Femtocell sounds like a ladies hygiene product!

I understand that some mobile airtime providers who also supply broadband have products that creates a small 3G cell using their supplied smart wifi router.

Troll or not, people like this are out on our roads. I’ve had enough incidents with dangerous people like this to keep off the roads.

I find the simulated keyboard on my iPad much easier to type on than my notebook. The ability to lightly tap and the auto correction enables me to type at a much higher rate than on any other type of keyboard.

I did the flowers, card, bottle of Proseco, followed by a meal in an Indian restaurant.

She moaned about work the whole evening and that pissed me off.

We ended up breaking up!

That’ll teach me for making the effort! 😆

Hope service is exemplary – a rarity these days!

This little shed is going on forever!

Maybe your mate’s systems weren’t set up right, weren’t well matched components etc. TBH, there are a lot who get it wrong, or simply have a strange perception of what an honest reproduction is. Personally, I like it to sound as natural and lifelike as possible.

I once attended the Great British HiFi show in Buxton. Some systems were incredibly vibrant, dynamic – alive, others analytical and flat. They say each to their own, but surely lifelike is what one is aiming for. What I found was that valves, horn speakers and electrostatic speakers, using all sorts of esoterica hit the spot, but they were nearly all pug ugly and/or impractical. You need a big dedicated room for a real HiFi. Not many of us have that luxury.

Acoustic Energy AE1’s on the matching AE stands would blow your socks off with their remarkable performance, but are compact.

I couldn’t and still can’t afford these diminutive speakers, but which have a sound that one would expect from a large high end floor stander.

Magic speakers, but lots and lots of money.

Not after ‘audiophile sound quality’, that’s just a load of waffle and I doubt I can hear the ‘difference’.

Regrettably, i think this is a typical and widespread uninformed view! Same as the people who don’t believe cables make a difference to sound quality. Until you have listened and made comparisons in a properly set up demo room, please don’t make assumptions.

Sub/sat systems are sonically inferior, by a big margin, but they integrate in most British living rooms where women rule and there’s sxd all space elsewhere in the home.

If you want just OK sound, spend £200 on a one box surround / Blueray system, but you will be missing loads where music is concerned. If you love music, surely you would want to hear as much of the content of the recording?

There are sub/sat systems from many manufacturers at hugely different prices. Personally, I think there is a ceiling on what one should spend because of the limitations of such a speaker arrangement. Ultimately, it’s more about the bling factor than anything else. A movie soundtrack does not require audiophile grade equipment, so there’s no point in wasting your money unless you are rich and/or a fashion victim.

KEF were always a significant player in multi-speaker systems, but many others have jumped on the bandwagon. As for Bose, well they are like Bang and Olufsen – a premium but mediocre brand that owes it’s success to a very expensive marketing campaign and a high street presence, paid for by the ignorant fools who think they are getting the best.

If you want to properly listen to music, you need a real HiFi with a straight stereo pair of speakers, stand mounted, or floorstanding. If what it the equipment looks like is more important than its performance, then you don’t need any recommendations from us.

Cheery stuff!

Eating that stuff might give you the trots!

Wasn’t a troll, it was a valid question!

Spacecraft hitting a tiny piece of space debris as 25,000mph would definitely cause a significant, if not major Damage. This assumes the said space debis is stationary, but the newspaper article stated that these rocks are orbiting the earth’s atmosphere at thousands of miles mer hour.

Given that a bullet travelling at around 680mph can pierce several layers of sheet metal, a pea sized piece of space rock would do more damage striking a spacecraft at around 40000mph (assuming the rock is doing 15000mph and the spacecraft is doing 25000). My guess is that the pea sized fragment of debris would penetrate its way in one side of the craft and straight out the other!

You can argue that space is very big, but how do the scientists know where the clear part of space is ? For example, how do they detect particles as small as a few cm careering through space more than a few thousand miles away? Or even 100 miles away.

A lunar rocket would have travelled at least 500,000 miles. So not one debris strike happened, but apparently there are 500,000 space rocks orbiting the earth. It think the newspaper journalist might be sensationalising his piece!

My father spent the last four days of his life in the Norfolk and Norwich NHS hospital and it was an utter hell!!

I witnessed neglect and abuse of elderly patients on two separate wards and in the admissions section for the elderly (elderly did not go in to A and E. An old lady was begging me to help her because the staff wouldn’t help, another man the same. The old lady eventually got a nurse who berated her for causing so much fuss and actually said that she had only just seen to her 5 minutes earlier – a total lie! the nurse was a bully! actually, i was in hospital myself 30 years ago and an old man dying of cancer got similar treatment – maybe the night nurses choose those shifts because they are lazy. There were numerous eople laying in their own mess for several hours. Notes not filled in – should father be on a drip or shouldn’t he?

At 4 am on. The first night, a nurse who i could barely understand called my mobile to tell me my father was being violent and that they had needed to sedate him. Really?? A weak 78 year old man, a retired General Practitioner, who had a serious gastrointestinal and urinary tract infection (that his local clinic had failed to identify weeks earlier). They insisted that I went in, but why? He was like a zombie after the drugged him up from that point until he died, but the notes on his bed were still not filled in. This was according to my late sister who was a physiotherapist.

He was a risk because he desperately wanted to get up and go home. We told the staff that he was going to hurt himself and he needed close attention. They said they were understaffed, so my mother and i spent hours there tending to him. He eventually got out of bed after we left for the night and had a fall. Was it a fall? Probably, but he had severe swelling and looked like he’d taken a beating. We couldn’t get a word out of him to find out what had happened because he was drugged up. He was then allocated 24hr one to one care along with another patient. The nurse we got was an expert in mental health nursing called Ian. He was a good man, who did what one would have expected of a medical professional.. He was very angry at the way things were in that ward and I know he just wanted to tell us his grievances, but he remained professional. He did say he was going to get out of nursing though.

They left food for the patients, but didn’t feed the ones who were helpless, then took the food away untouched, not saying a word. As my father had been nil by mouth, but then his notes were untouched, they didn’t know if he should be fed or not.

Eventually my father succumbed to pneumonia. The family was called on his final day and we sat with him for ten hours as he struggled to breath. They cleared his airways periodically which gave him respite, but it just got worse again. Then as he was suffocating, they put an oxygen mask on him. Fxxk knows why they did this at this stage! Was it to prolong his agony?!? Unable to speak to us, he finally passed out and was gone, just managing to utter my mother’s name.

The duty doctor came up and said to us that he would have not suffered and would have not been aware of what was happening. I was so traumatised at that point and my sisters and mother were equally distraught, but I wanted to scream at the guy “how the fxxk can you say that when you haven’t even set foot in the ward”. The one to one nurse Ian had not been on shift, so my father didn’t get the high standard of care he had received during his attendance.

The majority of the nurses showed no compassion, no humanity, but spent most of their time tapping into their computer and complaining they were short staffed. The patients didn’t seem like they were worth bothering with and to think many were soon to die in such undignified circumstances, neglected and in some cases bullied.

If my mother had not been so upset, I would have made a formal complaint and raised the issue with her local MP. My father worked diligently for the NHS all of his adult working life. He was an intelligent man who was very academic and qualified as a junior doctor by the very early age of 21. He showed great compassion and care for his patients, always striving to deliver the best service possible. He was an old school doctor with a good bedside manner. It was a travesty of justice that the very organisation he so trusted and championed, treated him with such disregard, who failed spectacularly to deliver basic levels of care!

When these stories of neglect keep popping up, it is pretty clear that geriatric patients do not get looked after in NHS hospitals. If it is remotely feasible and if my mother is hospitalised when she is facing her final days, I will be taking my mother home where she will be surrounded by those who love her and care for her!!

**** waste of space politicians, sort it out!!!!!!

23m!?

You need to weigh about two stones to get air like that!

Someone here implied that yachtsmen are reckless and foolish. Very very few don’t know what they are doing and the experienced have a very heathy respect for the sea and value their safety!

Not all small craft are equal however. Motorboats have no chance of surviving high seas, some yachts fair much better, others are designed to take a pounding. It’s all about keels and hull design. EG A 26ft Contessa with her long keel hull would be vastly better than say a modern Bavaria 32. The Bavaria is twice the volume of the Contessa with little low down weight, so would be far more prone to getting knocked down, but would feel much more uncomfortable/dangerous. When the tired a nd scared crew of the Bavaria would be seeking a port of refuge, the Contessa would be coping well.

Sustained very high winds with a very long fetch will.produce phenomenal wave heights.

The Atlantic swell is often quite big because of the fetch, but it’s less pronounced offshore.

Depth affects wavelength, hence steeper sided more dramatic looking (and dangerous) waves form in the shallow waters by the coastline.

Given that it would take a long time for these waves to form and high winds were being experienced, it’d only be a suicidal blind idiot who would put to sea in such conditions. The warning signs are obvious and abundant!

Only yachts that are on long passages with no port of refuge would be affected, but I’d hazard a guess that transatlantic skippers heading to and from the UK would be giving such voyages a miss at this time of year due to the general weather trends of winter, especially given the sustained windy weather of late. When making long passages and the inevitabke bad weather approaches, yachts often reroute to avoid weather systems. The skippers who sail the Atlantic are usually far better qualified than the majority, who make short coastal hops.

Anyone who worries about the what impact them having a child might have on the planet are exactly the peope who should be having children!

Why? Because these people are clearly not stupid and the world needs more offspring from intelligent people.

Around the world, we have far too many uneducated, poverty stricken masses replicating at the same rate as rabbits. Many of these offspring die in hideous circumstances, but this is not something new. People have many children, fully aware of the mortality rate. It’s a like throwing mud at a wall – you hope some of it will eventually stick..a bit like the rest of the entire natural world!

Even parts of the UK has a problem with women busily pressing out babies safe in the knowledge that they haven’t a cat in Hell’s chance of bringing them up without substantial government handouts, knowing they can demand a free home and food. Often the mother has multiple partners and doesn’t even know who the father is. What a miserable state of affairs and a wholly wrong environment in which to to bring another human into this world!

In the developed world, we have far too many people requiring free stuff and that there are not enough people paying for it, but hey, that’s socialism for you!

On the subject of having an unwanted pregnancy, i’d suggest that the OP made his bed and so should now lie in it!

It won’t be the freedom sapping experience that he perceives. Children, whilst a massive responsibility, provide a great deal of joy, especially in the early years.

I feel a bit sorry for those who have the means, but have made a conscious choice to go without children, purely so they can continue to do as they please. Their lives will never be as full as those with an extended family, especially in later life.

No i am not trolling and i was doing 125 hours o/t, on top of standard hours. This was 25 years ago and I would not do it now because I no longer need to, but the work isn’t there these days anyway.

No, don’t want a medal, just cant believe how employees want their cake and eat it!

The job I did was vital to keeping large corporations trading. It was certainly a very efficient deal for my employers, but actually, whoever said I was stupid enough to do that clearly doesn’t understand the practical realities of the jobs market and meeting their personal responsibilities. They are just picky, if needs must and no viable alternative presents, you just get on with it.

I was focused on delivering service and took great pride in my work and professionalism. it was expected that we maintained high standards, or we’d lose business and subsequently, our jobs. Personal needs were of zero interest to our customers. Let me pose a question; the next time you are on a customer support line dealing with a frustrating issue, where the firm has repeatedly let youndown, overcharged you etc etc. Is there any point when you worry about the person you are talking about, what hours they do, what breaks etc? No, you don’t! The chances are that the reason you are needing to complain is because there is a dysfunctional work force within that organisation – too many people thinking about their own selfish needs and not getting on and delivering to their customer. People who go the extra mile to not do what they are employed to do, possibly because they think they are underpaid, undervalued, or just bone idle!

The motives of the OP and this post is about the self and not how individuals contribute to the aims and needs of their employer, or how their attitudes and activities affect their customers and colleagues.

I’ve worked in the largest organisation in the world and they have adopted flexitime, working from home. In practice, you find key people knocking off early just when you need them most, because they chose to start 2 hours before the rest of the team. The whole organsoation is out of control and very inefficient. Customers hate the tardiness and inability to get simple tasks completed in reasonable time.

Personally, I can’t work in an environment like this. I enjoy doing a good job and getting things done, but with people only focused on themselves, what days/hours they work, they may as well not bother. Either work as a team, or do your own thing. People demanding flexitime are like tails wagging the dog – don’t deserve a full time regular paid job and just make businesses mediocre and weak. Keep up your self centred attitudes! The foreigners will take your jobs and you will be on benefits until you get off your butts and take what you deserve!

Rant over!

Jesus, what a bunch of lightweights!

I used to work a standard working week, plus unpaid overtime and call out 1 week in four before others and myself took leave. In practice, it meant 1 in three weeks on call, often working around the clock. Average 70 hrs o/t per month, no set patterns and on three occasions over 7 years, did 3 stints of working 9 weeks without a day off.

In earlier jobs, I did an average 125hrs a month and the longest in scheduled shift I did was 36hrs.

Lunch hours and breaks did not exist, pension was only paid on basic salary (which was pxss poor)

That was my experience of full time employment for over 20 years.

When I ceased working in this field, I had every weekend off. It was like being on holiday, but still getting paid.

People obsessing about whether working four longer days is preferrale than 5 standard days clearly don’t care about their colleagues, or the business that employs them. They probably hate their jobs too.

I would suggest they try self-employment, learn to stand on their own two feet, by generating their own income. Only then will they appreciate how lucky they are to have a regular income with regular social hours. No wonder employers pedal the idea that British workers are lazy!

Terraces and semis are hopeless for noise intrusion.

A property with full airtight insulation, triple glazing, that uses the sun’s heating energy and has a heat reclamation system barely needs any artificial heating. They do not need to be in adjoining other dwellings. So small detached houses are my ideal property.

Given the funny attitudes to property design, it will be a long time before such an Eco house will evolve. Big house builders hold the key to producing exciting and genuinely sustainable homes, yet they continue to churn out cheap shXt because they know that one of their single units often appeals to buyers because its new and in some cases, prettier than the alternative badly bodged, badly decorated, badly maintained architectural carbuncles of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s.

What’s your view about large developments?

Personally, I hate them because:
1) house builders bring nothing to the local economy
2) they make huge profits out of the economy of scale constructing standardised boxes
3) they construct a tree style infrastructure that concentrates all traffic via one entrance to the highway
4) they build with too higher density which means inadequate parking and cramped access roads
5) the density of buildings means local traffic issues, pressure on schools, medical services etc
6) the homogenised boxes with cheap cues of properties of the past are architecturally bland and completely inappropriate to the vernacular. They significantly detract from the identity of an organically evolved settlements – architectural and civic vandalism!

I would advocate a percentage increase in housing stock to all hamlets, villages, towns and cities, with no large developments. A strong bias towards small builders and individuals wishing to enable a sensitive improvement to the place that they live in, employing local people to do the construction.

And she has a blatant social bias against the better off.

The Iron Lady is not what would be considered diplomatic……

No, she seemed to enjoy the label. Makes her feel powerful I guess.

Replace with Dow Corning 785 Sanitary sealant – best stuff available.

Cheap silicone produces the problems you are experiencing.

😆

Cute!

Have no pics of my 1988 Saracen Blizzard with its Biopace and bottom bracket mounted rear cable brake, I’m afraid 🙁

A-Jays are cheap, robust, with ribbon cables that never tangle. Great bass response and good overall sound ( though more expensive units are better). Total bargain at just £20!

Righog – nice chalet!

Is that in the UK, or Europe?

Yeah, totally agree: wood is entirely suitable in the UK, so long as its the right species, or correctly treated.

The point of them is to satisfy the ostentatious, “LOOK AT ME, I’M SPECIAL” types.

Mostly driven by women, taking kids to school. Preferred colour is black. Got to impress their peers/rivals – pathetic behaviour!

Too big, over engineered for normal road use, heavy, dangerous to pedestrians, other road users and their own occupants, unstable in a sudden swerve – C of G too high, wasteful on fuel.

Most users don’t know how to drive them, even on the road.

Cockmobiles!

Damned expensive though!

It’s all about a nasty controlling religion. The same religion that has been causing misery and death around the world for much longer than I’ve existed on this planet.

Have you not noticed this common thread in all parts of the world?

It’s often reported that these people are extremists. Perhaps true, but there sure are plenty of them everywhere you go.

Must take some serious intimidation to indoctrinate people to become suicidally dedicated this medieval, but hollow cause!

All I can say is thank fxxk we live in a relatively free society (for the time being).

That ticket should become null and void. Send pics and copy of ticket to council. Don’t pay anything. If they still maintain their position, go to court.

They can’t threaten you with the old trick of doubling the fine if you don’t pay up within x days.

The this intimidating of law abiding citizens going about their business, keeping the local economy ticking over.

These councils need lessons in commercial awareness!

Not being funny and not wishing to detract from your forthcoming arrival, but isn’t this a little insensitive towards someone recently bereaved on this forum ?

I would expect mortgage rates to remain as they are for the foreseeable. If base rates go up, as they inevitably will at some stage because they can only go one way, so will the cost of a mortgage.

I’m looking at property right now and am finding it difficult to find anything I can afford without a mortgage. My current circumstances dictate that borrowing is out of the question. A few years ago I could have self-certified and borrowed what I like, regardless of income.

There is not much choice of stock at my price level and the stuff worth having sells quickly. Many people are staying put because of the high cost of moving (stamp duty being one of the biggest offenders), others are buying to invest, so there’s a bit of a shortage, yet prices are flat. Makes no sense to me!

People are already driving more economically and less often. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why the powers to be are jacking the prices up yet again.

We typically pay 20-30% more for diesel in the UK than in the majority of European countries already – too much tax.

Too much tax stifles the economy. EG Take Stamp Duty on house purchases; above £250k and tax jumps from 1% to. 3%, so people stay put. Tax take: ZERO. People don’t like being robbed!

Lower taxes would yield more for the exchequer, but for some reason, no chancellor ever really understands and acts on this fact. There was a Scotsman governor of Hong Kong many years ago, who made an astonishing success of the economy there, by slashing taxation.

Perhaps these people who make the decisions for us, regardless of how clever they are, are all out of touch with real people, but this is ripoff Britain for you!

There was a pivotal weekend shortly after the run on Northern Rock and others as a result of Leahman Bros caving in back in 2007. Senior politicians, the Bank of England and key people of several failing banks spent a weekend around the table just trying to fathom out each bank’s exposure to toxic debt and what to do about it. Without intervention, the entire system could have collapsed causing global economic meltdown. It was Gordon Brown and his lot who presided over this and it was he who claimed victory in saving the economies of western world. How arrogant and hypocritical!? It was his party who deregulated and allowed banks to engage in risky practices.

Regulation at that time meant that banks had a very low Tier 1 ratio (amount of actual capital they had in their coffers versus the money they had out in loans) and they had of course bought debt from other banks. In the event of a default caused by the knock on effects of Leahman’s collapse, (or any other bank), how would a bank meet it’s liabilities? Indeed, how would they even know what their exposure to toxic debt would be until their debts turned bad. Government had stepped in to shore up several banks already at that stage, but would be unable to keep doing this as the they had already spent all of the reserves built up by the previous administration. In fact, the reserves were long gone and government borrowing was escalating exponentially. They really had made a spectacular mess of th nation’s finances. Our grandchildren will still be paying off their profligate spending splurge long after we have gone!

The uncertainty of the situation meant that banks were scared to lend to each other. The markets reacted and banking stocks slumped. After this big powwow meeting, it was decided that a banks Tier one ratio should be doubled from 3% – 6%, to better equip the bank to meet its own liabilities. How on earth would banks find the money? They were exposed to untold liabilities that they didn’t yet know about. They still don’t know about!

So it was decided by government to print money to prevent the banks going bust. This then happened across the western world. The overall effect was to devalue our currency, to inflate our way out of debt. This is still ongoing and I believe we have a long way to go yet. So expect more quantative easing and much more inflation to ease this situation ( we import too much from countries little affected by national and personal debt). As the other Western economies are doing the same, we haven’t really felt a huge change between the currencies of the US and the Euro.

Gordon Brown and his lot, seemingly naively suggested that all the freshly printed money they had just given to the banks would be passed on to us in the form of loans and that this would stimulate the economy and get us out of the rut. Alistair Darling and his mate Gordon appeared to have written a blank cheque to the banks, but without getting any commitment as to how the banks might help the wider economy and the people who had saved them. They then proclaimed that everything was sorted and patted each other on the back. The merchant bankers had a bonanza and paid themselves record bonuses, just like the cheating gamblers that they are – scumbags!

Several years later and we are on the umpteenth lot of quantative easing, with more still to come.

I believe that many British banks were going to gradually discover that they were bust as they discovered the bad debt they had taken on from the US sub-prime bubble of the early 2000’s. I think this is still going on and each time a bank runs into trouble, is when they go cap in hand for some more QE.

I therefore conclude that the politicians were telling us a big fat lie when they said that all this money given to banks was to eventually benefit us. In effect, tax payers are funding the extortionate and enduring rescue plan for banks. This is galling when you consider how they have never given us such a shockingly raw deal as they do now! As you know, interest rates are 0.5%, but they are typically charging more than 4 percentage points above this for loans. I have friends with tracker mortgages taken out before 2007 as low as 0.45% over base. 1% was commonplace. So banks are charging four to ten times as much to lend money as they did pre 2007. The amount of capital you need has increased massively and you righlty now need to be creditworthy, rather than self-certify. Savings rates are derisory, rarely meeting or exceeding inflation.

What a monumental travesty of justice? Politicians tend to blame casino banking, but it was clearing banks that lent too much as well (and to the wrong people). Governments presided over deregulation of the banking system. They wanted the additional taxes from all of the resulting economic activity produced from opening the floodgates. Ultimately, the blame rests with those in charge: politicians, mostly Labour politicians! And still the ignorant people vote Labour do so because of the free stuff they get and because they misguidedly believe the Labour party are still the party for the common man.

aP – Member
IMO the sooner people have to pay for car parking everywhere the better. Not that this helps you.

Must be an institutionalised council worker! They would ban cars outright and totally destroy the fragile economy if they could. They are just jealous of anyone trying to better themselves or the community as a whole – period!

Meanwhile, back in the real world….

1981miked – Member
Why oh why oh why…

Just why!!’

What has happened to manhood??

Feminism?

An HTPC would be nice, but I’m unconvinced about the ease of UI, especially for Windows driven packages..

Topfield used to be very good. You could customise these and there was/is a whole community of likeminded people sharing their efforts. Don’t know whether they have anything exciting out these days.

Toppy.org[/url]