AndrewC

We go to Amsterdam a couple of times a year. Hotels: notoriously expensive to keep the stag party crowd away from anything decent. We really like the Singel Hotel and Hotel des Arts. Both are fairly central but just far enough off the beaten path. The Singel is about 10 min walk from Centraal. Arts backs onto the main shopping street. You really do need to wander around the De Wallen. Best time is earlier in the day when the asshats are sleeping off their hangovers. There are many good little shops and places to see intermixed with the seedy. Sites: Hortus Botanicus. Blomenmarkt. Rembrandtplein. Waterlooblein. Vondelpark. Dam Square. Nieumarkt. Canal cruise. Just hop a tram and go and explore randomly. Train out to Haarlem, which is a lovely little town. The architecture of the station alone is worth the visit. Brown cafes (beer) that aren't full of tossers. Louis Bar (Singel). Texels. De Prael. Brouweri t' Ij's windmill tap room. Im de Wildeman. Other stuff: Getting a Chipkart is not worthwhile if you are only visiting the once. Go with day passes for the trams. Get the GVB app for your phone. Watch your stuff. Pickpocket central around the tourist areas. Try to avoid wandering the Centrum on a Friday night. Too stupidly crowded and full of idiots. If your schedule allows it, go mid week instead of over a weekend. Much more pleasant and quieter. That should keep you busy.

Sun rises over the boring borough to signal the start of another week. The mayhem began early. The PM on my previous assignment has started bothering me about doing "just an hour to do X and a couple of hours to do Y". He's been bitch slapped into another timezone by my boss as there is no financial paperwork in place. It's not even 9am yet. My next couple of weeks should be fairly calm and sane now that has been resolved once and for all. The big blue shed is just over 10 years old already. It needs an external sanding and repaint but other than that it is holding up well. Barely any wear on the roofing felt. It came from Passmores in Stroud. They delivered and assembled as part of the price. Still undecided on what to do with the floor. The sh*tweasel of a builder had been using it for storage during the renovations and large sections now have plaster and mortar permanently ground into the original wooden surface. Temped to start with the surplus house flooring but it would cost several hundred to finish off the whole thing. 26m2 is a lot of flooring. I may even look at that Rolson rubber flooring from Halfauds I already have several of these I use on the floor when working on the layout. Sort of makes sense to do the whole thing. Would only cost about £140 to do the rest of the floor. Little else of note. Coffee is calling. Enjoy the day.

Evening y’awl. Good to see her Debship brandishing the awl of rebuke. Best wishes again for John & Sandy. One day at a time. Weekend of clearing, cleaning, and recycling. Back to work in the morning just for my muscles to recover. Finally removed all the remaining building materials from the shed. That means only 1 thing........... modelling. For the first time in 10 months,I have space and my workbench. G’night Addendum: several beer genies have been freed from their bottle prisons.

Just want to say a thank you to mdvle for constantly updating this thread with news of releases. It is appreciated. But not by my wallet.

Greetings all from the boring borough. Life ticks over. Christmas dust magnets put away to be replaced by the day to day dust magnets. This means the track around the tree has been dismantled. New book cases assembled and filled. Can someone explain the physics of 1 full medium Billy bookcase replaced by 3 much larger bookcases that are now also full. For the first time in many years all my train related books are in one place. Rediscovered Gordon Gravett's 7mm modelling parts 1 & 2. I see this as a sign. After the upcoming Freemo meet I'll be looking seriously at building a small shunting plank in 0. Chris, I'd recommend a second hand, refurbished iPhone 6. They can be had fairly cheap and will do the job. For travelling they are great. For example, arriving in Brussels. mile long queues for the ticket office and machines. The midi-zuid departure boards are a nightmare. Time table, platform number, ticket purchase, and ticket all in the palm of your hand. Last time I was half way to Bruges before I'd have managed to get through the ticket queue. Bus & train timetables, metro route maps, etc. All worth having on the phone. Socks are proof of multiple universes. Somewhere there is an entire universe populated by odd socks. Of course everything must remain in balance. For every sock lost to this universe, we gain a Z list celebrity. Yes there is another universe inhabited by vacuous, plastic, platypus lipped, non-entities. Every z-lister lost there gains something else from another universe, and so on, and so forth. That's about enough prattling on. Enjoy the day.

Ahh yes, the famous Pink Ginger Floyd Palace.

Are you sure that failing didn't mean fairy? It would explain the panto we are currently suffering through.

How many barrels of gunpowder will you be taking with you?

Purley squire? Famous place. Say no more.

There were also noises at the time around the robots losing radio connection with the lead locos due to excess train length. Both runaways occurred on curves where a mountain could easily block the signals. This was never brought up publicly but was one of the first avenues of investigation at the time of the 77 runaway.

Just to throw my 2 bits worth in. That is Robot-07. Converted from a CLC B unit (DFB16-4) and not a GM built F7B. These were the first implementions of Locotrol. Back then they took up a whole box car sized space. These days it is fully integrated into the loco. One of my dad's last duties at Ogden Shops in Calgary was to officially write off 2 of the SD40-2s that were involved in this Robot runaway failure: http://www.okthepk.ca/dataCprSiding/articles/201206/month00.htm As for CP caboose (cabeese?) the only ones painted fully in yellow were originally for run through. All local ones retained the original oxide livery but with CP Rail branding without the multi-mark. These were generally older and as they were retired and fewer cabooses needed the yellow ones were cascaded down to local use.

Once upon a time Windows defender was a bit of a joke. These days it is one of the better ones. For what it's worth, most large corporate and government installations use Symantic Endpoint. My personal windows gear has Defender + Malwarebytes running in tandem. It was the latter that prevented the RMweb page from being redirected to the rather poor ransom site. I had a look using a VM instance and the only thing that page does is annoy and keep pushing dialog boxes to prevent closure or navigation away. If you get one of these, the fastest solution is to give your computer the 3 finger salute (ctrl alt del), bring up task manager, and kill the browser process(es). Just don't let your browser restore your last session when you restart it. I'm lucky that part of my work involves managing and implementing Security Operations modules for our client's ServiceNow platforms. That means I have a personal development instance and a full blown Vulnerability detection and management tool to play with. I get daily updates from NIST and all my hardware is scanned for known vulnerabilities on a regular basis. For the geeks out there, on average from a vulnerability discovery to MS issuing a patch is around 100 days. Red Hat and Ubuntu patches average around the same.

Greetings from the borough of boring. The yellow and blue van from that Swedish company has been and gone already this morning. All new bookcases for the dining room to assemble. At least it will finally stop SWMBO from complaining about her book embargo. She'll have 3 times the current shelf space. Although I fear that will fill very quickly in the coming months. I'm really happy I have a complete set of hex bits in my drill case. Makes the assembly job so much faster. The upside is the old pair of small units are now in the shed and will be re purposed for stock and tool storage. For those of you struggling with your smart phones. That is all. Enjoy the day.

Rather than messing about with milling the chassis, there is room in the coal bunker for a small decoder. I've done several old Bachmann split chassis locos and apart from one or 2 there is room to put a decoder without having to resort to hacking the chassis.

Greetings from the boring borough. I've supported RMweb from the early days with the odd donation and to not ad block their advertising. That bloody counter on the top and bottom of every fecking page was the last straw. AdBlocker re-enabled for the site. Little of note apart from it appears as though SELKENT MRC's home is to become a full time pub with working model railway. The Ale Bar opens in March according to SE London CAMRA. Conveniently located half way between the Amersham Arms and Royal Albert on New Cross rd. Enjoy the day.

Afternoon all. Happy New Year. Quiet night in watching the tellybox. We had planned on watching Jools and playing Hootenanny bingo but decided on Suggs and co on BBC 1 instead. Several bottles of stouts and porters were consumed over the evening. The midnight beer was a rather nice 19.3% imperial stout from Het Uiltje & de Molen. The rest were all well above 10% as well. We finally crawled into bed around 2am. I think that is a record for me as I'm usually asleep by 10 and watch the recorded fireworks in the morning. Remember, it is January 1. Time to put the sprouts on for next Christmas lunch. Enjoy the day.

Good day all. What a great late Christmas prezzie to see Debs posting. Hope Santa brought everyone loads of trains. Turns out my rant about the dodgy banner advert was spot on and the ad was the prelude to the malware attack. The redirect advert embedded was pretty poor by most hacker standards and led to a non functioning ransom ware site. Yawn. Good to see Andy Y managed to clean it out pretty quickly. Pïss poor that the hosting company doesn't provide proper vulnerability and threat protection. Little happening in the boring borough. Christmas and Boxing Day were spent BBQing. Turkey and lamb if you must know. Last few days have been spent working on the house. 2 sets of stairs have now been rebuilt with oak treads & risers. SWMBO has done some painting and gardening. I may put up some shelving in the 'Harry Potter Suite' this afternoon.

Anyone else getting some Schitty banner advert that takes the whole screen for a dodgy “spin & win” site? I don’t normally ad block RMweb but it looks like I’ll have to if this is the kind of crap that is going to appear. Before anyone states the obvious, it’s not a pop up but actually within the RMweb page.

Just one? The shop across from us sells them by the bag full. With and without vinegar. Just as things are starting to get back to normal around here, we discover the lady next door was pregnant when she died.

Greetings all from that most boring of boroughs. Thanks for the travelogue Jamie. Sounds like a grand day out. Hopefully Ivan's banishment is temporary. AndyR. I'd be double checking the terms of Stripe's contract and contacting citizen's advice. If they are authorising and taking payment on your behalf they should be responsible for vetting the transaction. It shouldn't fall to you to monitor every payment by the dashboard. Even if you did, the first ones would have looked kosher anyway. Good to see the proper use for a chicken cannon has been highlighted by PH. I miss watching Air Farce. After John Morgan died it just wasn't the same and the younger replacements in the group were bloody awful. TheQ: do what the government does, kick it into the long grass. Don't forget to switch off your phone at the end of the day. 3 deliveries expected today. One from Het Uiltje in the Netherlands containing our Christmas beers. (F*ck the Christmas Tree is on Fire) A 10% stout. Along with a few other winter warmers. T-5.4 hours of work left in the year. Have a great Chrismas/Festivus/Saternalia/Solstice/Kwanza everyone.

Greetings from the boring borough. 14 hours of work left for the year. I for one will be happy to see the back of 2018. All that motivational crap about "new year, new you" is just so much bullpucky. More like new calendar, same sh*t. Thoughts with John & Sandy. Hopefully the treatment will be successful and with the minimum of side effects. A good evening with Roundhouse & our respective partners was had. most of the beers were in the 11-14% range. Today I shall mostly be waiting for deliveries. As for banking, I've not set foot in my branch, ever. My original branch closed about 8 years ago and I've not had any reason to use any bank since. I do it all online. Like anything a little common sense goes a long way. Never do online banking over wifi unless it is your own and properly secured. If you are using a banking app on a smart phone, you are more secure on 3G or 4G than on a public wifi. Long and complex passwords, stored encrypted on your device means that any malware won't be able to record your keystrokes and gain access. These days I use my phone for 90% of physical transactions. Fast and easy. Unlike cash or a card, if stolen it is useless as they need a finger print to access anything. I have a backup phone anyway and with Apple, I can also permanently lock and purge all data from a lost or stolen phone. Online I use PayPal where ever possible. Never had any fraud. For businesses that no longer take cash lack of internet is not really an issue as most of the modern card readers can flip between wifi and 4G in order to process the payment. During the O2 outage a couple of weeks ago, one shop I was in simply switched card readers. Turns out they have 3 all with different network sims. Redundancy is a good thing. Enough rambling, back to working in the cloud. Today's bit of work is for some company's Polish offices. I'm in London, my junior dev is in Cardiff, my boss is in Oslo, the client is in Warsaw, the data store is in the Netherlands, and the application servers are in France. What a lot of these little Englanders and nationalists don't realise is much of the virtual world is borderless. If dealing with the UK becomes even slightly more difficult, much of the service based work can flip overnight to another office in another country. Enjoy the day.

Shame he is toast. It would have been good for Premiership supporters of other clubs to have one or more of the big money clubs out of Europe for a year or so. I can see the toxic atmosphere clearing in time for them to recover some form over Christmas.

Greetings all from the boring borough. T-27h working hours until I finish for the year. Tonight we shall be fighting the hoards of feral shoppers in the West End. SWMBO hath decreed a fully branched Festivus bush instead of the usual stick. I have of course added a circle of track around said bush. A long hidden cache of 7mm wagons has been unearthed for the locos to play with. I've also found 4 unbuilt Slaters and Parkside kits to keep me busy over the Festivus period. Not much else to say. Enjoy the day.

I'll see your Lynn Johnston and raise you another. https://www.fborfw.com/stripcatalog/indexkeywords2.php?q=train < if you want more.

For me it's 2 pints of a decent IPA like Thornbridge Jaipur, then use a cheap oven cleaner that contains sodium hydroxide (caustic soda) on the model. I find short applications of 30 mins followed by a rinse and reapplication if necessary. Additional IPA may be required after the model has been successfully cleaned.