Posts by Tom 7 8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
When I was a young lad a couple of old ladies appeared in the local rag when a large dope plant was found growing in their garden. It grew from their budgie seeds the sweet old dears claimed and were let off.
Found out later they'd been growing the stuff since the 30s and it was only a car crash killing part of their hedge made it visible to the public.
Evolution has taught many animals not to get too big. Fish often limit their size to their environment. Keep them in one of the traditional fish bowls and they'll get to maybe 4" and that'll be about it. After 5 years of being 4" and going round in circles drop them in a large pond and they'll get pretty large. I've seen one that looked about 30lb though it may have been a cross breed with a 'normal' carp,
The thing about angling is its convincing yourself that getting a fish to eat and so hook itself is somehow clever and makes you a big man. When in reality the angling equipment industry got you to take the bait.
I remember having a chat with a mate who was a member of a fishing lake consortium and asked him why he wasn't fishing - he said they were restocking their lake. They did catch and release and claimed they didnt harm the fish and yet on a lake that size you could take around 2 tons of carp a year without any feed and they used a small fortune in ground bait and still had to restock!
'Restocking' lakes that cant possibly need restocking seems fucking insane. NZ has many lakes that have been totally fucked by the introduction of alien fish and we really dont know what was lost.
I cannot understand this obsession with angling when you're just really fucking up ecosystems and torturing animals that are hungry.
Some powerline chipsets go to 480mbps* and power cable is probably needed for something using that kind of bandwidth so for home working should be ideal. Unless there is something between your house and your man shed that stops it like mine.
*that is not a limit as far as I know.
Morcilia from Spain is an acceptable substitute. Indeed the scrambled eggs made with wild boar morcilia and truffles in La Herreria in Cantabria may just be an acceptable substitute for a full english itself. I went in there with a red wine hangover like someone had somehow put a bear suit into my cranium and the flavours and texture got through that. God I'm hungry now!
Frozen hash browns go in the bin! To me they have a sort of metalic taste which I guess is some additive or processing residue but whatever it is the smell of it dulls my appetite and it lingers and clings to everything else in the meal even if I dont eat them. With a food processor and a salad spinner you can knock them up almost faster than getting them out of the freezer and that opens up the opportunity for frying them in the sausage and or bacon fat and adding all sorts of things to liven them up even more.
Having said that attending lorry drivers cafes at 5 in the morning on the way home has left me with the opinion that chips (not fucking fries) with a full english means you can have chip butties with it and get your 1/2lb of hangover daily butter requirement at the same time.
There is a mechanism that sets a wingsail at the optimum angle to obtain the maximum drive from the wind. Combine that with the hydrofoil on a surfboard the lad in Puerto Rico is having fun with some mechanism (underwater whistle) to warn fish and cetaceans something is coming up fast (to be polite and also not to flip over them) and you may have some seriously efficient sea taxis.
Stick the wingsail and mechanism on a ski lift and you have a very cheap power source!
Some friends of mine had a pony and trap and frequently woke up in their barn after a good session down the pub a few miles away. The pony would even wait patiently for them to get back in the trap when they'd fallen out asleep, which normally but not always woke them up. I should warn anyone wishing to try this that trying to get onto a trap when pissed is incredibly difficult as the suspension on the thing means it all moves when you apply weight and tugs to try and get aboard. I would hazard a guess that for this to succeed you have to come from a horsey family and have been climbing into traps since you were able to walk.
Our problem is we are starting from scratch. We should really understand that animals have been doing this for 600,000,000 years or so and have systems we can probe for clues on how to solve the problems. Or maybe we are like those robots and just a bit to dumb to work out how evolution has managed it.
Especially now as summer is here. In cooler times my clothes act as lubrication and allow me to brush past a door frame when navigational error lead to a slight collision. I've notice that bare flesh drags and ruffles up to make a slight collision into a face slammed against the wall incident. I think maybe that's why flock wallpaper got popular.
Harlow had a Cobra replica shop Dax* I could see from my office at one time. I used to enjoy watching the new owners roaring out in their new toys and seeing the toys return a few hours later on a flatbed. I think my record was 3 spinning out on roundabouts in a day.
*seems they've move to N.Weald - I wonder if they do some training on the old airport there!
with Gabrielle Drake springs to mind.
When I've tried simulating star system formations I got a surprisingly high ejection rate, pretty much every system would lob at least one into the firmament in its early years.
I wrote that shit myself, must have a hunt for some astro modelling that can use a GPU!
I'm not sure the furniture museum would be to everyone's taste but down my local brewery every weekend a group of people from a local furniture making residential course come for a few beers and they seem a lot more human and entertaining than a lot of keyboard warriors I've worked with. One thing about getting older is (if you're lucky) you drop the bigoted and limited views of youth and realise boredom is down to your inability to actually realise there's a vast amount of fun to be had in almost everything if you'd only let yourself. And you'd really think a group of people who spend half their fucking lives sitting on their arses would at least have an interest in chairs FFS. Talk about pissing in your chips.
I got a nice book on green woodworking and with ash dieback destroying a lot of my trees I thought I'd get it out and make the pole-lathe design in it. After lots of searching I realised I'd loaned it to my local Mens-Shed so have been waiting for that to re-open rather than buy a new one. And then Delta comes along! You know when you've been johnsoned!
"Only if he had donated a healthy cut of the loot " If you think those cuts are healthy I can only imaging your are the treasurer of the tory party and think all the long row of 0s is all that is needed, ignoring the fact there was a decimal point a couple of miles to the left.
The really terrifying thing about the tories is they nor only seem to be corrupt they seem to be utterly innumerate as well.They're not selling democracy they're practically giving it away,
Any idea what those units are in Uk ish? I used to be able to play pool like a god between 8 and 10 pints of ordinary bitter. I once beat the uni darts champion when someone moved me from the 'oky to the wall and back for my go after more beers. A friend plays some of the best guitar you've heard in the two pints before falling asleep standing up with his head on the PA. Never really tried it at work but we did used to have a liquid lunch on a Friday - some of the best Adnams ever - at BTRL and then have a sort of seminar while we sobered up to go home and came up with some stonking ideas, many still stonking on the following Monday.
Galaxy distances are normally definitively measured by the yardstick of Type 1a supernova. This is meant to be the best way and yet it has pretty massive error bars, similar to the ones mentioned above. My Granddad was a pretty keen amateur astronomer (I believe the Carver scope in my barn inspired an Astronomer Royal in his hands (the scope!)) and he had a spectrometer that attached to this thing and he would use that to try and calculate stars redshift. That was hard enough for local stars. I've love to see in detail how Hubble try this on ones buried in distant galaxies. But not as much as getting hold of the fuck that stole the spectrometer.
Vigorous exercise. At uni people were baffled by my joyous presence in the pub Sunday lunchtime - I'd been playing basketball from 10 for an hour. Sorted.
Now I go for a row at 9 for an hour and a half and when I've finished there is no sign of a hangover and sometimes no sign of the breakfast I'd chucked over the side! It really is the best cure possible. And you can have the full breakfast twice if you chuck it up! I've been a drunken bastard for near 50 years now and tried everything but its the only thing guaranteed to work.
I had some cash in a small credit and loan organisation that went bust and I received my money from the government bank compensation scheme. Then two years later the company was re-booted and my account re-filled. I'm waiting to see how long it is before someone notices or its a really really really rainy day,
In many towns in the UK there are Christian Book Shops where no-one enters or leaves. We had one in the last town I lived in and you could see it from the pub garden and in three months no-one won the free pint for spotting someone going in that I put up. I decided they must be money laundering shops.
It involves a piece of plywood with a couple of holes to fit on the handlebars of my exercise bike and some clicky straps to hold things down.
Brilliant for web browsing or reading stuff. Am thinking about getting an e-iink screen and fitting a friction dynamo to run a pizero setup.
And get a gel tractor saddle - your nether regions really dont need to be brutalised to exercise.
I was down my local banging what looked like part of a broken rotary harrow on the table and saying 'No, its definitely not a shell!"
The bomb disposal squad disagreed later. But something of that ilk on a plaque on the floor of a church to make the buggers laugh for a change.
Could do with one of those now. Oh and bits that are less brittle than glass. And a cross head screw driver bit that actually fits into the screw I'm using without shredding itself and the screw when the screw is just proud enough to be a pain but impossible to get underneath the head without damage.
Not 'We dont keep paper records of stuff like that in a safe just in case*" dumb.
I used to enjoy disaster scenarios (if we could even get management to come and play) where we'd go through the what ifs list and explain what was going on and eventually you would hear the distant echo of a pin dropping deep in the empty cavity of their head - but generally only when it became apparent that it was the responsibility they had climbed over several backs to get.
* I used to keep some of this stuff at home so I could access it if not too pissed.
There is a place on the NHS website where you can put in your NHS number and email to opt out. They've mysteriously no record of my email and the health centre wont take it over the phone and do I really want to go in to get my email put in again?
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