Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

buy some black Concordes with nukes

Why use nukes when you can use properly-appointed summoning circles?

Read the latest Laundry Files book for details..

Re: Presumably backed to the hilt by UK consumer law (or lack thereof)

It ought to come with free side cutters so you can remove it

I suspect that a good-sized blob of Araldite forced into the microphone aparture would do the trick. I a suitably sharp object..

Re: i believe it was a mistake..

the dogs will bark when the post arrives, the cat will vomit on the rug (not on the tiles, or floorboards, but the rug)

Of course the cats do - it's part of the unwritten contract. Just look at the (very, very, very) small print.

Even better, they make sure to vomit on the bit that *exactly* matches the colour of said vomit. At night.

So that when you[1] are wandering around (having heard said vomiting and wanting to clear it up before the dog eats it or someone treads in it) you'll[1] be guarenteed to tread in it.

Hmmm.. warm cat-sick[2].

[1] Or, more accurately, 'she'.. I'm quite happy for the dog to clean it up. They are all regularly wormed..

[2] It doesn't help that two of our cats have badly-compomised digestions (rescue cats, came to with very, very badly upset digestions) and are prone to vomit at the drop of a gnats fart. Even when fed on very expensive food meant for sensitive stomachs. It does reduce the vomiting but doesn't prevent it. None of the other cats are prone to random vomiting..

Re: Don't be........

Do you have a persecution complex?

Why are you all out to get him?

/s

Re: Don't be........

play random sound

So - Steve Hackett music then?

(For the avoidance of doubt - I really, really like Steve Hackett and his music. The above comes from a quote by my wife along the lines of "his music has too many notes and they are all in the wrong place". I did try to explain that that's the essence of proper Prog music but she's gone off the listen to the Wombles again..)

Re: Death to advertisers!

I'm no fan of adverts, but they do pay the bills for many, many websites including this one

Which is not a valid reason for invading everyones privacy and breaking GDPR. It's been known for quite a while that the ad-funded model is broken and in need of replacement.

The trouble is, no-one seems to know what to do about it - subscription-based models are not popular (or easy to implement) and there doesn't seem to be a quick and easy replacement.

It's worth noting that John Gruber's Daring Fireball (one of the few I've whitelisted) does do advertising but the advertisers are carefully selected and curated and he doesn't participate in the whole RTB debacle. But his way takes more work than most sites are prepared to put into the process - especially as RTB is pretty easy to implement with some advertiser-supplied scripting.

Of course, the website generally has no visibility of what those scripts are actually doing but hey, out of sight and out of mind eh? As long as the money keeps flowing in..

Re: is it only me?

It's probably yellow, so... mustard?

Not everything yellow tastes of mustard. For example - yellow snow doesn't.

(I assume)

Rocks are rocks. Even the hot ones.

Are they better for banging together to make fire?

Re: Worrying over nothing

the H&S guy has a bit of a history for making loud announcements over non-problems

I tought that was business as usual for most H&S types? I've met a few good ones (last place I was at[1] ours was excellect - actually worked to reduce the level of stupid rather than increasing it..) but the majority seem to focus on "being seen to be Doing Something"..

[1] Manufacturing company of about 40 people - interestingly we had very reactive solvents stored next to some low-level radiation sources (beta radiation) used in the process. Our fire alarm generated *very* rapid action by the Fire Service even though we were relatively low-risk.. Our H&S person insisted that we all had proper fire extinguisher training with regular refreshers. Which (of course) didn't degenerate into mass spraying of each other.. Honest!

Re: You have a choice

I happen to like bananas so that's around three years for me

Likewise. Bannannannannas are somewhat good for you (lots of minerals and trace elements in them - probably why they are slightly radioactive) and help to reduce my migraines.

Not so good for the diabetes though :-(

Re: Amazingly reasonable reporting here

How dare you bring logic, reason and facts into the debate! Everyone knows that EvilRads will kill you!

(On a side-note - my wife was brought up in Plymouth, the daughter of a stone mason - who worked most of his life with granite - something that gives off radon. Most of her relatives have died from cancer of one form or other - her father of stomach cancer, her mother of lung cancer (that moved to her neck and lymph nodes) and her grandmother of breast cancer. I'm hoping that her long time away from Devon has reduced her risk..)

Re: RE: ...and now your average web page weighs more than the shareware distribution of "Doom"

Gimmie the Demons again, they showed mercy!

Then your GM isn't doing their job..

No mercy! Death to player characters! After suitable torture of course..

why such a visceral reaction to an otherwise fairly harmless

It does amuse me when, out with t'dog in t'local park, to see PokeZombies wandering around. Still, at least it gets them out into the fresh air and into natural surrounding and light (and benefits the on-site cafe) so I'm not that bothered.

You can usually tell a PZ - they are the ones that have external power bricks plugged into their phones to offset the rapid suckage of power..

Re: I'll Bite.... Yes, I know he was trolling

If the Romans hadn't thought that military strength and slave labour was better than Greek intelligence

Given that the Romans were technically a lot more advanced (and the Greeks also had both military might and slavery) this is a bit disingenuous..

(The ancient Greek philosophers were very much of the 'thought experiment' mould - very uninterested in practical mechanics[1]. Add the fact that most of them were from the 'gentleman' class and, as such, had a huge aversion to manual labour, it's unlikely that their materials science and technology would have increased terribly fast.)

[1] With obvious exceptions like Hero..

Re: Innovative sundials?

Radium was discovered to be radioactive and somewhat harmful when the people painting were licking the stuff

Also to a generation of small children who wore them in bed - especially those who liked to sleep with their shiny watches close to the lower groin area..

(testes/ovaries and radiation don't mix kids - Just Say No)

Re: "An email sent to the wrong address could be the difference between life and death"

DESPITE my pains taken to spell it out slowly.

Try having a relatively long and unusual surname. That gets to be even more fun..

(Despite the fact that it's, unusually, spelt exactly how it's pronounced..)

Re: Hancock's half hour

Email can be made secure

But no-one outside of commercial organisations does. Do the most popular email clients do secure email? Most of them claim to, but setting up PGP/SMIME et. al. isn't a task for a novice (and even security professionals say probably isn't worth it).

And a lot of your complaints about smartphones also apply to email - not everyone has it, it's easily compromised and hard to secure and hard to use for elderly or techophobes.

In short, there isn't a solution that works for everybody. And I (for one) won't be giving my local hospital my email details (given that the last time I did so, the address used ended up on all the spam lists in short order).

Re: Its not just mothers.....

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk

Bah. Told me I had to disable my ad-blocker.

Tab closed.

Re: Had to happen

Here, get out of the way and I'll show you...

And we thought that droight-de-seigneur was dead..

Re: Get a Shopsmith

How am I going to explain that I need that to SWMBO?

"I had a special offer that meant I had to buy it quickly"

On second thoughts - don't use that one - that got me the cold shoulder for about 6 months when I used that excuse to explain that I'd changed my bike for a 2nd-hand Honda Fireblade.. I'd cleverly managed to do it while my parents were staying with us which limited her capabilities for ripping me a new one at high volume..

And she refused to pillion on that bike - although the fact that the pillion seat was about the size of a postage stamp might have had something to do with it.. (and that it did 0-100 in about 4 seconds - 18K RPM red-line is a wonderful thing!)

Re: Similarities

seems to be a site pretty far to the left, so I assume it's representative of the Remainer position

Not a valid assumption - there are Leavers and Remainers at every part of the political spectrum.

After all, Jezza is most definately a leaver[1] and you don't get much further to the left in the mainstream.

[1] I'm not judging this by his current statement but by his attitude to the EU in previous years

Re: Auld Alliance

Would some Welsh ancestry help, d'you think?

Unlikely - in any context. Especially (at the moment) Rugby..

(My mother was Welsh..)

Re: "Blue jeans, sweatshirt with a logo on it, plimsolls, that kind of thing."

Nowt wrong with them, those are my best clothes

Indeed. Though some of the logos arefor obscure outfits (Flower Kings/Transatlantic/Spocks's Beard/Pittsburg Steelers/SF49ers et. al.) rather than some trendy clothes-producer-of-the-moment-that-should-really-pay-me-to-wear-their-logo..

Re: Bent coat-hanger and curtain wire

inducing panic in the owner lest the stupid animal snag the string and strangle itself

And this is (one) reason why none of my cats have collars - 3/3 of the previous generation of cats had problems with them:

Male cat would get new collar. 10 minutes later would go out for 5 minutes and then come back in sans collar. Rinse/repeat x 3. At which point we gave up. Said cat wasn't a shining intellect by any means..

His sister would get a collar, go out for 5 mins and then come back in with it partially off but holding her lower jaw fully open. We'd fix the collar, she'd do it again. Very bright cat - we reckon that she just did it to wind us up.. Gave up with her too.

Other female cat would vary between digging large holes in her neck trying to get it off and getting stuck in the mesh fence beween us and next door. Given that the collar had the usual elastic expansion and we made sure that, at full expansion, it would come off that was a pretty good feat.

So they went collarless. And then they introduced the cat ID RFID tags and problem was solved. All the current cats (and the dog) are cyber-pets (I use the term with deliberate irony).

Re: Bent coat-hanger and curtain wire

I think I've still got my official cable-running kit of bent coat-hanger and curtain

When I first met my wife (circa 1987) she had a Ford Fiesta (Mk 2). She also had a small reel of stiff packing tape in her handbag for the (rare) occasion when she'd locked her keys in the car. Seems that, using said packing tape fed through the rubber door seals, the internal locking knob could be lifted with relative ease..

That was when I knew we were compatible :-)