows. Good luck, but the basics are, vapour barrier, some outside ventilation, keep the internal temp above 7c to prevent condensation in winter, and enjoy your space.

Greetings from the boring borough. Happy Star Wars Day. Don't get me started on GP surgeries. Ours spent 4 years at the bottom of the Bexley satisfaction table. Trouble is for us, none of the positive rated practices are accepting new patients. I can see why it is so bad as they have over 12,000 registered patients. 3 GPs and a host of revolving door locums and temps. No wonder the gestapo are hell bent on making it as difficult as possible to get an appointment. Just checked online again. Nothing available in the "window". Which means they have yet again failed to update the site provider with their schedule. <sigh> I'm still trying to get my test results from 4 weeks ago, despite the GP saying they'd book me in as soon as the results came back. <sigh> BUPA won't help as it is all knee and elbow related and that is pre-existing from before my employer signed me up. <sigh> I may decide to start identifying as a poodle and go the local vet instead. At least I can get same day appointments there. <insert profanity here> Little else to moan about. It is a Wednesday that feels like a Tuesday but in fact is a Friday. A 5 day break coming up and I'm looking forward to escaping. Enjoy the day.