XmisterIS

NOTD is ... nobody! It's been that way for a fair few rides so far this year ... probably because when I get a sense that a driver will presently be entering 'nob mode', I make sure they quickly become a dot in my mirrors ... aaaaand back to enjoying the nice ride.

You have to be careful on the Isle of Wight. It's marked on maps as 'here there be dragons'. There's folk what's gone there and neyver come back. That's bandit county, oi tell ee!

I'm surprised they aren't paying you to take them off their hands!

I notice the OP's link refers to 'vehicles' being taxed at a flat rate. Does that mean a 50cc moped will be liable for the same tax as a Luton van, for example?

I've just had a thought: if you know your when your Mother's due date was, you can pretty much work out exactly when your parents did the filthy whoopee. Then the whole family can celebrate that date every year!

I think that you just have to live with the fact that, in all social situations, sooner or later you're going to find yourself saddled with a crazy person ...

To be honest, he seems a little deranged. I think he needs a psychiatric assessment, seriously.

I must be don't it wrong! I've knackered two bosch drills!

They seem very convenient, but this is the second one to have seized up on me in as many years. Even a pair of mole grips and a big ol' wrench can't undo it!

Off to Screwfix to buy an old-fashioned chuck. They're damn near bullet proof.

Verdict: Keyless chucks are very convenient - until they jam!

It seems to me that regardless of how they come by it, some people hang onto money and make it work for them, thereby enjoying it more in the long term, whereas it runs though some people's fingers like water and they're back to broke in no time. I'm thinking of people who got very famous and rich very quickly, before returning to relative obscurity. Some are still rich, some are stony broke.

One of my friends (ish ... more like acquaintance) is having his house repossessed due to mortgage default, and he is probably going to declare himself bankrupt to escape huge debts. I feel deeply sorry for his kids, but not for him or his wife.

Why? Well, a few years ago (not many) his aged, childless, spinster aunt died in a nursing home and in her will she left everything to her sister's children. He is an only child, so he got the lot. The lot turned out to be a lot! £200,000, to be precise. I know because he bragged endlessly about it to anyone who would listen.

Now, I've seen their house and it's nothing palatial, just a normal terraced three-bed place. They were mortgaged up to the eyeballs and you would think they'd bang the whole lot into the mortgage and other debts, all 200 fat ones, pay off the mortgage and have enough left for a slap-up meal, a family trip to the cinema and the joy of being a mortgage-free and debt-free couple in their early thirties, with a nice enough house to show for it. You would think they'd do that. Any sane, rational person would do that ...

Instead, they ripped out a five-year-old decent kitchen and had an absolutely top-of-the-range marble masterpiece fitted. Then they did the same to the perfectly functional modern bathroom. Then they bought their daughter a horse. A f**king horse. And bed 'n' board and a stables. The list of outrageous purchases goes on.

Long story short, they burned the whole wadge of filthy lucre in three years flat. Yep, two hundred big 'uns, all spent in three years, and they used absolutely none of it to pay off any of their seemingly prodigious debts.

I really feel sorry for their kids, that's all I can say.

last time I used it, I recall the package said to spread it around as evenly as possible, then just go away and wait for it to self-level. It did actually self-level, even though I didn't believe it would!

I haven't bought a magazine or newspaper for years, I just read things on the internet. I wonder how long printed media will last.

I've just bought Christmas presents for the entire extended family in one hour flat, while casually lying in bed.

And tomorrow the Great Unwashed will pile into Southampton city centre to get angry with each other on the roads, drive round the car park 6 times trying to find a space, drag themselves through over-crowded shops without really knowing what they want to buy and finally have to go home with only half their intended purchases because after five hours of feeling like a human sardine, little Johnny will have had a meltdown and shat himself in the queue in Argos.

I love online shopping! I have amazon prime, it has more than paid for itself already. Plus you're guaranteed next day delivery for nothing. It's well worth it if you're like me and the thought of actually going into a shop and buying real things with actual money is a chore!

Arduino FTW ...

If you'd grown up with early 80's games, you would have let go of them long ago:

http://www.retrogamesnow.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Chuckie_Egg_Spectrum-e1351345634429.png

... I rest my case (That's a Chuckie Egg screenshot).

I think if I was 9 (my niece's age), I would actually find that good fun! I think they want the lego set rather than the PC game. Thank you for bringing me up to speed; the last computer games I played seriously were things like Chuckie Egg in the early 1980s! If you've never seen Chuckie Egg, you haven't lived ... well, actually you have, it's pretty basic by modern standards. I had a ZX Spectrum, the games loaded from a cassette tape, they would take as long as 10 minutes to load, and sometimes you'd get right to almost the end of loading and a message would pop up saying "load error". That led to plenty of tears and snot bubbles!

I've looked it up on Wikipedia but I still don't really understand the point of it!

I'm asking because my niece and nephew have asked for mine craft farm, or something like that, for Christmas. I'm not sure what it is!

They've been doing this for years, only now it's been codified in law. The UK is a strange mix of very free and very draconian, always has been.

Also, relatively speaking, we are freer now than at any time previously in history. E.g.:

50 years ago - homosexuality was illegal.

100 years ago - women could not vote.

150 years ago - a man could only vote if he possessed property worth 40 shillings or more (most didn't - that was a LOT of money back then).

And back even further:

400 years ago - we were ruled by a monarch who held absolute power.

600 years ago - it was illegal to grind your own wheat into flour, you were obliged to take it to the local miller, who would charge exorbitant tax-in-kind. You would then be taxed again by the landowner and again by the church on the remainder of your produce. You would therefore live your life in abject poverty, without much hope of ever escaping it, while a small number of elite enjoyed eye-watering levels of wealth. Sounds similar to today's monetary imbalance between the rich and everyone else, but it wasn't. It was much, much worse. There was no middle-class, really. You were either dirt poor, or you were rich and powerful, or you were clergy. The only exceptions were the tradesmen, who could attain social mobility. If you could get yourself a trade when you were young, you had a chance to pull yourself up out of poverty, otherwise, if you missed the boat, you were pretty much doomed to a life of servitude and a level of poverty that hardly exists in the UK today. That's why so many people nowadays are called Miller, Cooper, Fletcher, Smith, Sawyer, Carter, Tanner, etc, etc - because when people started taking surnames for the early censuses of the late 18th century, they wanted to be associated with success. Before that, names weren't really fixed. You'd be "Thomas of Yeovil", rather than "Thomas Smith", for example.

Our daughter has a talking dog toy. I'm home alone for the evening, sitting on the sofa in browsing Facebook and eating a slice of cheesecake (well, I was). The house is eerily silent. Suddenly, the f**king dog toy starts talking out of nowhere, "I have two feet and my ears are blue!!!!" Top volume, completely unexpected. I shouted, fell off the sofa, dropped the cheesecake in my crotch and nearly defecated while I scrabbled around trying to find the source oft the terrifying noise. Then I realised what it was. f**k it.

You see turbod Lambos and crazily tuned GTRs etc all over YouTube and they'll all leave even litre sports bikes like they're standing still.

However I can't imagine them being reliable nor can I imagine they'd be at all easy to drive day to day.

That's the great thing about bikes though, an R1or similar you could drive everyday to work, getting 50mpg and be reliable as clockwork whilst still giving you enough performance to see off anything bar a top end supercar or one of those crazily tuned monstrosities. All for a fraction of the cost.

That's it exactly! Also, even the fastest most highly tuned car in the world is only as fast as the car in front.

Love it! One of my tricks is to feather the front brake without engaging the cylinder - just enough to make the switch click on and off.

Tonight I discovered a new element in the periodic table - Ultrachilli. Basically, this:

http://thaifood.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/maesri-kaeng-par-jungle-curry-paste-400g.jpg

Now, I am one of those people with a high tolerance for chilli. I will happily eat Chicken Naga without too much trouble. But Kaeng Par is on another level. You have to try it. If you're lucky, you'll get your eyesight back after a week.

Verdict: f**k me, that's hot!

That's a good point - you've got to inspect everything non standard very carefully. Also because there's no established standard for the cars, you've got no reliability measures. And I can't see one of those engines lasting more than about 20,0000 miles before the cylinders start wearing out! Still, I would love to have a go in one ...

Congrats! You'll never sleep again!

Actually, that's not true. Ours is just over 1 and a half years old now. Her favorite word is "No". "Do you want to go to nursery?" "No". "Do you want dinner?" "No". "Do you like chocolate?" "No". "Are you a little girl?" "No". "Do you have hands and feet?" "No".