Be Excellent To Each Other

http://xkcd.com/366/

The alt text is

I remember staying in a hotel room that had a hallway to nowhere. You open the door, walked about 12 feet and then one wall curved into the other and it just ended. A bit like Ned Flanders' rebuilt house.

Good idea having the fire standing by if you're reading about Mandelson.

OH MY GOD I'M GOING TO DIE

Went to see Richard Herring last night. What was going to be a quiet night went to shit when we had finished dinner in Osatsuma beforehand, and Ali texted a friend how she had missed the place. Turns out that said friend was in town and on her way to Satsuma. Gig finished at 9:15 so we went to catch up with them for a pint. Got home at gone midnight and now have lovely stomach cramps and an empty wallet.

Traditional Welsh longhouses didn't have corridors at all, just connecting rooms (and usually just two up and two down, and one of ground floor rooms would be an animal pen!)

lols.

Is Richard Herring doing new jokes yet? I saw him on telly last night and he was still doing the gags about gay sex mimes and potato/apple stuff.

This tour is Christ on a Bike, which is a reworking of a show he first did in 2001 (I think). Quite good, although by listening to his podcasts and stuff, I'd actually heard most of the jokes before from when he was testing them . However, put together its quite good, with the exception of the bits that I think he probably believes to be the best sections. The audience seemed to agree.

I want him to do the 'Someone likes yoghurt' show again. Now that was class.

I feel like poop.

Coo, interesting.

People are arriving today and I need to get an Xbox 360 SCART connector, lots of beer and decide when to get this fire lit.

Anyone else think this landlord who has been arrested in connection with the murder of Joanna N. Chachi or whatever her name is in Brizzle looks a bit like an old version of He-who-shall-not-be-named?

She who buys any car dot com what sponsors motoring on Dave:

I have one you can borrow, but I'm a long way down the M4 from you.

I am slightly less far down the M4, and also have a (not as good, composite jobby) one.

There must be a GAME in Carmarthen! There is definitely a big PC World who should sell them, on a retail park near where the A48 comes in from Swansea down that big hill.

That is most kind of you but I think I'll chance the retail park outside Carmarthen or the town itself. We're the only ones with keys right now so can't really leave, andI want to get my fire on.

woah, I hate to judge on apearences but I'm not sure I'd want this guy to have the master keys to my flat.

The web browsers on my laptop (Chrome and IE) have stopped opening. My only other way of browsing at the moment is through my Wii, which I'm using now, so I can't even try downloading them again and reinstalling. A full Malwarebytes scan found nothing. Boo-urns!

Why is it that when presented with photos of attractive women holding guns, the first thing I check isn't the size of their boobies or something like that, it's whether they have good trigger discipline?

(incidentally, she does - not in that photo, but in the others in the series )

's'alright, if the rest of the Internet had it's way he'd be hung drawn & quartered by now.

Here are the Internets charges against him; he looks funny, he reads romantic poetry & he pronounces place names in an eccentric way.

Because it's very important.

I'm picking up my driving lessons again in the new year so I can get back on the road again, so for the hell of it I'm looking at how much I'd get raped on insurance as a new driver on an array of cars.

On a Confused.com search (which I understand may not be accurate, and I can haggle with companies direct over the phone etc. but I'll use it as a yardstick anyway) it would cost me less to insure a 1.6 Focus bought for ~£5,000 than a 1.3 Ka bought for ~£1,500*, and I can't seem to get any insurance on any car for less than £1,500 a year. Arses. Hopefully when I actually get around to it I'll be able to find something cheaper as there's no fucking way I'd be willing to pay that.


*this is what Miss Malabar has picked up as a temporary car until she can sort out a decent one next year.

Insurance prices have risen astronomically in the past year thanks to the snow last year and loads more personal injury claims etc.

I imagine it'll only get worse now we've had a bad winter this year too.

It's not unusual that a larger car like a Focus can be insured for less than a small car, they often go by the type of person who's likely to be buying a given car. Saxo or Corsa (and increasingly, Ka) is likely to be a boy/girl racer who'll prang it at the first available opportunity. Focus has plenty of those too, but more often than not are bought by sensible types.

I've got to start ringing around for the insurance renewal on my GT-Four, really, really not looking forward to it.

So you've only got yourself to blame, Malaboob.


Try the awesomely-named Frank Pickles - they're good with customised cars.

I should have put the word "frivolous" in there to exclude those with legitimate claims

Well, that was a wonderfully harrowing and unpleasant drive home.

-why the hell, road designer, would you put a parking area on a dual carriageway immediately BEFORE a narrow bridge with no hard shoulder? Is that so the sort of guys who use parking areas on dual carriageways (flatbed recovery-type trucks) have absolutely nowhere to try and accelerate to 70mph EXCEPT by using one of the two lanes? I saw this from a distance and thought, "he better not," but he did, and the car in front of me (who had an unobstructed view) was terrified and slammed his brakes on and couldn't move over as up until that point they'd been driving at an irritating 55mph and a pissed off BMW was overtaking at 70mph.

-leaving the motorway, yet again no hard shoulder so the chav in the broken down 206 had nowhere to push it out of the way. Plus, his WELL RUDE blacked-out tail light covers meant his hazard flashers were producing as much light as a glow-in-the-dark condom to warn people he was there. More terrified people swerving to avoid.

-Craig Charles is DJing on Radio 2, and was reading out people's New Year's resolutions. He actually read out, "Next year we're giving up aerosol deodorants. Roll on 2011!" and I wished that perhaps I'd crashed into one of those two obstacles earlier and died in a huge explosion.

Thanks to the fact that I now own a radio for the first time in 10 years (ususaly pick and chose from the internets) I caught part of that Craig Charles show and he really is an appalling DJ, Patrick Kielty on the other hand is really rather good.

Satan has a special place set aside for Kielty-enablers.

"The first x-ray images of a lightning strike have been captured by a, well, lightning-fast camera..."


http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... echnology/

Spent most of the day assembling furniture for the nursery. FYI: The Aspen Double Wardrobe from Babies R Us is the most over engineered flatpack ever.

I'm knacked

So... they took some first ever photos then don't show us them, great. :|

I bet you read for fun

I wasn't belming you , I think it is interesting, I was just wondering about the point of the article if the miss out the aim of the investigation in the report!

I'm belming at myself, you'd think I'd notice these fairly important details.

Does this seem familiar to anyone else?
http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_ ... =18&esem=1

Well, it's not the first piece of hypertext I've ever seen...

Wow Arkham Asylum is fantastic. Thank you Steam for letting me have it for £3 and change.

Someone's bringing that to the next Unplugged, right?

11 cans of Tanglefoot do not sit well with me the next morning.

(more) BBC SHOCKINGLY BAD PROOF CHECKING NEWS NOW



Dicks.

That logmein.com dooberry works pretty well - I've spent my morning at the office doing some of my Dreamweaver coursework, using logmein to remote control my home PC. I'm very impressed! Obviously for speed reasons it's using a low-colour mode, so I'll have to redo all my colours and everything when I'm back home, but at least I can get the bulk of the layout HTML and CSS done from here.

some cunt has broken the wing mirror mounting of the hire car I'm still stuck with because the insurance company still hasn't fucking paid up.

Merry fucking christmas.

Dude, it's new year's eve.

FOUR-O-FUCKING-CLOCK? YOU'RE NOT CLOSING THE OFFICE UNTIL FOUR?

I am somewhat annoyed by this development, as I have to stay here until the office closes and then have to drive to stafford.

I accidentally pulled the mirror apart on my insurance-hired Fiesta trying to fold it in.

Yup, sounds like the usual Ford standard of quality control mate. Both mirrors on my old Fiesta TDCI fell apart from the inside within months of my ownership - handles came off in my hands - and the car was less than two years old. And yes, the 1.4 diesel engine was utterly shagged, with cam slap etc., at 90,000 miles.

It's a shame really; Fords generally handle and are interesting cars as compared to much of the competition. Shit, I even like the look of that C-Max Grand 7-seater, as a grandpa-mobile second car (yes I know, people carriers are as boring and embarrassing as cars get, but you just can't argue with great practicality and clever use of space, no? Not to mention 40mpg+ from such a big car). I'd never get one though, for fear of engine self-destruct and zero manufacturer/dealer support, just like my old Mondeo, however good the actual car design is, or how well it (comparitively) handles. VeeDub, Audi or a BeeEmm all the way, then.

Busy and stuff, but: No.

We've had this argument before Cavey. I think pretty much all manufacturers nowadays build their cars to broadly equal quality controls nowadays. Any mass produced car will undoubtedly have problems, that's a simple fact which I'll get back to in a moment.

Yes, there's a difference in the materials used on the premium brands, and VW is a classic example of this with their sliding scale modular cars across their various marques. The big difference is that if you drop >40k on a Merc/BMW/Jag/Audi and you get a problem, then the dealers will smoothly, rapidly and efficiently deal with it if the anecdotal evidence I've heard is true. It was probably true until a few years ago that you wouldn't get this treatment from the likes of Ford/Vauxhall/PSA/Fiat, but I've heard that they've improved considerably in the last couple of years.

The simple fact is this, there's a possibility that any new mass produced car you buy, regardless of who makes it, can have problems. It's how willing to look after you the dealer is transforms that from being a horror story to one of undying love for the brand. IIRC your first TT was a bit of a lemon but Audi bent over backwards to look after you, didn't they. You didn't get the same treatment from Ford with your cars.

The thing is, I've had experience of numerous Fords in the last decade that have been very reliable, Hondas that have been similar but no better, VWs that have ranged from fine to fucking awful, terrible Fiats (electrical problems obviously and the dealers were beyond fucking useless) and I have friends with Porsche's, Beemers, Audis, Mercs and Jags and I do enquire what the ownership experience is like. The "satisfaction" is wholly dependent on how the problems are sorted. Out of that lot the only one who had no problems was the Jag owner, the Beemer had numerous niggling problems which were fixed quickly, the Audi was fine with some teething issues and the Merc was an absolute dog which needed a new engine with 30k miles on the clock, had paintwork problems that required a respray(It was a CL600, which correct me if I'm wrong is a >£100k car). My friend's Porsche had a problem with a porous rear alloy leaking air all the time and Porsche failed to resolve it in the three years he owned the 997 S.

The thing is, I know this isn't empirical but all I'm suggesting is that all modern cars can be faulty. The dealers make a difference and hopefully if you're paying a premium for a premium brand, there's no guarantee that the car will be better built, but you WILL get better looked after.

Hell, one friend of mine went to another friend's 60th birthday and parked his 2 week old 5 series estate on their lawn and couldn't move it the following morning as it had sunk into the lawn. BMW sent a tow truck at no charge to get it off the lawn. Yes, it's a £50k car, but that's the kind of service I'd want if I was dropping that kind of money on a new car.

Hang on, what? He rang BMW and said "Hello! I've bought a car from you and now it's stuck in some mud!" and they didn't say "That's sad. Bye!"

What possessed him to ring BMW in the first place