test please delete

[covbob]

Hello all

How's the romantic weekend at norrahe towers going? Did the kedgeree go down well?

And zeity - are you a big lizardly Archers fan? I'm a bit of a follower myself. Didn't have time to listen much this week so will be firing up the omnibus on the Beeb website in a bit.

[zeitghost]

Dunno that I'm a fan.

It's just that it's more interesting than listening to the noise the vac makes.

I use a Lidl(tm) combined eardefender (necessary due to the din the vac makes) and fm radio.

The radio is permanently tuned to R4.


The lamb was done to a turn.

The rice pud, once again, might have benefitted from 10 mins less in the oven, but it was still very nice.

At the moment I'm cooking tomatoes in with the boiled spuds coz a) it gets rid of a couple at every meal and b) lends a slight increase in flavour to stuff.

[norrahe]

Hello all

How's the romantic weekend at norrahe towers going? Did the kedgeree go down well?

And zeity - are you a big lizardly Archers fan? I'm a bit of a follower myself. Didn't have time to listen much this week so will be firing up the omnibus on the Beeb website in a bit.

Kedgeree always works well.

Today is mostly booking stuff for the holliers

[BrilloPad]

[SimonMac]

I picked the wrong day to sit outside in the cold watching a film with the kids

[Alias]

I picked the wrong day to sit outside in the cold watching a film with the kids

Nice and warm here...

[NickFitz]

Finally made it home

It was a right hassle getting here, though

After checking out of the hotel this morning I took the car to Stanmore tube station and parked in the big car park there. Upon returning from central London late this afternoon, I discovered that a load of idiots, probably people going to some event at Wembley according to one of the locals, had found no space and had just parked in one of the lanes between the ranks of parked cars. I assume one did it, and the other just copied them like the fecking idiots they obviously are.

This meant that I couldn't get my car out: with a car either side and a row of them behind, there just wasn't enough room to reverse out

Nor was I alone, as there were several other people in the same boat.

There was a bloke next to a couple about six cars up from me who managed to work something out that involved one of them backing out, in such a way that the other could get their car out at an angle, then the other one getting back in at an angle in front of them, so that the first one was able to get out, making room for the other to get out. Each of these stages involved repeated back-and-forth manoeuvring, with other victims and me stationed at various points around them indicating clearances. They were having to get within an inch or less of other cars to make it work. There's no way it could have been done without four of us standing around helping.

Then a chap tried to help me get out, with manoeuvres involving similarly close spacing; but in the end we had to admit defeat: it was literally impossible to get my car out.

I went back to a couple a few cars up who had already made several attempts to get out, as they decided to have a final attempt. It took five minutes, but in the end we got them out by a whisker.

As they drove away, yet another couple returned to their car, on the other side of the improperly-parked row from me. They couldn't get out either; the best we managed got them into a position needing maybe two more inches of space, but it couldn't be done. This had taken about five minutes to establish.

I stayed chatting to them for a bit, when finally the owner of one of the cars in the middle arrived, and departed with a flea in their ear. (The chap from the stuck couple kept saying "Count to ten, John" to himself under his breath as they ditzed about before sodding off.) With that car gone, it meant we had the extra couple of inches they needed to get their car out.

That done, he jumped out of his car, saying "Right then, now let's get you out!" as the departure of that misparked car had also opened up a bit of space close to me, on the other side.

After going back and forth about a dozen times, many of them literally moving forward or backwards by two inches, changing from full lock one way to full lock the other while stationary between each move, I was finally free!

I was now facing the wrong way, as that was the only way to do it, and had to drive all the way to the bottom of the car park and back up again towards the exit. As I came back to where we'd been, that couple were helping yet another family get out of their space with similarly constricted room to move.

So that was six vehicles liberated in total. It took us ninety minutes to achieve that

[NickFitz]

Anyway, my talk seemed to be favourably received. They particularly appreciated the bit about using the sector editor in Norton Utilities to directly edit the machine code on the master disk of ACE 2 with an emergency last-minute patch

[zeitghost]

I'm sure they'd have been fascinated about my ISIS II floppy disk chkdsk program wot I wrote in FORTRAN on a GA 16-220 minicomputer.

As a means of cross linking files, ISIS II was ace.

[NickFitz]

I'm sure they'd have been fascinated about my ISIS II floppy disk chkdsk program wot I wrote in FORTRAN on a GA 16-220 minicomputer.

As a means of cross linking files, ISIS II was ace.

They would indeed - these young nerds (i.e. under forty) love hearing about old tech