How about he reaction when one of the women asked about a pint in cardif teh other week

I read that thread and felt uncomfortable. Sue was quite obviously just looking for someone to have a pint with whilst travelling.

The point was made, perhaps in a slightly smirking way, that some of our better halves might not be terribly comfortable with us popping down the local to meet a lady from a forum.

Throughout, I could see the growing discomfort of a human being looking for some like minded company and slowly beginning to be made to feel like a home-wrecker. I can understand whe Sue might have felt marginalised or pushed away, due purely to the fact that she’s not a bloke.

That all said, I could see both sides. I hope those who have left come back. It’s only the internet, but it’s my little internet 🙂

Josef Koudelka would fit the bill nicely.

I get days like that. But then I also get hyper days where I manage three day’s work in 14 hours, so it balances out nicely. Whenever I can’t face whatever tasks I need to perform, I take the dog for a long walk and that seems to clear the head (before I had a dog, I’d go for a quick blast on the bike).

Oh I do hope so! Bagsy first shot!!

Well let t’dog see t’rabbit. Can you post up the stuff you’d like pulverised worked on?

Will my face do?

Websites designed for photographers

+1 on Photium being very good. Will is absolutely second to none when it comes to customer service. I’ve asked numpty questions at midnight on a Saturday and had a reply within hours (minutes even)!

The templates are very customisable but for me, the most important aspect is the ability to apply SEO to each and every page. When I set up my dog photography website a few months ago, I went for another Photium site. Within 48 hours, I was on the first page of Google for my chosen search terms (dog photography north east etc, etc.). It’s that good!

Obviously if your search terms are things like “wedding photographer London”, you’re going to need to do a bit more work, but I’m also on page one with my main wedding site (also Photium)…

Apologies for the blatant links 😀

Oh, and I quite like the logo you already have too! I made my own in Photoshop – it’s an amalgam of loads of stolen ideas from elsewhere and could probably also use a designer’s touch!

All modes of transport have their pros and cons. Car; heated seats, air con, surround sound, ability to carry cargo / kids.

Motorbike; filtering through stationary traffic, likelihood of death, erm, excitement…

Why the **** should they wait in traffic if they can safely get between lanes? Just to appease the meat-heads driving from the chippy to the 10-pin bowling alley in the Scenic they’re falsely claiming incapacity benefit for on behalf of their imaginary Aunt Regina?

It appears f-e-c-k is now on THE LIST. Sorry father Jack – yer banned.

TJ – if the estate were mine to invite you to, you would be welcome to come and see it as soon as you were finished with the joys of Corstophine Hill.

It’s a beautiful place: a mixture of deciduous / coniferous woodland, open parkland and some rough scrub, all of which adds up to an exteremely diverse habitat for more species than you could shake a Barrat house on a greenfield site at.

…impoverished eroded landscapes…

This may be true of some of the larger Highland estates, but there are a lot of forward thinking, next generation landowners implementing new initiatives to ensure a very good mix of profit AND conservation. They want to survive just as much as the wildlife which (just) keeps them in business.

My father in law does the whole social shooting scene (Boxing Day shoot type scenario) and has produced some well-respected, very well trained dogs. He’s a janitor.

My brother in law (other side of the family) comes from a family with a large shooting estate in Dumfries and I’ve been to a few ‘dos’ at the family home. Some of the guests were regular folk, some were part of the old boys’ network.

If pushed, I’d have to come down on the side of the argument which believes that management of the countryside by those who know it best (keepers, beaters, the landowners themselves) is a good thing.

Try reading “Highland Year” by L Macnally for an interesting perspective; a gamekeepers’s diary with some cracking photos which gives a very real sense of a worker’s kinship with the flora and fauna he’s charged with managing.

I reckon the “tossers” comment was fair enough. I’ve had folk deliberately block my path / pull out in front of me / buzz me whilst on my pushbike. I always think, “tosser”.

Why wouldn’t you let a bike through? Very odd attitudes here… There are a few dual carriageways I have to drive down regularly where I konow there’ll be bikers commuting. I always make the effort to leave a gap wherever possible.

And yes, there are always going to be a few scrat-ends. A biker bashed into my boot mounted bike-rack a few years back – we were stationary in a queue. His female pillion passenger did the whole headshake thing as they weaved they way through the traffic. Later on we found big scratches in the car and on the forks of one of the bikes. Not best pleased.

Mine still gets regular outings. The stem adaptor and shorter stem have made a huuuuge difference to the way I feel about the bike. It’s nowhere near as ‘racy’ as it was, but is so much more comfortable. It also now has the fattest tyre which I could get to fit up front which helps with the whole sore wrists thing…

I believe this is why bike shops won’t let you take a new bike away boxed up for you to assemble yourself also.

With reference to Evans….. I bought a £350 Trek runabout for my stepdad there and was told I’d have to wait for the workshop to give it the once over before I could take it away. I’d noticed that the brakes needed looking at and told them I could do this myself, but no dice.

Waited forty minutes wandering around the industrial estate, went back and was told (with a withering look) that there was a queue and could I come back in an hour – this was Tuesday morning and there were two other people in the shop….

Eventually they handed it over – brakes exactly the same (not working at all). I honestly don’t think they even looked at it in the two hours I waited 👿 The whole experience left a pretty foul taste in my mouth, especially the condescending attitude of the staff.

Ah! Just twigged who you are! £15K party please, replete with ladies of the night and copious amounts of good cognac 😀

Update the drivers? Can’t think of anything else to try….

It’s a photography business innit? Can you let me know where you wasted the money please?

Printed adverts mainly – complete waste of money, Yellow pages, experimenting with superfluous gear, badly thought out promo material bought in large amounts which was dated within the year and non-reprasentative of current work, expensive suits which wore through within three months (cheap linen suits now), paying for online listings (the free ones brought in just as much custom), paying (a lot) to be a member of a local networking group full of lawyers and financial advisors – got some business from that, but spent a year pretending to be someone I’m not, and pretending to like a bunch of brown-nosing w’nkers in suits.

Frittered huge amounts on loads of gear unrelated to the business of wedding photography – Lee filter kit and polariser, huge Manfrotto tripods – landscaping stuff really – I was still thinking like an amateur rather than a pro – running things like a hobby instead of a business. I should have been buying radio poppers, decent strobes, a proper set of sample albums and perhaps space at wedding fairs.

The boring purchases tend to be the best….

Bought for £50 on ebay a few years back and lovingly brought back to life 🙂 Now with stem adaptor and little pop up stem.

If I could roll back the last ten years

……. I would start a business with seven and a half grand and save the rest for when I actually realised where I should have spent the first lot, in order to help the business, with the benefit of hindsight.

I wasted a LOT of money in my first few years in business 🙂

I remember reading that as the coating breaks down, toxic fumes are produced during use, said fumes being responsible for killing budgies and parrots in large numbers. Dogs can also be affected, but humans are impervious.

Anyhoo….

ir_bandito – Member
can’t hurt to try…

Yes it can! I fell off several times the last time they were fitted, but mostly into mud and rocks as it wasn’t snowing 🙂

Hmmm. Are (eight year old) Panaracer Spikes likely to be worth a shot? Bought them ages ago, tried them once and they’ve been hanging in the garage ever since!

nedrapier – Member
One was a scale thing: either being incredibly small in an impossibly large bedroom, or incredibly large in an impossibly large bedroom.

I got that as a teen too – sometimes they involved huge blocks of matter in a white space, other times the blocks were battleships. I now wonder if they were more about (lack of) control and the beginnings of a sense of infinity?

Regarding the kneeling on your chest thing, there was a prog on Radio 4 about that yesterday morning. It’s common to cultures throughout the world. The Germans call it something along the lines of a sleep witch and the Newfoundlanders have a similar story about sleep hags (disclaimer: was only half listening). So you’re not alone!!!

Might be a radial nerve issue…. Sounds similar to what I had years ago, but I lost my right arm / hand altogether for almost a year. Get it checked out….

I say I say, my dog has no nose. Sorry, can’t help, but that sounds bloody horrible!

‘Sold’ my Focus by auction on ebay recently. It cost me £28. But the ‘buyer’ turned out to be a complete time-waster and the car eventually sold to a very decent chap off here 🙂

I have to say, that after nearly 750 transactions on ebay, I would think twice about selling any more high value items on there – the last half dozen or so have been a total ball-ache.

flow – Member
but I have to put her on the lead when other dogs are about.
Common sense really.

Yes, if you have a dog liable to bite other dogs. But why does it annoy you that other, better behaved dogs are off their leads? Jealous much?

My dog walks round the town with his lead off. He’ll sit and wait outside shops without his lead. When I take him his walk round the fields / through the woods / at the beach / wherever, I don’t even take a lead with me.

Why? Because I trained him and am aware of his capabilities and limitations. Flow – why does it boil your urine to see dogs off their leads?

Even Glen Sligichan could be a bit of a mare this time of year – they’ve just had a week and a half of rain (with no sign of it letting up) which can make some of the river crossings pretty much impossible.

Glenbrittle Forest might be a better bet as it’s a touch higher up, followed by a push / climb to the top of the Fairy Pools and down into Sligichan. Only one river crossing and there’s a bridge 🙂

Either way, you will definitely get very wet – don’t be afraid of a mudguard or two – can make the difference between being drenched within five minutes and therefore a bit miserable, and a relatively happy experience.

And it’ll look a darn sight better than any piece of crap Volvo or other modern junk, like the boring soulless mundane-mobile in the very next post…

And the very next post was…. a pic of an Audi…. on a GOLF COURSE! (Volvo owner 😳 ).

ash.addy – you’d want to be pretty sure the victim wasn’t about to sneeze. Or let loose with a torrent of infected sinus juice.

wtf?

bikebouy – Member
Cold Clear Rides Man.

Can’t beat them for crispyness and hot air breathing heavy in the mornings. Open forests devoid of fauna, unspoilt views through the trees. Up on the hills it’s like God has dusted the land with sugar and we’re laying tracks through the virgin frost exposing the fact to the world….

We’re the only ones out playing.

Pure poetry right there 🙂

The best bit about that link is that it’s filed under

Better Living through Chemistry

😆

Be very afraid. Partying you say?! 😯

I made a serious reply before my silly one – is that alright?

Marijuana farm managed by 12 year old imported Thai lad 😯

This reminds me of that thread a while back where an STW regular let his beach cottage with a (quite reasonable) ‘No Dogs’ clause, and then found out that the tenants had a big, sandy, hairy dog in there, presumably louping all over the furniture / carpets etc. We all seemed to agree that that case was unreasonable, and that the STW regular had every right to go in and read the riot act.

I don’t think this is very (any) different. I’m a smoker, dog owner and erstwhile tenant, only finally buying a place five years ago. Be it a holiday let or a long term rent contract, I wouldn’t dream of keeping pets or smoking in a rented house, if I’d signed a contract saying I wouldn’t.

That said, I do agree with Elfin on the point that as a smoker, you really do have to lie to get rented accomodation. Al fresco smoking is heaps better anyway – who wants to live in a cloud of exhaled fag smoke?

My plates were stolen from my Honda about five years back and the police were informed immediately. I got stopped four times in five weeks, usually just after passing one of those ANPR vans.

Pain in the neck and not a little embarrasing, but I suppose it’s nice to know they were on the lookout. But Jaysus, I hate the sinking feeling when the blue lights suddenly reflect in the mirrors and you hear the blip of the siren…. *shudders*