Time for a bit of VBA / Macro recording then by the sounds of it.

Any sly way of incrementing the filter at the same time?

Big, comfy, quiet, but horribly wallowy, which makes their weight really noticeable. Also a little long in the tooth – been in production since 2002!

If you’ve 4×4, there’s a fair chance it’ll have a towbar – put your bikes on a towbar rack and save a fair whack on fuel.

Talk about passive aggressive. Aren’t you a partner in your own business if memory serves?

I bet you leave post it notes about the place too.

IIRC we have a particularly poor divorce rate in the UK.

First things I’d point at as causes would be the fact that we tend to work long hours and be heavily indebted in this country. It’s very difficult to make any relationship work if you barely see each other and are under heavy financial pressure.

Long hours, high house prices (which lead to BFO debts) and family breakdown are all pretty bad from an economic point of view – you get low productivity and mental health problems, gerontocracy and benefits bills.

Shift the culture towards working smarter, building enough houses where people actually want them, remove the false conceit that house price inflation makes people who own one home richer, and we might see things improve.

You wouldn’t reward a dog for barking all the time and taking a shit on your carpet.

Take the same approach with your other half and you’ll be fine.

As an occasional toe dipper into the world of economics, this is a fantastically bonkers thread.

Next week on STW: Bees.

A scientist once said bees shouldn’t be able to fly, from a theoretical standpoint.

The room is split 3 ways – there’s one scientist, surrounded by people who’ve decided they either don’t believe in bees or science, and will defend that position for n+1 posts.

China holds US debt as a method of deliberately holding down the Yuan, and therefore driving exports.

As a result, stopping lending to the US / the US defaulting on their loans isn’t really good for China. This is the scenario that will be upsetting the Chinese government.

IMO the prospect of a US default is pretty unlikely.

You might as well write a letter to the local paper with the same contents. Facebook is a) virtually entirely public, and b) easily recorded by printing the page.

Personally I’d try and get a job somewhere else and take it as a lesson learned.

Never. It doesn’t produce reliable evidence, and it’s a sure fire way of making sure you have a ready supply of would be terrorists. We pretty much proved that being more of a tosser than the other side wasn’t a winning strategy in Northern Ireland with Internment.

Think of it from a situation we could hypothetically be involved in. If someone said “XYZ European country are throwing their weight around in the EU parliament and harming our economy”, you’d not be particularly bothered. If they could say “XYZ European country are throwing their weight around, harming our economy, kidnapping British people then torturing them, and dropping bombs indiscriminately” then there’s a fair chance you’d hate them.

Write a good CV, get it everywhere you can. Signal to noise ratio is poor for employers advertising jobs at the moment – get your CV in early and make sure it’s decent.

I heartily recommend “Perfect CV” by Max Eggert. Quick to read and works well.

Undergrad at an Ex Poly, MSc in a completely different subject at Nottingham Uni more recently.

Couldn’t have done the job I did immediately following graduation without my undergrad degree, it was a technical degree and a technical job.

Could do the job I’m doing now without either degree, but the MSc will certainly grease the wheels when it comes to promotions / applying for other jobs.

I think that now you have to be move careful than ever in choosing whether or not to go to uni, and which uni to go to. If you’re chasing a grad job at the end of it, you really need to have solid A-levels and a good degree from a good uni, or go a step further and do a Masters to prove that you have a brain.

I mention this as I’ve known a few people turn down redbricks to go to places like Keele or NTU because it’s where their mates / bird is going, and that’s no way to decide on how to spend tens of thousands of pounds. The fact is that lots of employers just don’t bother with ex-poly career fairs or grads.

It’s “mum music” as my lass calls it. You wouldn’t be able to get her into a Take That, Westlife, Ronan Keating, Mick Bubble etc. concert with wild horses.

I cannot believe that apparently sane people in my office, including blokes, were paying > £100 a ticket from internet touts.

Taxpayer’s money? Money that could go to fund kiddies playgrounds and cure cancer? Are you lot really that thick or just incredibly disingenuous?

The front page of the Vulcan to the sky website contains the words “not Government funded” rather prominently.

The only way you can argue that it’s taxpayer’s money is if you argue that the money was donated by people who pay tax. Which could be technically true but is a very long way from the common usage of the term “taxpayer’s money”.

Nor would I be so stupid to argue that the cash donated to fix up the Vulcan would go to some other “valid” cause if the project didn’t exist. We simply don’t know what the opportunity cost of the project is.

Personally, I wouldn’t give them my cash, as the standing costs alone are huge and I’m unlikely to ever go to an airshow. Equally, I don’t give enough of a toss about people funding old planes to produce reams of bilge on here.

Options are taken account of by Glass’s guide. Full leather on a £5k or so BMW might be worth £250-£500.

It really depends on the car though – BMWs are famed for coming with very little as standard, and so they really need the options to be at the standard that sort of car should be.

A Fiesta with full leather and cruise control on the other hand, is unlikely to be worth much more the the boggo Zetec.

MX5 would be my choice if it’s your first RWD car – the front engined setup bites less viciously than a mid engined one.

If you do go mid engined, I’d go for the Lotus. The late MR2s just don’t seem like “special” cars inside.

We used it in an attempt to catch some theives who were repeatedly nicking stuff from our farm. We used a couple of cheapy cameras – the “night vision” was useless, so we tried sticking up a security lamp to provide lighting. The exposure adjustment was useless, so that just resulted in whiteout. The cameras were pretty good in daylight, but that wasn’t when stuff was getting nicked.

The moral of the story was that you need to spend serious money to get a worthwhile system. I’d rather spend it on physical security and fog machines if at all possible. In our case it wasn’t, as a farm’s a rather large thing to stick a 8 foot fence around.

EBC have such a variable reputation for pads crumbling away from the backing, I’d go for almost any other pad.

It’s art, apparently:

http://www.charliewhite.info/work/%5B/url%5D

Click on 2001, then go through the pictures.

The zig zag thing is paraphrasing something Warren Buffet or George Soros said on investment if my memory serves.

I’d guess that a fair proportion of the contestants should be making around £100k already from what they say they’re doing for a living. Seems very odd to step out of a decent wage for the chance of £100k and selling whatever tat Sugar’s bought the license for. Unless there’s a bit of impression management going on, and they’re actually clueless. But that doesn’t happen every single year, does it now? 😆

I was tempted to just lather the entire bike frame in 3M retroreflective tape when I was commuting.

try the online store?

I could do, but due to my aforementioned odd shape, I’d prefer to try em on first. Suppose I could try in shop and order online…

Thomas Pink is a no go – I’m after five shirts for < £150, not one very nice shirt for £150!

Lewins are looking like the prime candidates, assuming their shop has my size in slim fit without double cuffs. Double cuffs do my nut in for day to day life.

Next isn’t going to happen – It’d take a lot to get me to buy another of their shirts after some of the pure rubbish I’ve had from that shop.

This forum seems to attract a particular breed of middle-class, pseudo working-class, elitist debater with nothing better to do.

You’ll be first against the wall come the revolution 😆

I used to tool around in a £100 Volvo 340. It was rotten as hell, but it’s disposable nature was handy.

And unlike a lot of graduates seem to believe, research involves more than looking it up on Wikipedia,

Which graduates are these? Wikipedia is generally forbidden even at first year undegrad.

On the one hand, I’ve worked places where people were always nipping out for a fag, and it grated as the bosses were slavedrivers, so a few fag breaks was a real benefit.

On the other hand, I reckon everyone would be more productive if they were forced to take a 5 minute break every so often…

As someone who prefers to get things done quickly, I know I’m more productive if I go for a 5 minute break whenever I feel like I’ve had enough. Same principle as lecturers kicking you out in the middle of two hour lectures – you’re not that useful if you never have a breather.

That looks spot on. I reckon it’s a toss up between the Elm and the Nokia 6720 – probably the Elm due to my dislike of Nokia. Soon I will be free from the tyranny of touchscreen!

And the Elm’s a hundred quid. Spot on.

Thank you AlanF!

I’ll have to try a Blackberry out. I wonder if it would be back to having something a bit too big to comfortably operate with one hand.

Ultimately, I’ve decided that what I’d like is something roughly equivalent to the old Sony Ericsson K800i, with GPS, sports tracker, google maps and Opera Mini. Wifi and facebook would be nice bonuses, as would some ruggedness, as my phone’s screens always seem to fill with dust. I’m mid contract too, so cheap helps!

The Nokia 6700 is getting close, but it’s a bit too much of a phone purely for ringing people on, and it’s made by Nokia.

If you can’t afford a Golf, VAG make a load of Golf based stuff that’s cheaper…

What shocking ergonomics are those?

The unnatural hunch involved in holding it in one hand and pecking at the screen with your other.

Zamberlan Trailites. I picked mine up for £60, which is stupid for a boot that good – Goretex, one piece upper, vibram sole, full grain leather etc.

A proper leather boot is the way to go in my view – you will always hole a goretex liner eventually, and suede and nylon just let the water in. Leather does a good job of keeping it out in the first place.

Buy a Prius, it’s the only way you’ll be able to sleep at night.

Buy a Monaro, it’s the only real heterosexual man’s car on the market today.

Buy [insert poster’s own car here] it’s [bullshit]…

PS: You can’t drive, you’re dangerous because you like going fast.

You can’t drive, you’re dangerous because you can’t control a car properly.

Not right bothered about having Android again. It seems far too keen to do everything but provide a decent phone – calling someone’s mobile as opposed to the default landline is hugely complex compared to any decent normal phone.

As for geriatric phones, I reckon we’ll see a generation of people crippled by the utterly shocking ergonomics of touchscreen devices.

I posted a few things that I consider to be useful in the our man in the north thread. The Winsquared stuff is a very good sanity check.

Something I didn’t mention is to think about marketing very carefully. Stock, premises and equipment all have some realisable value if things go wrong. Marketing spend is gone. Lenders and investors tend to know this these days, and will pull holes in big marketing spends, and if you’re backing yourself, you should too…

A cup of hot chocolate or coffee from my last uni’s cafe. The queues were long, the coffee wasn’t great and it was pricey. What did they expect? 😆

I would guess £15-18k. There are lots of grads about at the moment with nothing to do.

You’re in Hong Kong? Surely you’re tripping over shipping agents and couriers?

Passat or Mondeo. I suspect the Passat will hold it’s money better.

Diesel was nearly killed by one of his prototype engines.

I’ve only ever played team sports at school as far as I can remember. I’m young enough that we were playing the boring versions of all the sports, so whilst I’d probably have been OK at proper rugby, I was shocking at tig 😆