Many Aberdonians appear to have adopted a very American attitude to perceived success and bollox to everyone and everything else!

They haven’t adopted it – they always had it. Look at the poems of Hamewith (Charles Murray) written in the Doric around 1910 – 1920. I forget the name, but read the poem about the farmer appearing before a bank committee of his peers to try to borrow more money or “Fae France”. Both show elements of this sort of practical, down to earth, get the job done, outspoken, self effacing, non-grudge bearing society I remember from my childhood.

Despite what some would like you to believe, Scotland is a culturally diverse place.

Colin

BigButSlimmerBloke – Member
>>Interestingly, Ive been reading some accounts from people in the area<<

research by kaesae?

No need for that. My mother lives about 4-5 miles from the course. Most people in the area think it is/will be a good thing overall, although they can see Trump has been throwing his weight about, sometimes with Salmond’s apparent collusion. From what I can gather they could accept the hotel and the course, but the idea of him getting permission for a housing estate where no-one else would get it was what stuck in the craw.
There are some very anti “antis” of course. But I think a poll last year in Aberdeenshire had 80% of those asked in favour of the scheme overall.

Disclaimer:- I haven’t watched the program, I’m unlikely to do so. I’m no fan of Trump or the SNP.

Colin

Have you tried using telnet to connect to your mail server? For example, from a command prompt,
telnet mail.vickerscreative.co.uk 25
will test and see at least if port 25 is blocked by BT. We use BT at work and at home, use our own and other smtp servers and have never had to use BTs SMTP servers. For me, your mail server responds on port 25 and 587 but not on 465. But if your not using ssl the surely port 25 alone should be sufficient.

Colin

Cougar
I really have nothing other than a negative view of traditional Chinese acupuncture. It only serves to muddle what people think about a modern western scientific approach. It has given us the acupuncture points, which are probably areas in people which, if needled, will give a good response, but that doesn’t help me with animals. All I ask is that you don’t tar all acupuncture with the same brush – where there is evidence that it can work and how it works, give that a reasoned hearing on its own merit. And realise there are some very well connected areas of pharma based medicine which have a considerable vested interest in showing why this shouldn’t/doesn’t/mustn’t work.

Colin

Well cards on the table – I’m a vet and I done some training in acupuncture and use it occasionally in animals. I too am very sceptical of most “alternative medicines” but had seen some people and animals who had reputedly benefited from it so thought I’d look at it a little more.
There is some pretty solid science behind some of the basics involved. They’ve done studies in rabbits where the insertion of acupuncture needles leads to measurably more endorphins in the cerebro-spinal fluid. This response works under general aesthetic, but not if the area needled is numbed by local anaesthetic or the nerves are cut. Nerve transmission is an important part of the response. They have measured which type of nerve fibre is stimulated by inserting acupuncture needles, and its largely fast pain fibres. Imagine you’d just put your finger in a flame. The fast pain fibres are the ones that transmit the message to the brain “get your finger out of there – its going to hurt” the slow pain fibres are the ones that transmit the message that you’ve burnt your finger. So that’s perhaps why people (myself included) report that strange feeling when acupuncture needles are inserted that they think its going to hurt then it doesn’t. Acupuncture needling stimulates these fibres in muscles and connective tissue where they are never otherwise stimulated unless there is a major accident – like a broken leg – where a major rush of endorphins is part of the body’s normal response to the insult.
In chronic pain acupuncture is thought to work by closing some of the open pain pathways to the brain that are kept open by the “pain windup” system.
And some of the large and meta studies which discredit acupuncture are fairly flawed themselves. There was a huge study in Germany in people with oesteo-arthritis where the control was still to use acupuncture needles, but not in traditional Chinese acupuncture points. Acupuncture needles are likely to work in all connective tissue and muscle, so needling a couple of centimetres away from the traditional points would still get a response. And indeed there was no significant difference between these two groups. However both acupuncture groups showed twice the level of relief of those only treated with conventional drugs. Yet because there was no difference between the two needled groups, it was deemed that acupuncture didn’t work.
There’s much about acupuncture that isn’t understood, it won’t work for everyone or every condition, but there is some solid science behind it. It deserves more scientific exploration, but that’s limited by its connections with the “traditional Chinese” approach, which make claims way far and beyond what is reasonable.

Colin

It also depends on the type of transaction (face to face are charged less than phone or internet), the type of business you’re in – some have more honest customer profiles than others, and the amount of business taken by card per annum. Any business taking £1m per annum or more is unlikely to have charges of more than 1.5% overall in my experience – probably nearer 1%.

Colin

Could be the booze. I try not to go for bloods in early January or just after anything else where ample alcohol consumption occurs. I’ve been caught out before.
They might well do the ALT test again – just to see if it was temporary. But ALT only appears in the blood when liver cells are being damaged. It indicates how much liver is being damaged, not how much capacity the liver has left to do its work. The only liver function tests (i.e. measuring the liver’s current capacity for work) I’m aware of involve 2 samples with some food consumption in between. Are they doing that?

Q1 = 0-25%
Q2 = 26-50%
Q3 = 51-75%
Q4 = 76-100%

You’ve got 101 points on your scale. If its only discrete numbers it should be
Q1 = 1-25. Otherwise your first quartile is 1 larger than the others.

If its non discrete (i.e not only whole numbers) you’re not allowing for the values between 25% and 26%, 50% and 51% or 75% and 76%.

Colin

Well I’ve had my share of Netgear, Belkin, Dlink, Buffalo and others. They all either died or developed problems in less than a year. Eventually, last year I put my hand in my pocket and got a Draytek Vigor 2820n. Absolutely fabulous. We’ve had one at work for nearly 3 years and it hasn’t missed a beat. Well worth the extra, I fear. But not cheap.

Colin

Have a look a the blog posts of J A Watson [/url] His hobby is checking out Linux distros on netbooks – he’s come across just about every wifi problem there is. ( I think nowadays there’s only about two combinations of driver/chipset that don’t work).

Cairn Terrier – like a smarter version of a Westie without the inherited health problems.

I don’t know where you get the idea that the vet will be paid in 5 days. One of the insurance companies we have to deal with – (Direct Line, as I recall) publicly stated they weren’t looking at claims for 6 weeks after submission if the payment was to vets. Scandalous.

Vets don’t accept direct payments from insurance companies with the possible exception of the good ones like pet plan because
a) if a claim is rejected, we need to then get the money from the client – often many months after the work was done – and we have another bad debt
b)we know how long insurance companies take to pay – usually weeks, not infrequently months
c) we have no contract with the insurance companies – their contract is with the client, as is ours.
Another thing that happens not infrequently is that we allow the client to delay full payment until the insurance company pays them – when the insurance company does pay the client spends the money on something else and fails to pay the vet.

I can give you chapter and verse, if you want.

Colin

Thanks for all the info. I went for the Lenovo A1 in the end. I’ll let you know how it goes in a few days. Installing the latest firmware is a must, I’m lead to believe.

Well all the cheap 10inch tablets have poor reviews or resistive screens or some other reason for not buying them. 7 inch it is. Now I’m dithering between the Lenovo and NATPC M009S. I suppose the Lenovo would sell better 2nd hand if I didn’t get on with it. (This is only some more justification for buying something I don’t really need – I never sell stuff I’ve just bought).

I don’t want to spend too much because I feel there’s going to be a lot of good Ice Cream Sandwich pads out soon – I thought I’d wait and get a good one of those.
Still I’ll have a look at the price of the 10 inchers. But I don’t anticipate using it much at home.

7″ for portability and price. I don’t want to spend a lot of money – I might by a 10″ pad later and spend a decent amount on it. Its only for travelling, looking at photos and the like.
I have a Desire – it’ll be bigger than that.

Bingley Roofing have been good for us

I do not see how blood sugar level directly stimulates the feeling of hunger ?.

Low blood sugar => hunger

More later
Colin

Ah bugg*r. I then go read (skim over the complex bits) something like this…

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate-hypothesis-of-obesity.html

and wonder whether or not the whole thing is tosh or not. He seems to be saying
– you can’t just focus on insulin as there’s lot of other interactions going on
– carb restriction will most likely reduce weight but you can’t escape the laws of thermodynamics – balancing calories in v calories out…

Wanderer,

I haven’t read the whole article , but from skimming the start I think I agree with most of it. The Carbohydrate Hypothesis of Obesity is just wrong. But that doesn’t mean diets like iDave don’t work, or that insulin response isn’t important – they are, but not for the reasons given in the Carbohydrate Hypothesis of Obesity.

iDave works because you don’t get hungry and you cut out a lot of calorie dense foods (dairy, starchy foods, and sugary foods). You don’t get hungry because you don’t have wildly swinging blood glucose levels. You don’t have wildly swinging blood glucose levels because after a few days on these diets you end up with stable and generally low insulin levels.

More to it than that, but its really an unrestricted calorie diet that works because you don’t feel the need to eat so many calories.

Colin

So, anyone have details of a high protein, highish fat, low carb diet, it sounds just the thing?

Just in case you’re not being sarcastic, Don S, iDave’s diet, whilst NOT low carb, has the same effect on insulin as I described above.

Colin

Jamie – see Captjon’s link above (reposted here for your convience)

iDave diet

FFS for the millionth time it’s NOT supposed to be A **** LOW CARB DIET!!!

iDave – sorry I realised my error about as soon as I’d posted. 😕
For me it becomes a moderate carb diet because a) many carb dense foods are excluded and b) my hunger (and hence snacking) is greatly reduced by being on the diet. Although I accept I could have any amount of carbs on the diet if I wanted through the beans.

Colin

CaptJon – you are essentially right. One of the real advantages of high protein, highish fat, low carb type of diets such as iDave’s is that they lead to very stable and low levels of insulin in the blood. This helps reduce appetite and hunger – which is a major cause of people falling off diets even when they really want to loose weight.

Whilst the comments about milk having a greater effect on insulin spiking than the sugar contained might suggest might be true, what causes insulin spikes varies greatly from person to person. I know of a lady who cannot drink coffee or tea (even black), because the caffeine causes her insulin to spike so severely that it can lead to hypoglycaemia and collapse. But she can drink any amount of milk.
Flavourings can do it, sweeteners can do it, Mars bars can do it (but that’s maybe not too surprising…. )

Colin

Thanks for both your answers.
mrmo – The names won’t change, each product has a unique wholesaler code. I like the idea of a yearly page – that’s what I want but I it to look the same as the other pages (rows with all the other info ) just for the amount column to reflect the total amount bought in the year. And is there a way to set it up so that if we started buying a new product, an entry for it would automatically appear in the yearly summary page?

Thanks again – I’ll go and have a play.

Colin

Did Gerald Ratner, Alan Sugar, Richard Branson, etc all have MBA,s or just god buisness sence, something that needs to be learnt by hands on experience, not from a classroom.

It doesn’t have to be learnt in a classroom, some will get by with experience. But some of it can be learnt. It certainly helped me.

And do you really rate Sugar and Ratner?

Jeez people….. Management is about people, not numbers and certainly not theory.

But surprisingly enough there is a lot that can be learnt on an MBA about people management, power, leadership, organisational behaviour that is both useful and not just “common sense”. That was what I gained most from my MBA, understanding how organisations could work, why people did what they did and how effective management styles could be affected by the type of business you were managing.
But managing is really about making decisions, and although most decision affect people, knowing that the Payback Method is generally rubbish for assessing the return on an investment, but that the Net Present Value method, although more complicated, is a good way to assess that return can be very useful indeed – although no people are involved.
I really enjoyed my MBA. It was hugely insightful – truly life-changing, although I’m still doing the same job as I was when I started it nearly 10 years ago. I was ready to give up on my business, sell up and move on, but it gave me the insight to understand what was happening, stick to my guns on some issues – its stopped my from making many mistakes. I went from being frustrated and unhappy to genuinely looking forward to going into work.

They’re right when they say its generalist – but I can still find the right page in the book if I need more information. I would agree with others about going to a good school if you can. Also I think I got more from it because I’d been managing some sort of business for 20 years before I did mine – you’ll get less from it if you do it too early in your career.

Colin

Some cheap Acer Liquids on Expansys.com at the moment as well.

Are you suggesting post viral fatigue and fibromyalgia are related?
Fibromyalgia is a much more specific condition – AFAIK. My mother had it and it took her over 5 years to get over it – although that is a long time for this condition.

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years since my father died of cancer about 30 years ago. I accept the fighting spirit and a will to live are a very important part of overcoming cancer, and of enduring what is required sometimes to treat it. However, despite that, many people die from cancer, as my father did. When some people speak about “will to live” or the like they sometimes seems to imply that those who die would not have done so if only they had been mentally stronger. That is unfair, and I can easily see how it can hurt those left behind – it still hurts me at times.
I can fully support anyone with cancer saying “I’m going to fight this – its not going to beat me” or the like. Its those comments – on this forum almost always from others – that imply that will power is always all that’s required to beat the disease that can cut to the quick.

Colin

I’ve had a 2008 ML320cdi for just over 2 year. Very pleased with it. Extremely comfortable, fast and pulls like nothing I’ve had before. But of course, that’s the diesel V6, the petrol V8 will be far less economical. I get well over 30mpg on long runs, I think my overall is just under 25mpg
I would pay the extra for the diesel, it just soooo torquey. Pulls a heavy horse trailer and a big horse up the hills around here as if its not there, where the Jeep 2.3CRD we had before was changing down and crawling. And the 7 speed auto box is very good as well – a very occasional clunky change slowing down at very low speeds but otherwise smooth and unobtrusive.
Over 20k miles in 2 years, one set of front pads only.
I think the previous model (2005 and previous) was more problematic.
I’d thoroughly recommend the car, but I wouldn’t have a petrol engine.

regards
Colin

and whats the rate of change? note I said “how long?”

A long time, by the looks of it. iOS is growing, but Android is growing a lot faster.
This, for example shows ad impression by platfrom in the US in July.

Colin

It can be difficult to decide when the time is right to put an animal to sleep. As the owner you will know better than anyone else your cat and how close to normal she seems. As a rough guide, any animal that is eating well and moving without apparent pain probably doesn’t have to be put to sleep what ever the rest of their condition might be. You say your cat is off it food and loosing weight. That’s not normal but if it is her kidneys – and it might well be – if it were her thyroid she’d likely be eating a lot – if it is her kidneys then she may well be in no pain.
From what you’ve said I think it’s inevitable that’s she’s not going to get better. Unfortunately many cats with kidney failure struggle on for many months before dying. Therefore its often not if but when you have to put her to sleep. In these circumstances, I think its better done sooner than later.
If you don’t want any veterinary treatment, then, when the time comes, make sure you ask for the animal to be euthanased or put to sleep when you make the appointment. From a vets point of view it can be difficult to judge what an owner wants if it isn’t made explicit and going through the options can make a difficult situation only more so.
Its never easy, but its often a last act of kindness, and the right thing to do.

Colin
(vet – old and old school)

You are never have allergic reactions to things the first time your body encounters them – you always develop allergies – although sometimes it only takes two or three exposures. However it can take a lot, lot longer and it is possible to develop allergies in your middle years – (but I don’t know how common it is). I used to eat salmon and trout without a problem, this year I started with nausea and vomiting every time I had some. I’m 56 🙁

Colin

I go a good one from Mobile Fun – its at work so I can’t tell more at the moment. Oh and its for a non HD desire, but they had HD ones as well. From the website it looks like I got the non HD version of this one.

And everyone sits there furiously typing away, trying to argue why their choice of handset is the bestestest. Surely we all have more interesting and important things to do?

This is moderately interesting in comparison to most of the stuff on here. Its all relative of course, and only matters if you care.

Colin

None of my friends have gone from an Iphone to an Android. Several have gone from Android to iphone, and never looked back.
Everyone I know who still has an Android phone wants an Iphone. No-one with an Iphone wants an Android phone.

Just to add to those who have indeed gone from an iphone to Android and liked it, my son did exactly that after having 3 iphones over the years. He got fed up with poor call quality, Apple’s One True Way of doing everything, and, with the last one, wifi issues. He now has an HTC Desire HD, and he’s delighted with it.
I have a Desire and my wife has just got a Samsung Galaxy S – the newer version. IMO the Galaxy S is the nicest of them all.

Colin

The main gondola is here
Its at the corner of Strada del Volpi, between it and Strada Statale 26, just across the road from where the map says “Refugio La Maison di….”

The one headfirst mentions is (I think) the newish Dolonne bubble across the valley.

Colin

Mull

Flippin Heck, I’m agreeing with TJ twice in 1 week…..

Monetier les Bains last year. Large area in 4 parts which are not particularly well connected, nice skiing but most of the villages are a little walk to the lifts. Free(ish) bus runs up the valley all day, but don’t miss the last one cause there are very few taxis!

The point is, although it always was excruciating, it NEVER was funny. David Brent as a character had comedic value, but, as ditch_jockey implies, Gervais now acts as if David Brent was actually funny. He wasn’t, he was a pratt. And Gervais behaving like Brent might have makes him a pratt too – and a humourless one at that.