A friend of mine is a professional sound engineer and an accomplished guitarist. He was taught at a young age to always wear earplugs or good quality ear monitors. As it is his business he cannot afford to have his hearing deterIorate any more than the ageing process naturally does.
He wears some very expensive custome made ear monitors (£800 I think) which are natural coloured (matched to his skin colour!) and expensive earplugs at other times.
He always says that one severe moment of feedback could wreck his hearing enough to make it difficult to run his business and certainly hold his guitar playing back.
Standing next to the speaker stacks at a gig is stupid or playing in a band without ear protection equally so.
Phil Collins can now barely play the drums now he has such severe hearing damage and Pete Townsend has severe tinnitus which he puts down to an pyrotechnic explosion at a gig that went wrong and years of loud headphone use.
EDIT Phil Collins actually can’t play due to hearing loss via a viral infection and a back problem. I’m sure I heard an interview with him that said it was due to loud drums but I may have been mistaken.

My wife’s engagement ring cost £18 and the wedding ring £20. And those are the ones she wanted. My weddIng ring was only £70 as I had to have a titanium one for durabIlity for the manual job I did.
£4k on a ring is simply insane. Our whole wedding was half that. If my soon to be bride expected that sort of expenditure on a ring then she would have to expect me not to marry her!!

Well I am sympathetic to someone out in the cold but if you read past the headline….

He burgled the house for the keys previously.
Entered the house, unlawfully, and stayed in it for 4 days.
Didn’t leave when asked by the owner.

So the six months might be reasonable.

He might not have had a jail sentence if he hadn’t waived his right to a pre sentence report, which would have brought into play mitigating factors such as the fact he had nowhere to go, other personal circumstances.
So yes it might seem harsh at first glance but he didn’t help himself in the slightest, did he?

beefy – Member
All it needs is a shopping basket
Mary Poppins

Looks better than your bike. 😉

I’m with Hora on the rounds thing. I barely drink if at all and don’t want to be part of the “rounds” as I will have to pay for loads of drinks and hardly have anything myself. So I just say beforehand that I’ll get my own because I don’t drink much, said in the right way and I’ve never had a problem.

Going to cost me £140 to get an iPhone 4g 16gb. Crikey.

I was thinking about the blackberry torch, latest one.

Can’t afford to repair my phone I’m afraid. I’d like to spend less a month than the £35 I do now. And yes, I do know you can get iPhone simplicity sim card for less a month but it doesntninclude unlimited data.

Would that be due to the huge usage they would have been through though – in your opinion – and would any other phone been any better?

Warm car heater + toxic veg toots is a combination that has been known to kill small children.

Breeeeeeeeeeblybreeeep!!!

Well post something of yer own taste up then and stop moaning you miserable git!

I did – read your own thread!!

Proper fun punk for the masses…..

And you can’t go wrong with the Misfits….

What’s with all the rubbish dance music? “sigh”
I’m not dancing to that
(mutters moodily into his pint)

Just heard them play it live. Simply brilliant and so much fun!

I fully support the enforcement of the forum rules and have said so many times. I thought this was improving the forum.
However, I have now learnt that there is now a more covert approach the mods are taking to remove posts which they just don’t like rather than them breaking the rules.
So I for one will be here a lot less, if at all, in the future as I don’t think I can say what I want to say, even if its within the rules. I don’t want to get a ranting childish “telling off” every time I fail to wave the Singletrack flag hard enough. If they want to run a forum which only says what they want to hear then maybe they should restrict it to ST staff and their best buddies.
I fully expect to be banned now for daring to criticise. Oh well.
Have a nice Christmas y’all!!

Errr I work for the government in a regulatory position. Winkies are frowned upon. 😀

In an ironic twist my post gets deleted for daring to review the magazine. 🙁

She always told us to leave the plug in the sink and bath in winter as it helped stops the pipes from freezing …. coincidence or not … i don’t know but it has been way colder this week and no repeat
Trying to work out why that makes a difference. So far I have failed.

Yes it is odd that one, but if it works??
Maybe by having the plug on it stops the air blowing up the pipe from the outside an making it colder – but the u bend water trap should do this anyway.

I’m glad we live in a terrace house with full internal soil pipe and a heating system not installed by a muppet. 🙂

My small Amazon order took a while too, and so did two boxes I sent to relatives direct first class. I reckon you should get it about now really. Unless you bought it as a Marketplace item rather than direct from Amazon as in my experience it can take a lot longer, depending on seller

I share your pain.
I found that Wilko’s sell those proper tape dispensers you slip a standard roll of tape into for about £1. Cut prezzie wrapping time down by hours.

TJ and mansonsoul in “not getting the joke” shocker. 😉

It is an ACTUAL FACT that if you travel on buses you WILL catch leprosy and your hands will fall off.

This is a guess but I think if it’s pewter then it’s probably cast, so might not like being bent at all.

It is incredibly difficult to get the front wheel of a bike to lock up IME.

Do you have the finger strength of a toddler?

Happens a few times every ride for me.

Eat a load of pies, then you’ll fit it ok. It’s a win win situation.

-11 on way to work this morning. Didn”t think it was too bad, but I had to stop at the car dealers to get a small fault rectified and when I got back in the car (they never touched it in the end) the door wouldnt shut. Took me ages to free mechanism so I could shut it properly and drive off!! Quite funny really.

London being affected by adverse weather conditions has an global impact in terms of trade and commerce and that

But that’s only because they’re a bunch of big girls blouses.
Sorry Elf, I like London too but grinding to a halt with -7 means they probably shouldn’t be a centre for business. Maybe the northerners who can cope with a slight chill would be better at it.

I’ve heard a saying that if you have a bad cold you will struggle to pick up a £20 you find on the floor. If you have flu then you wont even care it’s there.

EDIT – beaten to it!!

Just to head off the inevitable comments – I understand there will be loads of people who have much worse illnesses than flu this Christmas and I hope they will recover. It’s thinking that it could be much worse that makes the flu easier to live with for me.

PGP – I’ve had it twice in three years now, last time was Christmas eve till new years day. I have quite a bad fear of needles but I am going to beg on my knees for the flu shot next year as I can’t face having it again.
I’m on antibiotics now as my throat was pretty bad but it’s getting better now. Should be 100% for the 25th. 🙂

There is absolutely nothing you can do I’m afraid. You can take stuff that will alleviate the symptoms but otherwise if you have proper flu you’re going to hav to ride it out. And unless you are bedridden and unable to do anything you don’t have flu, just a bad cold.
I had flu proper 3 weeks ago. Lost 11lbs in 1 week, don’t really remember much of that week. Still trying to recover now.
If you have a temperature then just take as much paracetamol as the instructions on the box allow. Don’t bother buying any of the expensive cold or flu remedies as their basic ingredient is just paracetamol anyway.

I’d rather have a 1.6 petrol engine than the 1.7tdi (110bhp 200ft/lb) I have in my company car. Didn’t get a choice though. And even though my car is the “Eco” version I don’t get more than 44mpg with m62/town driving. 🙁
My 1.6vvti Corolla got 39mpg with the same driving and drove a whole load better.

What you MUST do is be very specific when ordering your air. It is easy to order the wrong thing and it will have a big impact on performance. People who have filled their tyres with hair, chair or bear will back me up on this.

I am proud to say I am PP’s brother and best of alll, many people say I look like him.
That may mean I am slightly awesome!!!

Alto are good, well they were 8 years ago when I was impressed enough to get a £400 one. Hose split in the end (my fault) and I could afford to repair it at the time so I got a smaller Karcher one.
If you are going to be using one a couple of times a week or more I would really recommend a an induction motor washer. Lot more money but buy cheap buy twice as Surf Mat has found out.

You bought a Halfords own make one? Well there you go then. Total cack.

Well I probably sold hundreds over the last few years and I processed ALL the returns and tested them as well. I cannot remember getting more than 1 or 2 that were genuinely faulty. However the own brand ones that you are looking at (generally made by NuTool or similar ) we probably got 50% back within a year. We were able to buy the own brand ones cheaper as they were expected to have a much higher failure rate. Most faults were burnt out motors as they were too weedy and at the limit of their capabilities. Either that or broken internal connections which were non repairable. I used all the makes as well and I though the Alto ones were beat but you don’t see them in the UK much now. The tornado nozzle on the Karcher machines makes them way more useful than the fan/needle spray you get on the cheap ones which are just cack.
But I suppose you could just ignore me. 😉

Just had a look. At the lower end I’d go for the Karcher K2.94m at £120. Has £100 worth of Karher accessories with it They always do special packs around that sort of price. Really I’d want the £300 one as it has a brushless induction motor (hence the big jump in price) which is quieter and lasts way way longer.
Don’t buy the nilski one, please.

Seems very simple on Argos website to me. 10 seconds after getting into Argos website I find that if the product is faulty within 30 days they will refund or replace. After 30 days and less than one year they will repair it or if not possible replace, or if that not possible, refund.
I would assume that extends to 2 years if guarantee is longer.
How is that hard to understand?

Personally unless you are spending loads of money I’d get a Karcher as their back up and spares availability is best. After selling various brands for 10+ years (costing up to £400) they are the best in allrespects. Don’t buy a Bosch one though as they are the worst (this was a big surprise, nearly every one we sold came back faulty, odd for Bosch stuff).

That is very odd. However I will try it!!

I always say if you won’t take something that might make you better you can’t be that I’ll, so stop moaning!!