Jonboy

This week i was at Reading getting a train to Gatwick, a sprinter was sat at the end of a bay locked out of use in the old FGW Barrie livery. I watched a teenage girl have a paddy about how she wasn't getting on that scabby old train....the service train then rolled in behind it, an identical unit in the new green and she jumped on quite happy....says it all I think about perceptions.

In general a businesses merchant agreement will forbid processing card payments on behalf of another entity...mainy because it makes the S75 card protection liability too complicated for the banks if there is an issue to unwind.

To spot hire a PDQ machine you need a merchant number with a bank or processor and the machines are around a £100 a week last time we used one(obviously long term hires are much cheaper per week). Running a merchant number means you have extra work to ensure you are compliant with PCS DSS rules(takes time and a monthly fee)

You can get the PayPal terminals that connect via a mobile phone but these cost £50 or so each and take a bigger percentage, that you need to factor into entry fees.

Is it therefore worth it for 2 Days a year of very low value transactions on entry fees?

About to take a wonder down to this show.

In other news there are various steels going up for the new multi-storey car park in the main car park at Didcot. It appears they are trying to build it over the live car park.

Trust me on this one, the shortest logical route, and the fastest (due to the roads being at capacity)are two very different things in this area. From Grove especially it is quicker by 15 minutes or so in rush hour.

Now if only there was a site for an additional station further to the west, that would ease a lot of the congestion issues in the area and provide a valuable public service....

take your map and look at Milton Park, south mead estate on the other side of the power station site, and Harwell a mile or so in the other direction....and bear in mind the three sites have around 10k jobs. Then plot routes from Grove, Wantage, the Hanneys/denchworth/southmoor, and many other local villages and suddenly the concerns make a lot more sense. The other routes are all at capacity to the point a single broken down car on any one of them can cause 30 minutes or more delays to many many people.

Also bear in mind that the other main route out of Steventon, (especially if after A34) being three miles through Drayton to Abingdon can take 30 minutes or more in rush hour on a normal day.

Apologies if this has been covered before, a few schools in town have 20 when lights flash limits around them BUT i have seen these lights on at night time, weekends and even school holidays so which limit do you abide by as the 20 is designed for specific times of the day monday to friday?

My sister used to be lollipop lady, the lights she had to protect her had a reed switch and timer, she waved a magnet underneath and the lights started flashing for a hour.

I had a skoda Octavia automatic on hire last year for a few days. When you stopped with the foot brake it stopped the engine under the eco stop/start function, when you released the footbrake it restarted the engine, regardless of the handbrake and park/Drive handle positions....so I could be green and and antisocial by holding footbrake on, or environmentally antisocial by running the engine when I didn't need too...

Could they be a deterrent to boats getting to close?

Sorry, Castle, but I've been listening to people telling me that soldering is not a black art for years, and I still can't do it without making a mess of it and/or making what looks like a join but isn't, especially electrically.  So far as I'm concerned, if it isn't a black art then the only explanation is that solder is a sentient material that just doesn't like me.

 

My current blt has been built and wired without the use of solder, as have the few whitemetal items of stock that I posses, and all work fine.  I do own a soldering iron, but it is safely put away in the back of a very inaccessible cupboard, where I hope it will remain so I cannot do any damage with it!

I had a demonstration of soldering at a exhibition, the 20 minutes or so were much more worthwhile than hours of magazine articles and online descriptions tried before to try and master it. I then bought a couple of diy electrical kits from maplin to consolidate the knowledge.

JonBoy, you need to learn how to setup/use w10.

 

edit - Reorte beat me to it.

I guess that is my main isssue with it really, it is the first bit of tech/software in a very long time that I just don't find particularly instinctive to use.

It may well be that I make my own life difficult by not liking video/sound as a medium in general and having an occasional stutter makes voice recognition a pita. I also prefer to locally host and backup my own data and am not a fan of cloud services.

At homeI have a win 10 2-in-1 laptop come tablet. In use it crashes on average once an hour at the moment.I cannot decipher the error messages if it stays alive long enough to find them. Take that with the horrid interface(tiles etc), the built in elements such as edge and cortana that you cannot truly diasable and the compulsory update schedule and I never use the ruddy thing if I can avoid it.

At work I happily support 10 users on windows 7 pro, a server, an email exchange etc etc.....

_{While this thread has not convinced me that a smart meter will save me money, indirectly this thread has.}

 

_{While thinking about my electricity use my mind gravitated to the grill on my cooker for obvious reasons. Suddenly light dawned ( 100W LED equivalent) as I am eating less than I used to why not push my food over to one side of the grill pan and only turn on one side of the grill. Instant 50% saving in my grilling electricity use, and all by using a smart me rather than a smart meter.}

I often use a small George Foreman grill for sausages, burgers, steaks, chops, bacon etc as they are cooked before the oven (or it built in grill) would be warm enough to use.

 

The winner must then go out and build a shed.

 

Xmas.jpg

 

P

Someone beat you to it...

http://www.thisisoxfordshire.co.uk/news/15210128.Cyclist_spotted__wearing_a_shed__on_morning_commute/

Interesting as a flat dweller it could well be considered antisocial to run said appliances at cheap times, if not forbidden within the lease as apparently many more recent leases are written.

We also have a car park with the spaces not adjacent to the building and any such cables would need to cross a path and the turning area. It could be an interesting experience to get the management company to install charging points without a legal obligation to do so. It could be further complicated by the fact our lease grants use of a space, but not a specific space...

Is the autosport subscription worthwhile?

I completely understand your frustration, this happens to me all of the time. There are some people who are just completely reluctant to send anything at all to Northeren Ireland and then there are others who will charge extortionate prices for delivery.

Sadly on the other side of the fence that simply reflects the costs we incur from couriers as a business. Both the Scottish highlands and Northern Ireland cost us around three times as much as the rest of the uk (most of our work parcels weigh 5 to 20kg).

https://www.youtube.com/embed/g9H7JE1ZjnY

Maltersers advert from the Paralympic opening ceremony...

I think a large part of the problem with the visual intrusion of the OLE is that we are suddenly seeing views at locations changed radically that we have been used to seeing unimpeded all our lives

 

No, I don't like the OLE either, but I'd also like to see the main car park at Didcot removed, the transfer shed put back where it belongs and the provender store rebuilt - somehow I think I'm going to be disappointed :)

with a 6 storey car park due to be built where the current station car park is, the overall effect will not be far off the provender...

Its looking a bit odd down between Didcot and Milton Park.

Different gantry's have over each track:

• a single registry arm off a single mount (vertical pole between the arm and gantry)
• some have two registry arms off a single mount
• some have two registry arms off two mounts - one each side of the gantry (bolted together for stability?)

I will try and get some photos tomorrow.

The Panalpina building has been divided into a few units around three years ago. It was empty for a year or so - DHL solutions (formally Danzas) had it before that for a pick/pack operation. Panalpina seemingly hold the back of the building near the railines, DHL have the front left corner as a courier depot, and a couple of smaller concerns utilise the office space (IT and fire alarm support companies), with a couple of spaces left on the address panel. 

The only train I can recall having seen on the siding in the last decade was a steam engine and gronk lashup from the railway centre which I guess was lowloader bound - this was a number of years ago. Network rail do seem to have kept up the maintenance and inspections on their part, based on activity seen over the years as driving to/from Didcot.

Was it (the UWC) in public service when issues were discovered? Just wondering if a local(s) had started using it and then had it taken away again?

There is a merge point at Milton Interchange A34 if you head onto Milton Park, this has signs saying "merge in turn" located on a bend....interesting moment of head scratching for me as a novice driver (over a decade ago I hasten to add) :

Does it mean merge like a zip or merge on the turn....

I have seen a few comments about the indicating right to go straight over a roundabout. On the roundabout closest to my flat I have had to adopt that strategy after around 10 incidents in the first 3 months of moving in, of other road users assuming no indicator he must be turning left....I tried returning to highway code recommendations around 5 years later and had two further occurrence's within a week on the same roundabout.

With a suitable speed it wasn't an issue, but my car does look nicer in its natural shape, regardless of who would be at fault in an incident....over indication will therefore prevail for some time to come....