AndrewC

Moaning all. Happy Anniversary to Mr & Mrs Hunt. Nothing else to report from the boring borough. Enjoy the day.

Same here. I've got the tee shirt for most routes. I think the worst trip was January 1992. Highways strike in BC. Coquihalla closed. Other roads a bl**dy nightmare. Flipped car carrier just east of Kamloops on Highway 1. Rain had frozen and the road was like a curling rink. Pebbled ice surface and almost impossible to even walk on. 4 hour nap in the van followed by another 90 minutes crawling behind a "rescue" sander. Ended up in a motel in Kamloops for the night. Fraser Canyon just a single solid line of trucks as none could get through otherwise. Planned on taking I5 & I90 via Spokane back then up through Idaho and Crowsnest. Nope. 3 was closed from the Alberta border west. Driving back via the Fraser and #1 had another 4 hour wait at 3 Valley Gap while they blasted and cleared the road. Got to the top of Roger's Pass when a blizzard hit. 10km/h crawl down the hill. Found out when I got to the park gate that I was the last vehicle that went through as they closed the road 5 minutes behind me.

WestJet also allows split departure locations. Last time we were back we flew into Winnipeg (cancelled last minute so we had to hop via Toronto), then back to Gatwick from Calgary. Cost the same as if we'd booked to/from Calgary, or to/from Winnipeg. Having done the Calgary > Vancouver drive many times, I can justifiably say it is a crap drive from a non-scenic point of view. I took to doing it overnight to avoid the millions of morons in RVs clogging up the horrible 2 lane sections east of Kamloops.

Greetings from the boring borough where the 4th week of industrial action by the bin men has left next door's front garden looking like a rubbish tip. (well more so than usual) We'll be off to the recycling centre on Sunday (even numbered registration day) with the Disco loaded to the max with refuse. At least the kitchen waste caddies are being emptied still. Anyone have the address for the CEO of Serco? The whole situation is maddening. Serco are out the door in Oct so they don't care. They owe the drivers thousands in back pay as well as many of the other workers. Once they are out the door it is doubtful any of the staff will collect a single penny. Can you say stall tactics? With regards to Oz's comment on Californians impacting housing prices. I remember a tee shirt from the 90s that pictured the I5 bridge across the Colombia River (OR WA border) with a road sign that said "Californians use right lane only". The picture showed the right lane veer off and end mid river with car + CA plate plummeting off the edge. Californians have also been blamed for the population spurts and house price growth in north west Montana and the over crowding of places like Glacier National Park in the summer time. It has become so bad they've started introducing ticketed access to the Going to the Sun Road in the summer peaks. Meanwhile our house has more than doubled in "value" since we bought it nearly 14 years ago. The sad part is the schitty HMO next door rents out what is the equivalent of 20% of our space for £5/month less than our mortgage payment. For us to see any of the cash from that growth we'd have to move somewhere awful with depressed housing costs. No thanks. My parents always insisted that a house was a living expense and not an investment. You always need some place to live. Helicopters, we see on a regular basis. Apache and Chinook runs follow the Thames but get lazy with some of the twists and turns. That means an Apocalypse Now re-enactment over our house 2 or 3 times a week. (no pedantry please, I know those were mostly Bell Hueys) The one thing that does amaze me is the sheer volume of air traffic using Biggin Hill over the past 18 months. 2 or 3 per hour turning south just to the east of us on approach. Mostly Cessna Citations, Gulf Stream, and Bombardier small jets. Sadly the Spitfires never seem to come this far north on their flights. Bl**dy Flight Radar app is turning me into a plane spotter. On that note, time for some imported coffee. (Death Wish from the US) I may be vibrating for a few hours.

Our condolences @tigerburnie.

Same in East London. Take the DLR from Woolwich to Stratford. There are hundreds of new developments. All of them are nearly dark in the evenings. You can see empty flat after empty flat from the train. But affordable housing isn't financially viable for the developers. Somebody is getting rich but it ain't me. Makes me also wonder how much was bought with laundered money.

Same with our closest one. Chips so chalky you could use them on a blackboard. I don't think the oil in the fryers has been changed since the 70s when the place was built, or it is supplied by the nearby garage.

SWMBO's great aunt & uncle had a bit of money and were quite snobbish, so back in the 50s they bought the houses surrounding theirs so they could control who they rented to and keep out the riff raff. At the time property in the area was quite cheap. PH will know how stupidly expensive West Vancouver is these days. Especially houses with a good view of English Bay. Each one of those properties was flattened and sadly now are corner to corner monstrosities. The architects should have been drowned at birth. A couple of the homes have never been lived in according to FiL. They are just bought and sold as "assets". Mostly owned by Hong Kong based development companies. I've heard them referred to as "Buy to Leave".

Does one lead to the other? In my case the latter often negates the ability to achieve the former.

There is a lot of tuning you can do with regards to range and sensitivity. I do find the door will trigger movement from large vehicles regardless of how restricted the setting. The delays are caused by the fact Ring relies on the cloud. The bell has to wake up on motion, start recording, then contact the Ring server, which triggers back to your phone via the app, then it has to get the uploaded video or live feed and relay that to the app. Great in theory but if your phone isn't on 5g or home wifi it can be slow to respond. I think I've only managed a live conversation with someone at the door, once. The other 2 cameras work great as I don't need live notification usually. Anything in the garden, (including spiders on the lens) gets recorded. My morning ritual is to check the alley cam and watch the fox and cat activities. It has also managed to capture a fly tipper about a year ago. Footage with registration number submitted to the old bill & council but with nothing actioned by them in the end. Cost the neighbour over £100 to get it carted away. In other news, greetings from the boring borough. A weekend of 2 halves. Saturday was off to the first beer fest in 18 months. Numbers of attendees cut back. No entry without a negative test and/or double vax proof. In other words, no rat lickers allowed. Evening time we attended an immersive Van Gough exhibition. It was quite something. The second half was not so great, having over taxed my knee on Saturday. Drugs, ice, and bed rest was the bulk of the day. An earlier post seems to have vanished. thoughts and well wishes to @tigerburnie Thoughts and condolences as well to @jonny777 time for more meetings. Enjoy the day.

They are a mixed bag. We’ve got the doorbell and 2 light+motion cameras. If you are at home and on the same network it is quite good. We’ve found the doorbell battery to be less than wonderful though. In 2 years it has gone from around 3 months between charges to about 5 weeks now. I’d recommend mains or solar power. If you are away from home it can take up to 3 minutes at times to get the notification. Useless if you need to talk to the person at the door.

Gronkits, yes. Aggro remains to be seen. Trouble is at the moment, what I was hired for has stalled with the client, and access to their systems has been delayed as well. One can only read the corporate bullsh*t knowledge articles so many times. Still, it is better than the last place, which by all accounts is going to h*ll in a hand cart. Laterz

Moaning ish all. Just another crap Tuesday. The new job is turning out to be not quite what I was hoping for. Bored out of my wits is probably the most apt description. Oh well, live and learn. Our one planned escape this summer has now hit the rocks. A double whammy of sorts. The BXL beer fest is cancelled (again), and it seems the Belgian government unlike the French, won't yet accept the NHS covid passport in any way shape or form. This morning has been spent cancelling Eurostar, hotels, etc. The clock is also ticking on some of last year's hotel vouchers recovered from previously cancelled trips. That is about 450€ worth of bookings that have to be used in the next 5 months. At least these most recent ones were not pre-paid and had free cancellation. Plan B was another camping trip but with a fairly last minute cancellation and now the little crotch gremlins are out of school, trying to find a camp site that isn't in the middle of a motorway that still has room is a lesson in frustration. Regards, Bl**dy Annoyed of DA16

A very Happy Anniversary to Mr & Mrs P.

Good moaning from the boring borough. Office still nice and cool but the rest of the house..... So hot down stairs that 2 Hobbits came to the door and threw a ring at me. Another night of disrupted sleep. Even with the room cooled I just couldn't get comfy. I'll be mostly running in zombie mode today. That's about it. Enjoy the day.

Greetings all from the stupidly humid boring borough. Rain, hail, etc at various times yesterday afternoon brought down the temp somewhat but drove the humidity through the roof. Last evening on the patio felt almost tropical. New BBQ assembled. A couple of beers and dinner al fresco. All in all very pleasant. Today will be mostly reading and brushing up on some software that I haven't used in nearly a year. I can see why banks are using "greeters" to triage customers. They are stupidly understaffed. The offspring is working in one such bank. It is a merger of 2 branches and with Covid and other issues is down to 5 members of staff and no real manager. They are run off their feet. Even though 90% of what they are doing could be done online or via one of the machines in the bank. His main function seems to be trying to get their banking app running on a customer's phone. A lot of the "oldies" actually love the idea of having online banking and being up to date but their tech skills and indeed their hardware is lacking. For him it is difficult to try to explain to some poor older lady that her 90s vintage Nokia just can't run the app. Meanwhile in the boring borough, when we moved here 13 years ago there were 6 banks on the high street. By the middle of next month the last one will be gone. Not really surprised though. My bank branch in the city closed 15 years ago and I have yet to visit the branch where they moved my account to. It's been nearly 20 years since I wrote or received a cheque. Long may that last. On that note, time to do some work, have another coffee, and forage for a bit of breakfast. Enjoy the day.

Postman Pat came up trumps and delivered a new hose coupling for our spare portable air/con unit. The other one is now hard vented in shed so no longer "portable". Office temp has now fallen from 31c to 23c and still coming down. Bliss.

If you want to confuse things even more. Natural Gas is traded in mmBtu. However even in the US, once processed the resulting liquids are traded in litres but later wholesaled in pounds or gallons. (kg and l in Canada) Moaning all from Dante's 7th circle of hell. As usual the house has magically switched from cool to pizza oven sometime over the last 18 hours. Another quiet weekend. Little else. Looks like our Belgian beer holiday is scuppered. Seems as though the UK once more has failed in its attempts to get its sh*t together with regards to anything covid related. This time it is failing to get the NHS covid records inline and compatible with the EU vaccination passport app. The integration is still in the testing phase and not likely to be implemented for at least another month. (Iceland, Norway, even bloody Estonia managed it) In the mean time Belgium isn't recognising the NHS vaccine certificate or app. <insert profanity here> Enjoy the day. edit: oops. Happy Bazday, err Birthday Baz.

Ian, I can share your pain. Been there done that. At least the new employer has an idea of how IT should work. They sent me an email. I clicked the link and voila, everything worked. I've been set up and activated on all the corporate systems via one happy process flow. (that's what we do. Make digital transformation work for people). As for race. I can't keep up. The acceptable pronoun for just about everyone changes daily. SWBMO's boss said it best (Indian descent) when some f*cknugget told her to go back where she came from. "f*ck off, Coventry is a sh*thole."

Good Friday all from the boring borough. We managed to survive the coming and going of page 10,000. New job has begun. All onboarding carp so far. A bit slow for my liking but today I'll finally start getting into some project work. SWMBO's former boyfriend had a Suzuki Samurai. It was a PoS by all accounts. Soft top constantly being cut to nick anything in the vehicle. Walk past with an ice cream and it would be too cold for it to start. It did roll a couple of times as well. MiL had the Ford Bronco which was as likely to flip as a stack of pancakes. Awful thing. I'll stick to my Chelsea tractor. This one has an external air bag for pedestrians. I can't help thinking of some poor idiot getting bumped up onto the bonnet and then being launched into orbit by the bag. Speaking of sheds. Here is mine hiding behind the jungle that SWMBO has created. Coffee calls. Enjoy the day. TFIF

This isn't just any page 10,000. It's an RMweb page 10,000 <insert Fleetwood Mac's Albatross here for your listening pleasure>

Tap replaced. Took longer to find the long pipe wrench than the actual swap over. My other honey do items for the day are complete. Now I can take it easy for the rest of the day. Maybe do some of that M word that is verboten on this list.

Morning: check Boring borough: check Overslept: check Need caffeine: double check Weekend chore list: check Everything else: check SAP = Satan's Accounting Package Consultants: When LUL was part privatised with MetroNet some of the long time employees cleaned out their desks on the Friday afternoon, were escorted out the door, Redundant. Returned on the Monday, same desk, same job, 2.5x the pay as they were now contractor/consultants. Today I shall be replacing a dodgy tap in the bathroom. My crap builder did one good thing and that was the plumbing. Inline valve, easy to reach, flex fittings. With a bit of luck it shouldn't take more than 15 minutes. That's about it. Enjoy the day.

Afternoon all. Just checking in. thoughts with Gordon and his family. Doesn't sound promising. Spinal origami this morning. Sadly the appt is too early in the AM for me to use my old f@rt Oyster card. <oh bother> Today I'm mostly in meaningless meetings and waiting for parcels to arrive. That is all. Enjoy the day and weekend.

Ethel reminds me of an ancient saying. We were all feeling mary. When mary left we all jumped for joy. When joy left we all went to the gas station to pump ethel. sorry, not sorry.