TandemJeremy – Member

Does having 1000+ Science fiction novels on shelves in alphabetical order qualify one as a geek?

Yes. And that's from someone who has a whole bookshelf dedicated solely to post-apocalyptic novels.

Stories of the Wasteland – a collection of short, post-apocalyptic stories. Very, very good indeed, mostly.

Toilet / waiting for computer to compute / kettle to boil fodder is The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter. Also excellent in a very different way.

Posh…..ish;

On a Halfords bike 🙂

I haven't forgiven that wallpaper for taking up five hours of my life when I was trying to give up tabs. Nearly killed my wife and dog. Still off the tabs though…..

The bolt is completely unscrewed and didn't lift up as it loosened. I've just battered it with that massive wrench on the black rag in pic 2, but to no avail.

V annoyed with self as just had the whole assembly in bits to replace headset not long ago.

EDIT: done – hit the allan key with a hammer, straight down and the whole lot fell apart. In a good way 🙂

Cheers all!!

Lol Lol Lol 😆

I hate blocked toilets! (sorry for unhelpful post but been there, didn't do that ^^^).

Omar Little – wrong. The Scottish hermesexual would rather be up to his knees in peat than up to his ankles in heather.

How do you know when your dad's been shagging your sister up the a$$?

__

His c0ck tastes funny.

No way dude – free postage gets the punters flocking in. I promise. As for all the tricksy stuff and getting your mates to shill bid – don't bother. I've sold everything from £4000 vintage Leica cameras and lenses to £5 'skateboarding knee pads', via 1950s Belstaff vintage rubberised, full length jackets (this last went to a Jap bidder for £3500!)

All items will find their market value – whatever someone is willing to pay. That's all it's worth.

If you've c0cked it up, pull the listing and start again – apologise to anyone who's already stuck a bid in and include a link to the new auction. Email me if you'd like a hand – in profile…

What bike?

You did indeed get some good ones! Number six with the diagonal path lit my candle.

Hmmm. I reckon Latin's well worth it for the air of worldliness it bestows upon the speaker, not to mention the sideways door into the Old Boys' Network of ex-public schoolboys jobs club…

End on a Sunday night, free shipping to the UK (send 'signed for' obviously), reasonable P&P to most of the rest of the civilised world, no reserve, £1 start, specify no bidders with less than 5 feedback unless they contact you first (cuts out the timewasting teenyboppers).

I personally wouldn't bid on or even watch anything with more than a week's running time but that's just me! You're given the choice whilst listing where you want the auction to run – you can specify certain countries. Do be careful with shipping charges if you're opening up the bidding to Oz and the US…

Ride report (bit light on details sorry) of the Fairy Pools route;

http://jamiethetog.blogspot.com/2009/09/another-skye-trip.html

Well worth it – no doubt at all, and the Forest of Brittle is good for a bit of fire road / singletrack riding.

I use Sony phones with the behind-the-neck-band and plastic loops over the tops of yer ears. They stay on fine but mean that I can't wear sunglasses or high collared jackets. I also have odd shaped ear-holes!

So why not just shoot RAW and then save as TIFF when you finish editting?
Wouldn't that give you the same benefits?

Yes, biut it adds another hour or so onto my workflow for no extra benefits at all – that is, I have to wait an hour for my computer to convert about 1500 photos from raws to TIFFs.

Why re-save 5 times?? If I edit a jpeg and don't get it finished before I have to stop working on it, I save it as a psd file (as I'll undoubtedly have some layers).
I then save the final image off as a jpeg, so am only re-saving once.

Fair question. It's mostly due to the way I used to process, resize, sharpen, 'de-noise' and save for web. I used to start with a file full of jpegs and work on each file at full size, saving to another folder.

Once all these were done, I would run the processed pics through Noise Ninja (or similar), saving them again, in a new folder. I then ran a couple of photoshop actions to sharpen / resize for web / add drop shadow frame / whatever else, saving again into a new folder.

So that's why I used to end up opening and closing my files several times, causing degradation. And that's why I now work pretty much only with TIFFs.

Apologies to the OP – IIRC, the D70 only does Jpegs or raw….

big-chief-96 – Member
if its friendly make your dog like it and take it in.

Some dogs are genetically programmed to chase cats / any small furry things and I genuinely believe this cannot be trained out of them.

I spent nearly three weeks trying to force my lurcher not to go completely mental at the sight of my Mum's Siamese cat – no joy. He's very well trained in almost every other aspect, but if he sees a cat / rabbit / fur glove he's off, irretrievably.

jca – Member
There is a quality issue with shooting jpegs as well – it is a lossy compression format, which results in a reduction of image quality. You probably won't noticeimmediately , but if you keep editing and resave your jpegs, the effect is cumulative.

This is the main reason to shoot in a non lossy format such as TIFF or Raw.

For years, I shot weddings in jpeg format. I know how to compensate for odd lighting conditions (strong backlighting for instance, which will fool the meter into silhouetting the subject). Auto WB does the job for most situations and it's a doddle to tweak it where necessary. I didn't feel I needed the 'safety-net' which raw provides.

I looked at my colleagues shooting in raw and wondered why they wanted to add an extra step into their workflow – I was editing and processing entire weddings in a day, maybe two – they were taking at least two, usually three.

Then I began to notice that by the time my images made it onto the web, they were definitely degraded. Details were blocking up and the pics looked very unlike the original, processed images. This was due to what jca describes in his post – every time you open and re-save a jpeg, you lose quality. I was re-saving each image perhaps five times as part of my workflow.

I became a raw convert, doubled my workflow time, invested daft cash in new software (Lightroom) and hardware (mahoosive hard drives).

This worked well for a while but now shoot nothing but TIFF – my colleagues still think I'm strange (and brave 🙂 ) but I can process them with a mixture of LR and PS and re-save them as often as I like with no loss of quality – and I do so in the (fairly reasonable) certainty that the TIFF format will still be around in 20 years.

Sorry for the big post 🙂

trail_rat – Member
my mate – a seriously heavy user of all kinds of drugs – managed to pass a piss in the pot drugs test for a new job 3 weeks after his last joint ….

Snap. I was surprised by a PITP test as part of an interview for a job at John Lewis' many years back – thought it was just a regular medical. I had had large amounts of LSD the day before, followed by copious amounts of pot to help with the comedown.

When the company nurse came out with the pot I nearly shat in it instead of pissing in it….

The results showed, "… a surprising amount of protein – have you any idea what might have caused that?". I said I'd had a bad cold and got the job…

Jaffa cakes
Red Wine (I never buy boxes as 3 litres only lasts a few days 😳 )
Pistachio nuts (sp!)
'Posh' bacon
White bread with real butter and pigs' toenail ham. Gone in 30 seconds.

mumsnet claims the plane will stay on the ground, given the extra weight of a Halfords bike. And that's good enough for me.

EDIT: glad to see that flying bike on the conveyor belt is still on terra firma as physics dictates.

Grum's is better. Fact.

😳 Thought it said "Team Meeow" 😳

All my own work.

I reckon the Count has made a sh1te pic almost acceptable. Want complex PS work done? Pay someone.

If TJ's around I'm sure he'll be along, but in his absence, I'm pretty sure that even in Ingerland, land owners have a duty to keep rights of way passable. Not sure if this extends to dogs or not – probably not.

As a general rule, the longer the focal length, the less depth of field you'll get at any given apperture.

What styles of photography are you interested in? Landscape? Social? Sports? Low light?

Only three so far, but the dog had this many;

He got them all in NW Scotland. Seems fine now. I've been scraping ticks off me since I was old enough to do it for myself. I do understand that Lyme's is a pretty horrible disease but wonder if the increased awareness of the disease is causing a bit of an over-reaction? No way would I take anti-bios just because I found a tick on me…

a girl I can't sleep with

No such thing. Unless it's a female relative. Or maybe a mate's wife.

Pretty sure this is the oldest scam in the internet book of scams. I've heard of it in various forms but the general gist is just as you've described; scammer gets an email address and sends emails to all contacts to say he's in trouble and needs cash to get sorted.

A few kind hearted /worried / gullible (sorry) individuals act on the email and send cash – repeat several hundred times a day with different email addresses and retire.

You're all wooses

PAIN!!11!

But even that sorry episode pales into insigificance compared to toothache – I resorted to self surgery with a Swiss Army knife after a botch-job by an emergency dentist. He tried to pull the tooth but snapped it, leaving raw, jagged edges. My gum swelled up over the top and dug into the shattered tooth – I had a lump on my face the size of a snooker ball.

Went back to the same dentist the next day and he reckoned he could do nothing until the swelling went down, so I went home and pulled out the pieces of tooth with the pointy bit on the back of my knife – hurt like the very devil but the relief was palpable…

highclimer – whooshhhh!

My mate John used to collect his finger / toenail clippings in a massive container. That was bad enough but then I found out his dad was contributing to the collection too. F+cking Yuck! That's almost incestuous. Or something.

user-removed – Member
My mate had a Kryptonite lock removed by a blacksmith in a few seconds (he bought the bike at a police auction with the lock still attatched!). Surely getting an insured professional in wouldn't upset the H&S bods too much?

As an aside, the smithy my mate used tapped his nose afterwards and said he'd 'liberate' as many as my mate could bring in

Posted 1 day ago #

abductee – Member
Why not buy a bike like other STW members do rather than trying to "liberate" one?

Posted 1 day ago # Report-Post

Can't you see that your post insinuates that you've half read mine and decided that I / my mate was a thief?

Apologies if that wasn't the case…. Agree that genuine thieves are very unlikely to be one step behind us in matters of theft… And insinuating that the OP is a thief is just a bit weird really…

Forgot I'd started this thread – was reminded about it by a link from another Skye thread. Didn't actually do the Sligichan route that trip ^^^ Did THIS ROUTE instead.

Did the Slig out and back next time though – sorry the pics are nine months late for this thread…

I got one of them tonight, but by txt msg;

"hi its rob – you still gonna make the party. i got cats don't forget"

????

Perfect bed time reading – cheers for the write up. Nice to have the back story too. There's nothing better than a trip with a bit lot of uncertainty to it.

abductee – Member
Why not buy a bike like other STW members do rather than trying to "liberate" one?

Are you stupid or just a bit pissed? Try reading my post again without your beer goggles. Twit.

My mate had a Kryptonite lock removed by a blacksmith in a few seconds (he bought the bike at a police auction with the lock still attatched!). Surely getting an insured professional in wouldn't upset the H&S bods too much?

As an aside, the smithy my mate used tapped his nose afterwards and said he'd 'liberate' as many as my mate could bring in 🙁