What makes you grin? Antidote to grumpy thread

[bramz7]

Train conductor/‘train manager’ just now:

 

“When leaving the train, please remember to take all your bags, personal belongings and children of which you are fond with you. Failure to do so may result in the bags, belongings or children being taken away and destroyed.

 

“The next station is East Croydon, the spiritual home, cultural capital and regular testing ground of Kevlar.”

 

Fair, not a bad effort! I'm still too green to even attempt that....

[Kiltox]

Train conductor/‘train manager’ just now:

 

“When leaving the train, please remember to take all your bags, personal belongings and children of which you are fond with you. Failure to do so may result in the bags, belongings or children being taken away and destroyed.

 

“The next station is East Croydon, the spiritual home, cultural capital and regular testing ground of Kevlar.”

Well you need to make working for Southern more enjoyable somehow

[Skizzer]

Well you need to make working for Southern more enjoyable somehow

Not to mention being a passenger! Though to be fair my trip to Reigate and back went fine today.

[Tadhg Tiogar]

Merciless satire:

 

[DodgeRover]

I do like Private Eye

[The_Equalizer]

“The next station is East Croydon, the spiritual home, cultural capital and regular testing ground of Kevlar.”

And to think there was a time when East Croydon was considered prosaic enough to be in the intro of Terry and June.

[Wack]

I do like Private Eye

Haven't bought it in years but the cover a few weeks ago made me laugh

[AMC Rebel]

So the big question is did you get a dangerous fail and have to have it trailered to the tyre place.

 

The garage are doing the MOT - but they don't do MOTs (if you see what I mean) so someone drove it back there.  They are fitting the tyre today.  It was driven away from the test centre with a dangerous fault fail though, yes, but not by me.

[AMC Rebel]

And to think there was a time when East Croydon was considered prosaic enough to be in the intro of Terry and June.

 

I worked there (and "lived" there weekdays) for nearly two years - it's not as bad as people make out.  I watched Bridget Jones' Baby last night and spotted a bit of Croydon in one of the locations.

[bramz7]

As ever, got a very car focussed weekend off coming up. Viewing one, and two incoming. Should also have two going too.

 

First delivery today. Hopefully it isn't a wreck, but it did only cost £100.

[Wack]

Saw a pile of model display cases in warrington lidl this morning reduced to £30 if anyone is looking for something to display their models in a vaguely wife friendly manner, may be available where you are

 

 

[Tadhg Tiogar]

 

And to think there was a time when East Croydon was considered prosaic enough to be in the intro of Terry and June.

 

 

I worked there (and "lived" there weekdays) for nearly two years - it's not as bad as people make out. ...

 

 

Apart from the Home Office tower blocks along Wellesley Road.

[AMC Rebel]

Apart from the Home Office tower blocks along Wellesley Road.

 Fair point - but balanced by the Alms houses and the fabulous Turkish restaurant I used to eat at.

[Tadhg Tiogar]

 Fair point - but balanced by the Alms houses and the fabulous Turkish restaurant I used to eat at.

 

The Alms houses and the old town hall were probably the only original bits of (East) Croydon left once the post-war architects had left their mark. Oh, and maybe the Allders building as well, built in similar style to Selfridges.

[bramz7]

The 164 has gone!!!!!

[320touring]

The 164 has gone!!!!!

*Checks for pigs in flight*

[meggersdog]

Karma is good.

 

A couple of weeks ago some bloke comes in for us to mot his car.Apparently he's in the trade, looks across at the lad working outside the garage nextdoor turns and says "what's it like working next to monkeys ?" I smiled politely and carried on with his mot.After he'd gone my glamorous assistant asks if I knew him.Nope never seen him before."How rude" was her reply.

Today he brings another car in and leaves it with us.Before he goes he tells me the brake pad warning light is on.Well that's a fail "it was on last year and passed" under the new rules it's now a fail."oh well my customer will have to have a new canbus system then" and off he goes.

On the ramp it's evident the car has had rear discs and 'pads not too long ago (probably for last years mot).Whoever had fitted them fitted a cheap set of pads with no wear indicators and the original wiring is tied up out of the way.So that's wiring to a braking component damaged DANGEROUS FAIL. Hmm, what was that about monkeys ?

[Wack]

That new John Lewis bohemian rhapsody advert put a smile on my face

[Pillock]

The 164 has gone!!!!!

Bloody hell they do rust quickly don't they?

[Tadhg Tiogar]

That new John Lewis bohemian rhapsody advert put a smile on my face

It'll have put a smile on the faces of the surviving members of Queen, because royalties....

[DodgeRover]

https://onsizzle.com/i/charlton-police-department-there-have-been-coyote-sightings-near-some-21126498

[purplebargeken]

MGF...... two new studs fitted, exhaust fitted, new rear brake pads because why not.

 

All done and dusted

[Zelandeth]

The computer my website (and a few local services aside) lives on decided to lose interest in responding to http requests a couple of days back for no readily explicable (therefore difficult to fix) reason.

 

That machine had been running CentOS for a while, which I'd never really got along with. Having used Debian variants for 10 plus years, I know my way around them quite well by now. CentOS is different enough that I seemed to spend a lot of time on Google trying to figure out where that configuration file or option that's not where I expected it to be is actually buried. Plus it tended to want to reboot for far more updates than I'm used to, made worse by the fact that it took forever to boot. Granted, it is running a horrible old Celeron D CPU!

 

25 minutes after dragging it out of the stack of knackered computers that makes up the little computing cluster, we were back up and running.

 

 

Never ceases to amaze me how rapidly you can get a modern Linux distribution installed and set up. Granted this one only really has the base system, the Window Manager, Apache and the client for a distributed computing system installed.

 

Hopefully it can remain buried back in its corner now for another couple of years.

 

Can't believe I used to consider taking the best part of an evening to install an OS, and the best part of the remainder of a week's worth of spare time to get all the other software back on and configured to be normal! Centralised package managers/repositories make stuff so much easier...

 

EDIT: Yes, the website does look like it's from the late 90s, that's because that's when I started writing it, and for the intended purpose it still works well enough. I do need to think about getting things set up to be more mobile friendly though - not to mention a general overhaul, weeding out of dead links, taking down a few pages that are embarrassingly poorly written etc... it's on the "to do eventually" list.

[LightBulbFun]

The computer my website (and a few local services aside) lives on decided to lose interest in responding to http requests a couple of days back for no readily explicable (therefore difficult to fix) reason.

 

That machine had been running CentOS for a while, which I'd never really got along with. Having used Debian variants for 10 plus years, I know my way around them quite well by now. CentOS is different enough that I seemed to spend a lot of time on Google trying to figure out where that configuration file or option that's not where I expected it to be is actually buried. Plus it tended to want to reboot for far more updates than I'm used to, made worse by the fact that it took forever to boot. Granted, it is running a horrible old Celeron D CPU!

 

25 minutes after dragging it out of the stack of knackered computers that makes up the little computing cluster, we were back up and running.

 

IMG_20180906_205433.jpg

 

Never ceases to amaze me how rapidly you can get a modern Linux distribution installed and set up. Granted this one only really has the base system, the Window Manager, Apache and the client for a distributed computing system installed.

 

Hopefully it can remain buried back in its corner now for another couple of years.

 

Can't believe I used to consider taking the best part of an evening to install an OS, and the best part of the remainder of a week's worth of spare time to get all the other software back on and configured to be normal! Centralised package managers/repositories make stuff so much easier...

 

EDIT: Yes, the website does look like it's from the late 90s, that's because that's when I started writing it, and for the intended purpose it still works well enough. I do need to think about getting things set up to be more mobile friendly though - not to mention a general overhaul, weeding out of dead links, taking down a few pages that are embarrassingly poorly written etc... it's on the "to do eventually" list.

 

 

I do hope you keep it 1990s browser friendly like ians bus stop is ( countrybus.org )

 

I actually use ians bus stop when im setting up my vintage computers to make sure they are connected to the internet properly (as seen a few pages back when I got a bondi blue iMac G3)

[richardmorris]

It'll have put a smile on the faces of the surviving members of Queen, because royalties....

I don’t think they’re short of a bob or two. I haven’t seen roger Taylor in the news for years, but Brian may lives in windlesham about 2 miles from me. He’s often in the local news saving badgers and hedgehogs.

[SiC]

 

I'm now just hoping the weather holds out on Sunday and Monday! The aim is to get the floor in at a minimum. I'd like to be started on the sills too to be honest.

[Wack]

It'll have put a smile on the faces of the surviving members of Queen, because royalties....

Like they need the money

[richardmorris]

Itv4 spy who loved me has the lotus scene on now, after the 2cv chase it’s the best one.

[Tadhg Tiogar]

I don’t think they’re short of a bob or two. ...

Every little helps.

[Zelandeth]

I do hope you keep it 1990s browser friendly like ians bus stop is ( countrybus.org )

 

I actually use ians bus stop when im setting up my vintage computers to make sure they are connected to the internet properly (as seen a few pages back when I got a bondi blue iMac G3)

That would definitely be the hope.

 

The biggest headache with it currently is the lack of ability to have text reflow when zooming in on a mobile browser - so it can lead to a lot of scrolling left to right while reading.

 

I think IE3.01 is the oldest browser I've seen it displaying correctly in from memory.

 

Annoyingly, Google actively de-rank sites with what they seem to be "poor mobile compatibility" in search results according to the documentation with the webmaster tools...which given the proliferation of tablets, smartphones etc may have a lot to do with why my usual daily traffic has dropped something like 95% in the last couple of years. The vast, vast majority was from random Google (other search engines are available - AltaVista was my favourite until the ads started crippling my PC) searches rather than direct traffic...so my...sporadic...update schedule probably isn't a huge factor.

 

Trying to maintain full legacy compatibility *and* the above will be a challenge.

 

I think the oldest I have a photo of is a version of Netscape from around 1996.

 

 

That might be a silly test for one day if I ever have any proper free time again for silly projects...see how old a browser on as many platforms as possible it works on.