Early Risers.

[AndyB]

Evening all

I'm completely shocked by today's events.

I may have mentioned previously that I grew up in Leigh and knew this part of the town really well; a close school friend lived on this road.

I can't believe that the place where I grew up and had such a nice childhood has seen this happen.

I'm lost for words.

[monkeysarefun]

6 hours ago, polybear said:

 

The first bit looks like a flashing light off a council truck, the one in the middle is a fish tank, and the one on the right a TV set.  This Bear'll stick to proper engineering - you can keep all your 1's and 0's thanks.....

 

Thats very quaint  but if I want a model of something I take some pictures, run them through clever software then send it off to the printer and a little bit later there it is in as many copies and at whatever scale I want ... 

 

If I had a stick long enough that I could reach the ón' button on my printer in the shed  I wouldnt even need to get my ar5e up off  the lounge from start to finish!

 

 

 

 

Edited October 16, 2021 by monkeysarefun

[Erichill16]

Evening All,

Not around here much this week. A combination of work, domestic duties and early nights being contributing factors, though nothing much has been achieved. Spent part of  yesterday at the shop fitters discussing colour schemes but will probably boil down to what’s available. We then went to Red Brick mill at Batley to look at furniture and the like and finally ended up at IKEA, just off the M62 at Leeds. Excluding lunch (rather then dinner as Red Brick mill is quite posh) we spent the princely sum of £5 on food bags in IKEA. 
A bit unhappy yesterday as I have not been able to help out a couple of friends.

SWMBO’s birthday tomorrow but she can’t decide what she wants to do  so as Bear would say “we’ll make it up as we go along”

Goodnight,

Robert

[TheQ]

Evening Awl,

Just back from the MRC..

A huge total of 3 people tonight..

 

Acted as a cooper, a dry stone waller, a joiner, with a little bit of painting and decorating thrown in all at 2mm scale..

 

Tried my new driving gloves, nice and warm they are too, it was very chilly when we finished this evening.

 

SWMBO saw some programme where they were using a similar singer machine to hers on some very heavy multi layered material.. she only had two needles left so I went to order more. Turns out there are 4 types available so I've ordered a pack of each .. one type is for sewing leather, so I suspect that will go through, pvc coated canvas.

 

Time I think to finish my muggachoccy,

 

Goodnight Awl.

 

[Tony_S]

1 hour ago, PupCam said:

thermally insulating the garage door in an anticipation of the looming winter

I insulated our previous garage door with the stuff that looks like foil covered bubble wrap. I added a brush draught excluder at the bottom and some rubbery strip at the top. It made a very significant improvement. The replacement door that rolls up has insulated slats so doesn’t need anything extra. 
 

Edited October 15, 2021 by Tony_S

[PhilJ W]

Evening all from Estuary-Land. Trying for an early night tonight as I'll be off early in the morning. Just got to get a few things together so its chuck them in the car and go.

[laurenceb]

Model railway exhibition in Burton tomorrow so night awl

[Pacific231G]

1 hour ago, PupCam said:

 

Well the Dyson has successfully completed it's first post-repair User Trial.      I was going to say it passed with flying colours, in truth the best it could manage was to perform exactly how it always has.   But I suppose that's some kind of achievement and the wallet was not inconvenienced at all so no Toy Tokens were harmed in the repair of this vacuum cleaner.

 

Good evening all

 

I looked at Dysons when I bought a vacuum cleaner many years ago but they seemed to have too many plastic bits that I'd probably break. Instead I bought a Henry. Not so elegant or clever, rather heavy and a bit awkwad to store but, as an essentially industrial product designed to work for  eight or  more hours a day every working day, I figured it would be pretty  bomb proof and so it's proved.  Twenty five years later it's still working as well as it did when I bought it.

It's also built in Britain and though I'm no jingoist that is,  given how our indutrial base has been hollowed out, a definite consideration. 

 

Apart from a briskish 31/2 mile walk before lunch I've been pretty well head down all day editing and writing so only saw the news quite late. I'm shocked and saddened.  In my experience, and I have through my work, both paid and uinpaid, had dealings with a goodly number of them, the majority of ordinary MPs, even those I disagree with vehemently, do go into it from a sense of public service and, with a few exceptions, do try to serve their constituents. 

 

 

Edited October 15, 2021 by Pacific231G

[Ozexpatriate]

2 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

Nice one grandad

I believe the colloquial gen-Z expression is "OK Boomer!"

 

The sardonic form of "On ya! Mate!" doesn't travel well.

 

Edited October 15, 2021 by Ozexpatriate

[PhilJ W]

Goodnight all.

[BSW01]

Good evening everyone 

 

After dinner, as there was nothing else planned, I decided to sit down an write email to my cousin in Malvern and my (half) sister in Canada. I’d promised to let them know if the proposed operation I may need was to go ahead! I did intend it to be just a short message. Yeah right! I ended up adding things I’d remembered I wanted to tell them and a few photos too, regarding what I’d been up to over the last couple of months and the email went into several large paragraphs. So, once I’d finished writing it I added a new sentence at the beginning in which I advised them both to put the kettle on and make a drink before reading any further! I usually do write them both long emails, but this one is a fair bit more than usual. 

Edited October 15, 2021 by BSW01

[BSW01]

Goodnight all 

[monkeysarefun]

It's always a poo ya pants moment when you move a pile of stuff aside and spot a scaly body hiding  in amongst it all. That jJust happened to me when mulching a pile of prunings I'd not had a chance to do last weekend cos the rain came.

 

 

Luckily like this time  it's usually a blue tongue lizard rather than a snake, I think in my time  here I've had 3 Eastern Brown Snakes, half a  Dozen Red Belly Blacks and a Tiger Snake but about 2 dozen blue tongues. 

 

 

They are harmless unless you really annoy them then they'll latch on which is meant to be painful but won't make you drop off your perch, unlike the Browns or Tiger snakes.

 

Perceived wisdom is "it's good to have a blue tongue in your yard cos they keep the snakes away" but no one's ever explained how they do that cos  their stumpy little arms are way too small to wield the snake deterrent of choice, a bloody big shovel*

 

*(Disclaimer it's illegal to harm wildlife including  the world's second most deadly  snake and huge fines apply so  if one is encountered a local wildlife organisation or snake wrangler should be called who will  come and catch it and rehome it closer to someone else's place)

Edited October 16, 2021 by monkeysarefun

[J. S. Bach]

Night Owl from the Piedmont.

[Ozexpatriate]

1 hour ago, monkeysarefun said:

... the snake deterrent of choice, a bloody big shovel

Many years ago my spouse spotted a snake in the back yard (in the Chicago suburbs). It was green and not very big and looked pretty harmless to me. However as a child she had stepped on (and was, of course, bitten by) a western cottonmouth viper* that was sunning on the back step and she was understandably afraid of snakes.

 

* If I remember the species correctly from her stories. (It might have been a rattlesnake.)

 

I was instructed commanded to dispatch the snake to the great beyond and turned (as one does) to the big shovel.

 

The next day the next-door neighbours asked "Have you seen a snake, our daughter's pet is missing?" We said nothing.

[BR60103]

This was computer day. The laptop stopped working, apparently. It looked like the mouse left button was kaput. So we bought a new mouse. And that didn't work either.
Then I found that it was the icon line at the bottom that was not responding -- icons on screen would work. Back to Staples with the full kit and nice tech discovered that it was caught in the middle of an update. We were advised to take it home and let the update have its way.

So we bought a new iPad to replace the one that was dropped a few weeks ago. It was supposed to setup and align itself with the old one, but the old one needs V10 or better and we have 9. For years it has told us it would update, but after a half hour of playing by itself it goes to sleep and forgets about the update. So I'm trying to do it by myself. I'm not sure if I've managed to get everything up in the clouds. And I can't see where to put in the SIM card.

 

[chrisf]

Hail smiling morn!

 

Being awake and out of bed is a good enough start to the day.  I will be leaving shortly for Uckfield.  What could possibly go wrong?  Everything!  Will the ticket office be open in time for me to catch the train I need, which is the electric from Corby and so something of an unknown quantity?  Yes, I know I should have bought the tickets yesterday afternoon but it's a long time since I have done a journey like this.  Will there be a recurrence of cramp in my thigh, which kindly struck while I was putting on my trainers?  I do hope not.  We can discuss the relative merits of sandwiches and a full English tomorrow.

 

Let the adventure begin!  Best wishes to all

 

Chris

[iL Dottore]

21 hours ago, New Haven Neil said:

….Oddly, recruiting Consultants, whom you would imagine to be the most difficult, generally were fine to deal with, it was the junior doctors who were a long way up their own......opinions.

That’s exactly my experience as well (and I’m in “the biz“).  I’ve worked with some of the most well-known and respected key opinion leaders of their fields: Consultant doctors who set the standards that their colleagues follow. And whilst they can be demanding, they are generally very easy to work with.  It’s the younger doctors who believe that they know everything that can be total PIAs (I remember a newly arrived to pharma junior colleague [an oncologist] returning from his first meeting with our marketing and regulatory team spluttering with indignation that he - a medic - was being told what to do by a non-medic.  Which was a bit rich coming from somebody who was so wet behind the ears that he wouldn’t recognise an NDA [New Drug Application]  if it had bit him on the bum)

12 hours ago, polybear said:

Bear mentioned the Chalk Pits Museum at Amberley a couple of days ago - well I got the chance to take this piccy whilst waiting to unload.....

 

 

Paws up all those who'd like that workshop.....too late, Bear saw it first.....

A very nice workshop indeed.

But that reminds me of a story I read about two industrial museums that were being set up about the same time in the 80s. The curators in Germany had to hunt around to find antique and vintage industrial machinery to fill the museum; the curators in Britain just went along to newly closed factories to collect Victorian machinery that only recently had been turned off for the very last time (but having said that there are some quite ingenious pieces of industrial machinery that the Victorians came up with that have never been bettered).

9 hours ago, Gwiwer said:

Depends what you want. The station platforms feature a couple of the usual coffee-and-croissant chains.  Just outside the barrier line you have Costa and Burger King. Beyond that it’s a ten-minute hike into the town centre which is bandit country

Just one piece of incredibly important advice for this situation:

Take - A - Picnic

7 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

Nice one grandad, but unless you are old enough to know who the Beatles were  this is the modelling  workshop you want!

 

 

 

I would say that this would be in addition to the workshop featured above, not instead of

(am I to conclude from his ageist comment, that our amusing simian acquaintance is one of those tattooed and pierced purple haired millennials?) 

7 hours ago, polybear said:

 

The first bit looks like a flashing light off a council truck, the one in the middle is a fish tank, and the one on the right a TV set.  This Bear'll stick to proper engineering - you can keep all your 1's and 0's thanks.....

 

I see that we have another NeoLuddite amongst our ranks  (I will be kind and not “out “the other NeoLuddites amongst us).

Given that polybear is using a computer (or tablet computer) to post on ER,  I suspect that rather than “embrace technology”  the bear gritted his teeth and offered technology a limp handshake (pawshake?) or am I being a tad unkind here? 

5 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

….Instead I bought a Henry. Not so elegant or clever, rather heavy and a bit awkwad to store but, as an essentially industrial product designed to work for  eight or  more hours a day every working day, I figured it would be pretty  bomb proof and so it's proved….

Yet another piece of evidence to support my contention that “when you gotta go, you go pro” Professional equipment is designed for long-term and constant heavy usage, it eschews the bells and whistles that might look good in a showroom but bring nothing to the machine’s function and furthermore it is designed to be repairable.

A busy day ahead: I have three cakes to bake, a Bistecca alla Fiorentina to cook sous-vide (before finishing on a white-hot griddle pan as my guests sit down to eat), spuds to prep for the patate al forno and a rummage in the cellar for a suitable wine. And that’s before I start tidying up the workshop.

As you may have sussed we have guests tonight. The menu? Bruschetta ai funghi; Bistecca alla Fiorentina, patate al forno, spinaci saltati al limone; castagnaccio, sweet ricotta and a vin santo (OK, you could claim it’s “just steak and potatoes”, just as you could claim that Ferrari is “just a fast car”))

 

And not a microwave or deep fat fryer will be used! 

 

Have fun boys and girls

 

iD

[monkeysarefun]

37 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

am I to conclude from his ageist comment, that our amusing simian acquaintance is one of those tattooed and pierced purple haired millennials?

Nah mate, in fact in 1978 while my mates were getting surfboards and AC DC cassettes I saved up my pocket money for yonks until I could buy a 2nd hand Unimat SL with a few attachments.

I still have it albeit with a 21st century electric scooter motor in place of the feeble mouse in a wheel that it came with. I'll never sell it although it's rarely used now.

 

But once you see some little model that you've designed forming and rising slowly out of a vat of resin in a 3d printer it's like science fiction and there's no going back after that..just think, you just need a bottle of goo and a beam of light and you can make anything you want!

 

I just like sticking it to the bear cos he knocked lamingtons a few months ago and to an Aussie that's as bad as accusing us of having anything to do with Fosters.

 

Edited October 16, 2021 by monkeysarefun

[polybear]

5 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

Luckily like this time  it's usually a blue tongue lizard rather than a snake, I think in my time  here I've had 3 Eastern Brown Snakes, half a  Dozen Red Belly Blacks and a Tiger Snake but about 2 dozen blue tongues. 

 

 

Bear has just been looking up the 3 nasties mentioned above - what do those who live miles from anywhere do if they get bitten?  Can you keep anti-venon at home until help arrives?

(It seems that some find pleasure in keeping such nasty ones as pets.  Now that is weird.  Bear sees them as targets for flamethrowers)

 

44 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

That’s exactly my experience as well (and I’m in “the biz“).  I’ve worked with some of the most well-known and respected key opinion leaders of their fields: Consultant doctors who set the standards that their colleagues follow. And whilst they can be demanding, they are generally very easy to work with.  It’s the younger doctors who believe that they know everything that can be total PIAs (I remember a newly arrived to pharma junior colleague [an oncologist] returning from his first meeting with our marketing and regulatory team spluttering with indignation that he - a medic - was being told what to do by a non-medic.  Which was a bit rich coming from somebody who was so wet behind the ears that he wouldn’t recognise an NDA [New Drug Application]  if it had bit him on the bum)

 

At what stage do young docs transfer from kn*b 'ed to reasonable I wonder?  Or is it a case that as the years have progressed the young 'uns are getting more and more up their own ar*es?

 

44 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

Given that polybear is using a computer (or tablet computer) to post on ER,  I suspect that rather than “embrace technology”  the bear gritted his teeth and offered technology a limp handshake (pawshake?) or am I being a tad unkind here? 

 

 

It's an old laptop.... 

 

18 minutes ago, monkeysarefun said:

I just like sticking it to the bear cos he knocked lamingtons a few months ago and to an Aussie that's as bad as accusing us of having anything to do with Fosters.

 

 

An aussie with a grudge match.  Oh dear. 

Bear has just had to Google Lamingtons to remind myself of the crime committed.  Dump the cream and the coconut and they'd be ok....

[iL Dottore]

1 hour ago, monkeysarefun said:

…But once you see some little model that you've designed forming and rising slowly out of a vat of resin in a 3d printer it's like science fiction and there's no going back after that..just think, you just need a bottle of goo and a beam of light and you can make anything you want!

 

I just like sticking it to the bear cos he knocked lamingtons a few months ago and to an Aussie that's as bad as accusing us of having anything to do with Fosters.

 

1978, eh? You write much younger….

Like you, I’m very much in favour of 3D printing and I’m just waiting for when hobbyist machines approach the quality of the (currently very expensive) professional machines. 3D printing in metal is a particularly appealing possibility (and it’s just occurred to me, following the discussion about repairability, that a good 3D printer that can print in a variety of materials could allow for the easy replacement of otherwise unavailable spare parts).

 

As for your final point, I am shocked, yes - shocked, that an ostensibly “cake loving” ursine should be so cavalierly dismissive of one of Australia’s great contributions to culinary pleasure (another being the Peach Melba). An egregious insult, I agree (that’s much, much worse than claiming all Aussies drink Foster’s).

 

But I have noted that for a patisserie loving Ursus maritimus, P Bear has distinctly limited palate. Perhaps we should feel sorry for him. Cut off as he has made himself from a wide world of patisserie pleasure? 

Edited October 16, 2021 by iL Dottore
Typo

[Barry O]

Ey up!

 

A mugatea has been delivered. Good job herself checked her flu jab appointment..she thought it was 10:13..wrong..its 08:13..close but no cigar.

 

For a technology developed to produce replacement tools in space stations the 3D printing malarkey is coming on leaps and bounds. It was used toroducebparts to keep the RAF VC10 L1 tanker fleet flying. 

 

Today has been designated "dowhatever you want day" by her indoors.. this sounds very ominous as it generally means "things which need doing" will be added to my morning job list for the next few days. PAH!

 

@chrisf and others enjoy your show today.. we have ours next week.

 

horrified reading the news. Not a lot else to say.

 

Stay safe!

 

Baz

[jamie92208]

Good morning to all and of course Sundry, from a distinctly cool Charente.  A good dayvwas had yesterday, chatting about models over lunch then a couple of hours at Tours watching the real things. No injuries were incurred and I got home safely.

 

The hens are now out and their pen/coop will be cleaned this morning.  Not a lot else is on the agenda but that might well change.

 

Horrible about the MP.  I used to have to sit in the surgery for Merlyn Rees when he was in our village. Quite what I would have donevif a PIRA hit squad had appeared I do not know. Nice fellow though who cared about people.  O.He gave the family gotva tour of the Houses of Parliament.

 

Chrisf I hope you enjoy your jaunt.

 

Jamie

[TheQ]

Mooring Awl, Inner Temple Hare.

About 4 hours sleep followed by 2 hours sleep, woken with a headache, for which pink pills will be taken shortly..

Ben the I want out Collie dragged me out, and then it was just a splash and dash even though it's daylight.. He's now snoring in his pit.

 

Junior doctors sound like some junior military officers, some think they are god's gift, some think they should interfere with everything, as they try to "make impression " in their career. They forget while officers command the military, SNCOs run the military.

It doesn't help the officers position that in the more technical jobs the serviceman may have a degree,(sometimes better than the officers)  and is not the uneducated poor who needs to be told every detail of what to do.

 

Plans for today, more boat work, shelving work in the mobile home, more mowing.

This will however not be while wearing the new riggers boots. They are trying to mould my lower paws not the other way around, all ankles sides are sore as is a ring around my calves at the top of the boots.

Other boots today to give lower paws time to recover.

 

Time for a muggacoffee and those pink pills.

[grandadbob]

Good morning all,

Cloudy here with a hint of brighter sky to the East.  Some rain is possible but it should be dry this afternoon with the chance of some sunny spells depending which forecast is correct.

Rugby watched last night and a good result for one team but not mine.  Mind you I don't think they've won up there for 6 years.  Never mind, there is another match to watch later.

Some financial stuff to do today as both my pensions landed this week and I've won a prize on the Euromillions.  Don't normally do this one but decided to have a punt for the big prize.  Didn't quite make that but have recovered £4.60 of my £5 investment!    

Hope those going to Uckfield enjoy the show as much as I did the Farnham show last weekend.  That visit did something to rekindle my enthusiasm so I plan to visit The Shed today and at the very least turn the power on and play with some toys.

Have a good one,

Bob.

 

Edited October 16, 2021 by grandadbob