Jonboy

The race highlights are 00:05 Monday morning…

2 hours ago, Northmoor said:

 

I had to go up there to finish the job.  The installers had simply unrolled the fiberglass insulation at right angles to the beams, over the top of any boxes that were stored there which they hadn't even bothered to move.  It took me about an hour to get the rolls to match up and form a reasonably even layer across the roof.  The installers had spent about 30 minutes and charged the nation something like £500 for their efforts. 

A friend moved into a council house about 15 years ago and found the tv aerial was seemingly mis-aligned so I popped into the loft and found it was 4’ deep in insulation. It emerged the housing association policy was that each time a property changed tenants loft insulation had to be installed, rather than simply checked it was to standard…

I did some internet based waffle recently suggesting drive-thrus should use anpr to print the number plate on the bags to allow littering motorists to be identified….would make sense to me….

9 hours ago, F-UnitMad said:

Which doesn't change my second point, that none of them had any content on North American trains or modelling, thus severely limiting how interesting I would find them.

 

I would recommend you drop your interest in large and varied rolling stock; huge or varied infrastructure; wide variety of scenery, widely varying maintenance standards; and all the other problems that come with the American prototype and concentrate on learning about the only right way, the Great Western to solve that problem

7 minutes ago, Hroth said:

No matter how well things are drummed into you in preparation for O levels (my dad would have said "School Cert") or the current examination syllabus, unless you use (or teach!) that knowledge frequently, then only fragments remain as the years pass by...

 

Oh well...

Tell me about it, currently picking up algebra again for an evening class, 20 or so years after learning it 

8 minutes ago, rob D2 said:

 I have maximum respect - he got himself a spice girl .

 

I suspect we have to be a certain age* for that to be thought a good thing

*or more particularly a certain age when they were at their peak…..

35 minutes ago, Kris said:

Oh dear, who would reverse over a level crossing?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-58848062

Looking at street view there is a narrow bridge with a 5 ton weight limit 100 yards past the crossing and nowhere to turn around…

the other side is a T junction with the level crossing to the right and a 7.5 tonne “except for access” limit 300 yards to the left…

edit: the T-junction looks to be leaving an industrial site so a bit of a red herring…

I don’t work on the railways and never have.
 

I do remember a few years back getting on a packed peak service (unusual but had a meeting to get to) and a gentleman who’s badge identified him as Mark Hopwood and another suit being stood next to me and checking with the guard if anything more could be done to make conditions more comfortable for passengers, such as was there more space in the end carriages he and his colleague could go and direct people too to assist the guard…

It was a comedy show around a decade ago. Like many such shows it had the odd gem surrounded by a lot of dross…

46 minutes ago, Tony_S said:

Actually it would be my problem as if the smart (gas) meter is unpowered it will cut off the gas which is why I wanted to know what happened with the battery. It hasn’t been a problem yet. When it does need replacing, I will let RMWeb know  what happens too.

We had one of the earliest versions at work on the gas meter and it went the best part of 10 years without the battery being changed before we moved out…

(We also had a digital electricity meter display stop working and had to go through a process of monitoring usage and agreeing a figure to pay for the time it was not working. We didn’t accept their first figure as a they were trying to compare late winter to late spring and it was a bit of a hassle, so we then went over to making sure every bill was actual reading rather than estimates to avoid a repeat).

6 hours ago, 33212 said:

 and the video box has shown me scantily clad women, giraffes and some feathered birds..

On the basis that web adverts are normally served follows micro-auction linked to tracking cookies and your browsing history the mind boggles….just what are they trying to sell you????

Not sure of sumup or Izettle, but If you are only using a square terminal and their app to process payments, and do NOTHING else with cards (no storing, collecting online/by email/by phone etc etc) then there is no Payment card industry requirements - https://squareup.com/gb/en/townsquare/pci-compliance .

(and yes I am well aware of the deep joy a PCI DSS compliance SAQ and scans bring…..).

Just now, RJS1977 said:

A lot can depend on the type of organisation running the event. A small organisation holding a show once a year might not be able to justify getting a card reader for such infrequent use.

The basic ones I mention above cost £30 (£17.99 in WH Smith on Sunday!) and then around 2% of the transaction value in fees without a long term contract.

I got cash out at the weekend and had to try 4 cash points before finding one with cash available….

1 hour ago, Kris said:

some venues do not have mobile signal needed to run the card readers.

The no-contract readers used by stall holders etc these days connect to a mobile phone via Bluetooth.
The phone can connect to the internet via the phones mobile signal, or via WiFi if the venue offers it, which can increase flexibility.

I personally would suggest there is a element of blame on the retailers customers demanding the lowest prices at all times, and the subsequent squeeze on margins and capital employed for this long sustained race to the bottom.

Is it simply capitalism, or a very long game of robbing Peter to pay Paul?

Reminds me of when our late Mika was around a year old…She had smashed the hock in a rear leg and the vets had fitted a metal plate to fuse it into a solid shape, rather than amputate, and then put a cast over it.

She had a cone to stop her attacking some stitches, and we had also resorted to putting a baby sock over her cast to stop her attacking that. We then had her in a cage when we were out, but let her out into the living room when we were at home.

I came home at lunchtime to check on her and duly opened the sliding patio door around 2” for air and let her out the cage, then go to prepare my lunch.

I walk back into room to see her at the patio door and put her neck through first then force her head down, sliding the door open and immediately start running under the hedge and down the street….queue me bursting through the hedge in front of the village hall car park, and chasing the cat in its cone and bright coloured sock down the street….her wobbling all over the place as she hadn’t run on her injured leg before…

10 hours ago, John M Upton said:

One thing that I can't fathom out though is if we have a shortage of HGV drivers, container ships stuck outside ports unable to load and supposedly major shortfalls of essential supplies across the board, how come lorry loads of Halloween and Christmas tat have still managed to make it into the shops?

 

Bit of a massive fail in the prioritising department there....

Our Halloween and Christmas stock, that all goes to small independent shops, is typically ordered in January and arrives June through September (Halloween in June, Xmas July to September). Our competitors run on a similar timetable.

We got our first Halloween container in mid September and the Xmas delivery’s start this week. The stock was ready in the normal timescales but we have struggled to get it on a vessel.

Our freight agents managed to get our stock in two weeks ahead of our competitors (and the resulting spike in demand almost broke our warehouse team).

We are seeing the hauliers book final delivery to our warehouse almost as soon as the vessel leaves Asia/USA, instead of as it reaches the uk port and we have had to take afternoon delivery slots on almost every container. This is a pain as it means you are almost always the drivers second run and are at the whim of whatever traffic, unloading and port delays the driver has already encountered and you have to hope there are no issues unloading such as pallets having shifted in transit needing handball (whereas morning deliveries often mean the driver is there before the team arrive).

It’s frustrating, I like the gold price point, and the content of the magazines, but I have given up reading them since the change from the app to the browser, because it is an awful user experience on the iPad with pages that don’t simply fit to screen. This means every page needs scrolling up and down on and isn’t enjoyable.

I will therefore be looking to downgrade my revenue to Warner’s simply because the experience of the benefits (beyond mweb) is poorer than the experience when I initially signed up.

5 minutes ago, 30801 said:

 

They don't hold any information like that. Hence the other bit of hilarity where ambulance drivers have been sent letters suggesting they go be HGV drivers instead.

Funnily enough that was why our local ambulance service stopped training C1 and made people acquire it privately before joining, as they kept training people only for them to depart to go lorry driving….20 years ago or so….

I did say to the wife this morning that I suspect the army would be better deployed in the queues simply to slap around the head and ask what are you thinking of anyone who has more than half a tank for a few days, rather than the 150 drivers to end the “crisis” in around 8500 filling stations…..

Round here there was the issue that to meet the government set targets (something like arriving at 90% of category 1 calls, such as suspected heart attacks, within 7 minutes)  the local ambulance had to focus their resource standby points based in the percentage of population. I.e the towns and city that housed 75%+ of the county’s population, and shift patterns focused on typical levels of activity.

This meant that the rural areas were seeing a far longer response time simply because the ambulance service were doing what the government told them to do via Whitehall mandated targets…..the CFR schemes in the area initially linked up rural members of  St John Ambulance and the Red Cross (and then got other members of the public to join the schemes directly), with the right training, equipment and the correct communications with the ambulance service to get treatment started whilst the paramedics and ambulances made their way there .

I did originally join a scheme and all the calls I was sent to were within 2 miles of home, and one was with 100 yards. The ambulance service were normally there within 10-15 minutes but the cfr scheme meant treatment was started and AEDs were deployed more often within the critical timeframe.

(Now I live within 5 minutes of the local ambulance station there isn’t a local scheme to join).

It would have been nice to have many more ambulances in the county around the clock, but this comes up against the same sort of funding arguments the railway encounters:

• how many extra idle trains should be sat around just for summer specials/football ex’s etc.
• shouldn’t there be fleets of coach’s and drivers sat around just in case of disruption or line blockages.

1 hour ago, big jim said:

What’s a cfr? 

I am assuming he means a community first responder, who are local residents that assist the ambulance service by standing by with oxygen, AED and other medical supplies (and having committed to a not small amount of training) in their local area by providing a very quick local response, often in their own vehicle, until the big boys arrive…

Went out tonight and all four petrol stations I passed seemingly had no fuel left…

One assumes these buyers are all registered in accordance with the Petrol Storage regulations that govern storage in home or club premises of volumes between 30 and 275 litres….

The other minor confusion can arise because some industries and company’s call Taric codes by different names such as:

• HS
• Commodity
• (Combined) nomenclature
• Customs Tariff Code

This comes about because the combined nomenclature is the international  harmonised system for describing commodities….(how the EU ended up with taric I don’t know….!) but is basically a big index of items and an identifier number.

That would explain why I couldn’t reconcile the image to street view….