AndyID

Found another one Jock. This from a few years later. We sailed over to Rothesy for the day (mainly to get a fish supper!) Passing Toward Point on the way back. MrsID spent most of her summers there while growing up. Her parents had one of the terraced cottages just to the right of the lighthouse. And, just for good measure, the Arran hills from above Largs in, believe it or not, a heat haze.

Wemyss Bay was mentioned recently. I stumbled across this image from the last century. (It was pre-digital!)

Watch out for that woodpecker. One of them drilled a big hole in the side of a neighbor's house!

Plywood power poles! Well, not really plywood, but presumably glue-laminated. I hope they used waterproof glue!

Coincidentally, I bought a new Nikon yesterday. No need to plug it into anything or remove the SD card. This thing connects directly with a tablet or smartphone using a built-in Wi-Fi connection (you don't need to be in a Wi-Fi zone for it to work - it works anywhere.) The images pop up on the tablet/phone as soon as the camera and phone connect. You can also use the phone as a remote control for the camera, although I have not tried that yet. The camera I bought is a bit more than your budget ($300 in the US including a 60x optical zoom!) but if this capability is not already available in lower-end cameras, I'm pretty sure it will be soon. The cost of adding the wi-fi electronics is probably negligible.

The "battle of the tablets" is over. I've now been able to load more than 8Gb of railway magazines on to the SD card in the Galaxy. Had to resort to a bit of subterfuge by going into settings in Pocketmags and setting "Storage Location" to "external" No such luck with Zinio though. I tried faking it out by moving the files around, but it just kept creating copies in the original locations. However, the Zinio mags are more about news than anything. I don't need them for reference, so I've just archived them back into the cloud to save system memory.

Best of luck with that Jock. IIRC, that's the one where they inject you with some stuff that comes in a very thick lead box. It was a long time ago, but I seem to remember seeing my skeleton gradually appearing as dots on a screen, but I'm sure the equipment is much slicker these days.

There's also Marjoribanks (pronounced Marshbanks) which originated in Renfrewshire (like me!) My favorite is Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley)

Indeed, but if it encourages anyone who detects anything unusual to see a doctor, it could well save their life.

Rest well Jock! As it turned out, those were the photos of our retirement home. It was not far from Capistrano (frae whence the swallows do actually return). We moved in in 2002, but due to an unusual alignment of interstellar planetary objects, the value had doubled by 2004, so we flogged it, and I retired. You can plan all you like, but sometimes you just get jammy! (I was also very jammy thirty years ago when they removed a malignant tumor from my wedding tackle.)

You could always nip over here and help me with the construction of "Dudgeon High". MrsID is in Scotland at the moment, so we can make as much noise as we like.

It's quite handy for me. The US quart is pretty close to 1 liter, so when I'm buying petrol in the UK, I just multiply the pump price by four to compare it with the price in the US. "Good grief! That's nearly four times as much! No wonder everyone is riding bicycles." (For reference - I filled up the truck yesterday, and it was $2.21 per gallon. MrsID has a diesel VW, and diesel is about 5 cents more expensive at the moment.)

Saw one tree swallow today, and one ruffed grouse. No sign of the ospreys yet, but they should show up soon.

OK, OK, OK - last one, promise. I just received a nice email from Whitehouse.gov The subject is "Why I'm at the White House today" and the sender was a gent who goes by the name "Randy George". (No kidding)

One more then I'll shut up. In the US, heating systems are quantified in BTU/hour, which, as I'm sure you all know, is the British Thermal Unit. Exactly why US heating engineers choose to use this arcane measurement is unknown. They could easily have adopted the much more sensible unit used by US cooling engineers, the ton.

I'm sorry, but you are 0.2 mm off

Mind you, that could lead to unfortunate consequences..... "This bit is less than 1.7 and more than 1.5. Do you think that will be OK?" "It's still 1.6 then. No problem, at all, at all."

The excessive and meaningless precision nonsense also applies to the gauge of railway tracks. Standard gauge is typically quoted as being 1435 mm. I'm willing to bet you won't be able to find too much that actually is that gauge. It would be a lot more sensible to describe it as 1.44 meters, but I know I'm swimming against the tide with that one!

It took me a while to figure out lumber dimensions in the US. A 2" x 4" stud is always 1.5" x 3.5". Wot a rip-off! I bet they wouldn't allow that in the EU. Well, it is a sort of rip off. The 2 x 4 refers to the sawn dimension (or it did originally at any rate). A quarter inch is removed from each face during finishing.

Similar experience here. cgs to SI, then back to "English" again when I came to the US. (I like to point out to people here that England dumped the "English" system years ago ) I don't have a problem with the metric system at all, but I do have a problem with the ruthless enforcement of the SI system's multiple of 1000 rule. That leads to an unnecessary and misleading "apparent" precision where is does not exist. The dimensions of things like flagstones should be described in decimal fractions of meters. For example, 0.90 m implies a tolerance of plus or minus half a centimeter while 900 mm implies a tolerance of half a millimeter which is completely ridiculous. Of course, the sensible solution would be to just measure things like that in centimeters, but The SI would have a canary if we did that!

I bet if you measure them to the nearest millimeter, at least half of them will be "out of spec". They are 3 foot by 2 foot by one inch, same as they always were. They should be described as 0.9 m x 0.6 m. Measuring concrete slabs in millimeters is completely bonkers.

Oh, you mean 3 by 2. Why didn't you just say that?

Firkin soup dragon.

Charlie was a pretty rum character. He moved around from railroad to railroad, but he didn't get along with many people and usually fell out with management. Things finally caught up with him in Texas. He got into a big fight, and threw his boss off a train. Well, his boss didn't survive, so old Charlie was dragged into court and found guilty of first degree murder. The judge sentenced him to death. In due course, he was strapped into the electric chair in the State Penitentiary in Dallas, and at the appointed hour, the big switch was thrown. Nuthin! They jiggled the switch and tried again. Still nuthin! After five minutes of this carry-on, the chairman of the railroad stood up and shouted in desperation, "You idiots! I tried to tell you he was a lousy conductor!"

Were they bused in from Castlemilk?