Our door seals and locks on our Golf used to freeze shut every time there was a heavy frost (quite often in Derbyshire). An excessive quantity of silicon spray all over the seals and in the locks sorted them out, so no more pouring hot water over them. VW door seals on our car are made of some slightly fuzzy rubber, perfectly designed to trap a tiny bit of water at the top. Doh.

a friend of a friend who works for the BBC described the systematic waste of resource and money that allegedly happens at the BBC. Far worse than even the public sector I was told. So until the BBC appears to have gotten it’s house in order then I’d rather my money wasn’t swallowed up in some BBC black hole or given to some, established overpaid presenter when there’s so much young talent that doesn’t even get a look

I’ve done bits of work for bbc shows, and other channels, and I would describe the bbc as pretty tight to be honest. They are way less profligate than any commercial company I’ve worked for in terms of rubbish like expenses etc. Very very professional too, compared to a lot of companies. If you want to see profligate wasting of money, you should meet some ad / pr companies.

Waterlog by Roger Deakin.

I swam outdoors a bit before that, but it really inspired me to get into it a lot (to the point that I’m going down the river in my speedos tomorrow morning!).

Plusnet customer service seem alright on the few times I’ve had to deal with them – when I noticed our exchange was upgraded, and wanted a faster speed right away, rather than when they got round to doing the upgrade cycle, they replied to my message within 24 hours just saying yeah, no problems, you’ll get a text once the new speed is on, and sent me messages about various things while they were getting it done to let me know the progress.

Weird really given how bad BT customer service is and how they’re effectively the same company.

But say you’ll take the car – if they do the cambelt with their mechanic in-house.

No never, don’t be an idiot. In-house mechanic doing something means that they could do whatever they like, they could even do nothing. For example in my experience, when someone selling a car says they will ‘fix the engine problem that is causing the warning light to show’ (and is silly enough to put that in writing even!), they in fact permanently disable the engine warning light and do nothing about the engine problem. If you are going to get it changed, get it changed by a reliable independent garage, and factor that cost into the cost of the car.

Current model estates with roof rails for that little money are. It is also otherwise a very decent nick car for the price.

If it’s massively cheaper than other similar cars then it means there’s likely to be something wrong with it. Dealers know how much cars are worth. If it had nothing wrong with it then he’d have sold it for the same as other similar cars.

In my experience of car dealers, ‘my mechanic looked at it’ means it hasn’t been done.

Even if it has been done you don’t know when.

My experience of a ‘fully serviced car’ was that it hadn’t been serviced at all, or at least not to fix the things they claimed to have fixed. On the plus side Derby Car Centre ended up paying me the best part of three grand to buy back a car that I bought from them for under two, thank goodness for the small claims process!

When it happened to me though the garage refused to pay me back when I found out their mistake, and it took six months of court process to get my money back and get rid of the car, so in future I would treat anything that a car dealer sa’s that they don’t have a written receipt for as being a lie and so should you. Find another car. Way quicker than fighting them in the courts for months.

Possibly ‘aspiring’ is the same as ‘not’. So if you say ‘aspiring database analyst’ for example, that implies person who doesn’t know much about databases. I know when we write papers, we’re always told to be wary of anything titled ‘towards X’, because that typically means ‘tried to do X but haven’t managed it’.

I have to do different style CVs now for academia, but when I was doing software development stuff, I seemed to have success with:

name, contact details (very brief, don’t bung loads of junk on there, recruiters will take it off anyway)

4 or 5 bullet points (been a developer for 15 years, 5 years professional experience, list of about 15 languages and technologies I’ve been paid to develop with, 1st class degree in CS, lead developer on project teams of x people)

Hobs: (each job stating a)dates, job title, a thing I did there that demonstrates some knowledge and independent ability (eg. designed and developed feature x, which does something jolly clever using genetic algorithms and was jolly important to the company). Don’t write rubbish about team players and all that – something concrete that you did, and that can be demonstrated, and that shows skills that you want to push.

Qualifications:
For me this was one sentence – Xth class degree from X university + 4 a levels grades ABCD. I don’t bother with subjects for the a levels. If you’re applying for more certification type jobs then it might be bigger, but no one cares about your gcse and grade 5 piano.

Interests:
I put a very brief personal statement in saying that I’m a mountain unicyclist, swimmer, runner, and that I play the piano. Or something similar to that. I put it in for two reasons – firstly it gives me a guaranteed easy interview question about mountain unicycling, which is nice, and makes the interviewer remember me. Secondly, whilst it shouldn’t do, it has the potential to get you looked at by people who share your interests; I’ve had chats about piano playing in interviews before, and I’m pretty sure that it helped. Don’t bother with interests if you don’t have any though (or if they are going to the pub and watching TV).

Joe are you selling the sling?

Nope sorry, friends had twins recently* and needed a second baby sling for theirs, so it is on a long term borrow right now.

Joe

*I can’t wait to see their setup – 2 babies in the Croozer, plus some kind of bike seat for their 2 year old, will be brilliant!

Baby sling is for from one month using it as a pushchair according to the instructions, but that would feel a little early to me for biking personally. We started at 6 months and could easily have done earlier though. I think probably 3 months or so would have been fine. I’ve seen 12 weeks recommended by croozer somewhere on the web for ‘very gentle biking’.

The recommendations are different in every country – in Canada it is supposedly illegal to take an under 1 year old on the road, so they recommend starting at 1 there, whereas in the Netherlands it is normal to take very small babies on bikes, so they recommend quite young.

That sounds very familiar (including the descant recorder plus piano and trumpet). Except we were being told off by the old people for building dams in the stream.

I played a lot of games, plus I was programming at 7, kept doing it and my job has been as a programmer amongst other things, but I still swim a lot, bike a fair bit, run sometimes, walk, climb trees, walk up mountains for fun. And my 2 year old despite being exposed to technology still likes all that outdoorsy stuff.

I made her her first computer game recently too, which she seems to like really quite a lot, although it does slightly confuse people when she asks them if she can poke goats now (here it is).

We’ve had one since 6 months and Rose loves it. She’s now 2 and a half, and we still use it, it is pretty much as good as new after well over a thousand miles, except for a few scrapes where I bottomed it out riding down a too narrow track in Shinin, Cliff Woods.

Tons of luggage space – ours has been bike camping twice with all the gear for the two of us in the back of the trailer (and teddy bears, toys, books, nappies etc.) You notice the weight on the hills, but not so much on flat roads – I’ve done 40 miles in a day no problems (Belper to Tissington, Tissington Trail, High Peak Trai then back to Belper). Great for picnics, shopping trips. We have a double, which limits you to wide singletrack, but means you can give friends a lift, which Rose likes. I’d buy single if you were thinking of going for anything super narrow, although round here in Derbyshire I rarely have any problems (and I tend to only take it places where I know the route anyway).

When you first get it, use it a lot, and try to use it at nap time, that way they get used to it, and also learn to sleep in it. Ours is a real baby sleep machine – she’s had three hour naps at times!

Oh and if your baby is young, don’t forget the baby sling, which is also brilliant – Rose grew out at just over one but she was a teeny tiny kid then, so expect it to run out by one or so.

As for the comments above about dogs being a bit like sharp knives. I’ve just checked, and none of my knives will jump out of the knive block and attack any passing toddlers. I don’t let kids sit on the sofa playing with kitchen knives either.

Hey,

Ignoring your daughter – what risks you put her in are your problem and up to you, but no one has yet pointed out how antisocial it is to take a dog that you already know is a biter, out for walks and runs unmuzzled, when you are clearly incapable of stopping him biting people (if you were capable of stopping him, he wouldn’t have managed to bite 4 people so far).

Every time he bites someone, do you say to them “he’s never done that before”, like every other person who owns a biting dog seems to?

Town in the morning is full of people walking to work from the bus or train stations. The Starbuckeses are all open and doing a brisk trade too

That’s what I said – passing commuter trade.

How many people specifically pop into town for a coffee, when that isn’t on their way to work? If you’re a coffee place and you’re not on a lot of people’s way to work, how worth it is it to open early and late? I’d guess not very.

Our small town has several successful coffee shops that only really open 9-5. Lots of parents, lots of older people, plus people who work locally means they seem to be usually quite busy. Depends a lot on whether they get passing commuter trade whether early opening is going to be worth it I guess – I mean how many people really pop into town for a coffee before work or after work?

Oh, and I work part time, work from home, shift hours around etc – I think that whilst part time working is difficult in some fields, in a lot of places I’ve worked, allowing part time, flexible hours and teleworking would have been a piece of piss. And particularly in my industry (software development), companies offering flexibility, working from home and stuff like that seem to attract way way higher quality developers without paying any more money. People really underestimate how many really talented people are out there who don’t necessarily want to be tied down to a 9-5 plus commute and don’t need oversight of their work every ten minutes.

I’ve had idiots telling me off for riding on the road with a bike trailer – if people perceive that as too dangerous, it’s not surprising they get up in arms about shoulder rides. And obviously from the above, even some cyclists get up in arms about kids riding in bike seats without helmets on.

I have a picture somewhere of Rose aged one having a shoulder ride on my unicycle, although not on the road! Please no one tell social services.

Brilliant, thanks.

Take bttery out, then put it back in. Hold volume up and home button and then press power. If you get to a funny boot menu, that is good news.

If so, you probably want to do wipe / factory reset from that menu.

Before you do that, have you tried taking out the sd card – sometimes bad sd card can cause weird things on phones.

If it doesn’t work, bung on ebay as broken with a description, people pay silly money for stuff they think they can fix on there.

If you can get to the boot menu, there are probably more complicated things you could do with pc software to fix it too.

Depends if you wrote it or not I think. Different royalties for writer of the song and for playing a particular recording.

So if you wrote something that was covered by lots of people, possibly better than if you had a true one hit wonder, and certainly better than if you were a one hit wonder but someone else wrote the song.

I think that’s why there is a certain amount of tension in some bands about who gets writing credits.

Means if you write something obscure then it gets covered, you can make decent money – I bet the original writer of ‘you got the love’ is doing okay after it got high in the charts in the 90s with the source and recently with Florence and the Machine.

I wouldn’t worry too much – you can perfectly legally buy a cd with names and addresses of everyone in the UK on it, anyone in mail or telephone marketing owns it, pretty standard. Only won’t have you if you aren’t on the electoral roll, and have never given your address or phone number to any of the companies they buy data off. When I had access to a copy, it had us and our phone number on, despite being exdirectory, and having ticked every box on every darned form, goodness knows where it came from.

Bike hire is cheap and fun, and it’s a great place to go around on bike (lots of places – fat tire bike tours are one of the big ones).

If you like art, get one of the listings magazines (I think they’re mostly free, given away in bars), there are always loads of things on (mainly in old East Berlin).

Oh, and I can’t find any up to date info for this year, but they apparently have a very active and well known winter swimming group, the Berliner Seehunde, if you wanted to do something completely mental and masochistic.

Did you know Sonic Knives are used in Sandwich factories to cut prepackaged Sarnie’s that you buy in the shops?

The real scandal about sandwiches is that the two halves of a sandwich that you get in a packet aren’t actually the same sandwich, they are from two different sandwiches. Shocking.

8gb gone now too.

Balls. Kind of could do with one for work.

They can tell by looking at the packet headers. It is pretty simple to do. Some networks do it for all users, some networks don’t bother except with heavy downloaders. It basically tells them if it came from a device other than your phone (ie. if the packet is being routed), or if it came direct. Works no matter what the connection between the phone and the computer is.

On Android, there are hacky programs that let you get around it, but they are a bit of a pain to use to say the least, and whilst they are hard to detect, if you took the piss and downloaded absolutely loads, they could still tell by looking at the data itself.

What you want is a player that supports DLNA, and a DLNA server for your computer.

If you have an HTC with Sense, I’m pretty sure that it supports DLNA out of the box. It used to at least. Otherwise if you search google play for DLNA, there are a bunch of apps that will play DLNA.

On Windows, there are a few DLNA media servers, quite a few are free – eg.I think this one is http://www.serviio.org/

Once you have a server and a client running on the same network, in my experience it just kind of works, as long as your router supports something called uPnP, and has it turned on in the router settings (all modern routers do support this).

What you want is a player that supports DLNA, and a DLNA server for your computer.

If you have an HTC with Sense, I’m pretty sure that it supports DLNA out of the box. It used to at least. Otherwise if you search google play for DLNA, there are a bunch of apps that will play DLNA.

On Windows, there are a few DLNA media servers, quite a few are free – eg.I think this one is http://www.serviio.org/

Once you have a server and a client running on the same network, in my experience it just kind of works, as long as your router supports something called uPnP, and has it turned on in the router settings (all modern routers do support this).

We live at the bottom of a hill that is something like 15% at the steepest point, so I am trying to get Rose to learn to brake.

She can go down it without the brake fine though, it is just that her shoes get worn down quite quickly when she zooms down the hill.

Really though, you don’t need it at all unless you live somewhere crazy steep, and even then, you won’t need it for ages.

I don’t think they ever actually need anything more than foot braking – she’s ridden all the way round Derby BMX track without a brake for example, and that is quite a zoomy place.

Oh, and assuming you are of an age to remember the original gameboy,

http://ukuleleunderground.com/2008/03/ukulele-lesson-3-tetris/ – the only thing I can reliably play on the uke.

and the brilliantly named ‘Uke Hunt’ website is pretty good too:
http://ukulelehunt.com

Joe

Soprano is the one.

Get something with metal machine heads for tuning, rather than just pegs or nasty plastic machine heads, as it is easier to tune and they won’t break.

For tuning it, if you don’t have anything to tune off like a piano, then there are tons of mobile phone guitar tuner apps that will do the job. I have one called ‘gStrings’, which is on Android, and it is fine (and free).

Assuming you didn’t take the keys off (in which case you’re probably screwed – laptop keyboards are a world of pain to put back together). it’s probably something under the keys that you.

Tip it on its side and shake a bit in case something is under it.

Or blow air on it somehow. If you have a hairdryer with a cold air mode, that might do it, or a lens cleaning puffer thing, basically anything that’ll let you produce a decent blow of air that isn’t damp or hot.

windows phone is a bit of a gamble, as no one much uses them, so most developers don’t develop for them.

Iphone is nice if you like apple stuff, but bear in mind, you pay the best part of 500 quid for the privilege of having one, compared to keeping current phone and going sim only contract, and probably about 300 quid more than most other phones. Don’t be trapped into thinking that it is a ‘free’ upgrade – you pay a whole lot of money, just over several months, and you pay a lot more for iphone than other phones.

Friends seem to help our one get over things she is scared of. So that is certainly worth a try.

I swim a lot,so we started swimming very early, and she loves it now, has been swimming in rivers and lakes with me even. The very first few times she was a bit timid but she got confident quite quick. In terms of things we did – the big thing i’d say is that we never try and push her to be all that far away from us, or to do things she doesn’t want to do. Any time she is scared, she can have a cuddle, stand on legs or whatever and that is okay. I think she is more confident knowing that there is always a safe fallback position to go to.

I think swimming lessons vary in terms of how outcome focused they are – some try and push kids to do particular things towards swimming, whereas others are more like a nice group where you can get ideas of fun things to try in the pool. We did them for a few months, very much the latter type, and then just started taking her ourselves, at least once a week, often twice, and now she is very very confident. Oh and I haven’t bothered with armbands and stuff – they always seem like they are geared towards encouraging kids to let go of you and swim away from you, personally I’m cool with Rose holding on until she feels confident enough to let go. She now has a pool noodle, which she does like, but it was only really much use after a year or so. It depends slightly on how wedded you are to the lesson system, as some types of lessons take the parents out of the water at three or four, which means enforcing armbands then.

Oh, and I don’t know if they work for yours, but ‘Woolly and Tig’ on bbc has an episode about the swimming pool. They are stories about being scared of things and overcoming them – worth watching that, seems like t_ey help Rose when she can’t understand something.

Equity in a listed company has value. Anything else is just a promise that will probably be worthless. Knew loads of people who got shares in tech companies as part of pay, and no one who ended up with anything valuable. For work now, get paid in money that you can spend now.

It would appear that the great Execs/CEO’s, COO’s of our collective corporate companys somehow seem to manage what appears to be a 24hr life at work including global travel and so forth, seven kids and a time consuming (ie property renovation) hobby, whilst studying for a Masters at the weekends and making appearances at the local NFL teams speeches.

Simple. You are stinking rich, you pay someone to make things less hard to do.

Property renovation as a hobby = pay a fancy architect / project manager etc, turn up every so often to chat with them, swing a hammer or whatever, but no real pressures.

7 kids = fancy nanny, private school; just cos you have all the kids doesn’t mean you actually see them.

Studying for a masters probably means an MBA = the most spoon fed course that you can do at any university; not that it isn’t challenging, some of them are proper hard, but they pay ten times as much for the course and hence get a whole lot more support and mentoring from the university for their work compared to your average student.

Obviously you pay people to drive you around = extra time to work.

You pay people to cook and clean = extra time to work.

When you’re a CEO, things like going to football / baseball games are time at work too, promotion/entertaining.

I’ve taken Rose (2) clambering up boulders at the bottom of Black Rocks and up the easy way to the top (round the side).

I haven’t done any proper climbing since I was in Scouts though, so am considering doing some kind of course so that I can actually take her out, as whilst I know loads of climbers (and some instructors for that matter), I never seem to get the time to go out climbing with them.

Oh and if you’re a student, you can get windows for cheaper I think – about seventy quid or something.

I need to get windows on my mac but it is so that i can run solidworks. So far i have installed bootcamp that is on the machine and now need to put on a copy of windows but im not sure where to get windows from it needs to be vista or higher to be compatable with solidworks. Any help?

Just go to a shop and buy it. Most computer shops sell it (even Tesco will sell you it if you go to a big one). If you’re a home user, it is not very expensive (about £40-100 I think), if you are business, it is about £150. There are various ways to get OEM versions, which are a bit cheaper. If you have an old windows disc for XP off a computer you don’t use any more, you might be able to use an ‘upgrade’ version.

Given solidworks costs about a million quid, and your mac cost you a fortune too, £100 for a windows licence doesn’t seem too bad.

if you went for an interview in a clown suit you wouldn’t get the job.

I’ve been to a few interviews on a unicycle, and I *always* put mountain unicycling on my CV. Being slightly different from the last person guarantees they’ll remember you, and the odd hobby gives you a guaranteed question that you’ll be able to talk about interestingly.

Have also worked with a few people who turned up to interviews (and came to work later) dressed as full on goths. Clearly had the skills and ability to do the job, so it appears they got the job. Sorted.

It obviously depends what it is, if you’re talking corporate management or sales, they probably are a lot more about appearance than just looking at your skills or ability, but for surely for most jobs having a tash is going to make no difference.

I’ve been regularly swimming in cold water (last week it was 25 minutes in 9 degree water). There has been some research that suggested that extreme cold adaptation might improve your immune system response. I am experimenting with whether this is true.

As I understand it, the thing about cold viruses is that if the germs get into your nose or wherever, you have a 95% chance of catching them, pretty much independent of how strong your immune system is. Hence why us with small kids tend to get quite so many colds no matter what.

So the only measure is how long it takes to get rid of them.

In the last month, I’ve had three colds, which seem to have lasted less than a week each, with gaps in which I have swum, done a running race, biked to work etc.

So I haven’t had the long stretches of no exercise that I had last year, but I have had a bunch of colds. So I’m currently a bit inconclusive on my experiment. It certainly feels jolly good to jump in the river in winter though, so I guess I’ll keep doing it whatever.

If you go to a club get coached how to do one properly then practice on widths.

Made a massive difference to me getting good coaching. You’ll get better advice at a club than on here.

If you don’t want to get proper coaching, there are probably multiple ways to do it, but a couple of bits of advice above differ from what we were coached, so might not be a good idea:

Before working on the turn, make sure you can somersault at least once in the shallow end from a prone position as it encourages you to use your hands to bring you round.

Whilst being able to somersault is good – we were taught not to use your arms during a flip turn: Last arm pull from the swimming puts both arms behind you, then you turn over, your arms stay in exactly the same position, ready for the push off. Head and body tumble in between the arms.

You do have to twist at some point to get face down again, I tend to do this before pushing off from the wall as you get a better glide that way.

Like someone else says above, we were taught to twist after or during the push off, never mid turn – do the turn clean and do the twist as you come off – look at the Thorpe video up there, he does feet touch, then push off and twist – he’s maybe slightly round before he pushes, but not much.

The bonus of that is that while learning, you can do turn, push off upside down, and just let yourself come up without a twist at all. Once you have that down solid, so you’re always coming off the wall straight, you can bring in the twist. If your pool has pull buoys or floats, you can start by doing this arms behind you, with two floats in your hands, head down, kick into the wall, turn, kick off, which helps reinforce the whole thing about arms not moving at all.

Oh, and the big thing that made them click for me, was realising that at the midpoint of the turn, if you look towards your feet
(don’t mess with where your head is, just turn your eyes down), you can see your feet heading towards the wall. Until you have turns super smooth, keeping an eye out for where your feet are means that you can see what you’re doing wrong each time, and see how well you’re planting them. It is tempting to think that you can’t see anything during a turn and you have to do it by feel, but keeping your eyes open helps you to learn much quicker until you can do it by feel.

No noseclip unless you’re allergic to chlorine (I am unfortunately – you’ll know it if you are – sneezing for days after every swim session). I have to wear one for pool swims and I hate it (hence probably 75% of my swims nowadays are outside), it is uncomfortable and a fiddle to put on.