The grumpy thread

[vulgalour]

Today, my Dad visited and we had another go at making my lights be reliable on the Princess. What transpired instead is that we succeeded in making the rear side lights work properly, but the brake lights and my wipers now no longer work and no amount of fiddling seems to resolve this at all. I'm going to clean up the contacts and fuses in the fuse box and try again, I can't very well use a car with no brake lights, even if I do know the relevant hand signal to be legally sound in the short term.

 

I've also started stressing about the Waddington show now it's sunk in just how long a day it is. 1.5 to 2 hour drive to arrive at Waddington by 8:30am and then not allowed to leave Waddington until 6pm. That's going to be a long-ass day and I am not a morning person, at all, in any way, shape or form. Mornings are for sleeping.

[Mr Lobster]

Slugs.

 

GET OUT OF THE FUCKING HOUSE YOU SLIMY FUCKSUCKERS.

 

SRSLY, I keep getting slug trails appearing overnight. Not loads but just the odd one and its getting on my moobs. Been round silicone sealing any little gaps which helped but theres still one or two somewhere. As they appear to like somewhere damp to live I'm going to pull the washing machine out and see if theres any leaks behind that.

 

To add insult to injury, one appeared on the rug last night, seems that one of the cats then ate it and then sicked it back up. Cheers for that puss.

[cobblers]

  Mr Lobster said:

Slugs.

 

GET OUT OF THE FUCKING HOUSE YOU SLIMY FUCKSUCKERS.

 

SRSLY, I keep getting slug trails appearing overnight. Not loads but just the odd one and its getting on my moobs. Been round silicone sealing any little gaps which helped but theres still one or two somewhere. As they appear to like somewhere damp to live I'm going to pull the washing machine out and see if theres any leaks behind that.

 

To add insult to injury, one appeared on the rug last night, seems that one of the cats then ate it and then sicked it back up. Cheers for that puss.

 

 

[richardthestag]

  Mr Lobster said:

Slugs.

 

GET OUT OF THE FUCKING HOUSE YOU SLIMY FUCKSUCKERS.

 

SRSLY, I keep getting slug trails appearing overnight. Not loads but just the odd one and its getting on my moobs. Been round silicone sealing any little gaps which helped but theres still one or two somewhere. As they appear to like somewhere damp to live I'm going to pull the washing machine out and see if theres any leaks behind that.

 

To add insult to injury, one appeared on the rug last night, seems that one of the cats then ate it and then sicked it back up. Cheers for that puss.

 

Had this prob for years, nip downstairs at 2 am and find a dozen big fat bastards all over the floor. Get rid off tem all and it gets better for a week then back to square one!!!

 

Now have sticky copper strip along the skirting and door openings and that seems to hold them back. Also slug pellets behind furniture and under kitchen cabinets.

 

If I do get one then it goes for a ride over the hedge courtesy of an old charity shop tennis racket

[richardthestag]

  volksangyl said:

Today, my Dad visited and we had another go at making my lights be reliable on the Princess. What transpired instead is that we succeeded in making the rear side lights work properly, but the brake lights and my wipers now no longer work and no amount of fiddling seems to resolve this at all. I'm going to clean up the contacts and fuses in the fuse box and try again, I can't very well use a car with no brake lights, even if I do know the relevant hand signal to be legally sound in the short term.

 

I've also started stressing about the Waddington show now it's sunk in just how long a day it is. 1.5 to 2 hour drive to arrive at Waddington by 8:30am and then not allowed to leave Waddington until 6pm. That's going to be a long-ass day and I am not a morning person, at all, in any way, shape or form. Mornings are for sleeping.

 

Ah Lucas the prince of darkness strikes again.

[M'coli]

Re: slugs - turning the lights off and waiting an hour or so brings them out. We had a massive problem with them at one point, picked eight 6-inch long ones out of the cat's food bowls one night, then some smaller ones a couple of nights later, and 76 half-inch to inch ones off the kitchen floor 2 weeks after that...

[dollywobbler]

Don't get me started on slugs. None in the house thankfully but the slimy f*ckers have munched quite happily through our strawberry harvest. Not happy.

[Mr Lobster]

  cobblers said:

 

LOLOLOLOL

 

I think I've got rid of the worst but I'm going to pull the bottoms of the kitchen units later and throw some pellets behind and seal up any holes I can find. I'm guessing there must also be a small damp issue somewhere as well as they like somewhere damp to live from what I've read so hopefully if I pull the washer out I might just find a few.

 

Otherwise I'll be staying up late in the dark tonight to see what I can find before playing a little game of slug death

 

Had loads of them in the garden as well as an invasion of snails. Quite a lot of them got drowned / launched into the field though.

[sporty-shite]

We've found a couple in the conservatory just lately, slimy little fuckers. No idea how they're getting in, but that's as far as they go. Seen a couple of weird looking tortoiseshell patterned ones, too. They all get lobbed back in the garden though, regardless of colour.

 

I ain't no slug racist!

[MrDuke]

  dollywobbler said:

Don't get me started on slugs. None in the house thankfully but the slimy f*ckers have munched quite happily through our strawberry harvest. Not happy.

 

Are your strawberry plants actually in the ground? If so, make a 'border' of copper piping to completely enclose the bed, and lay it on the soil. I thought it was total BS when I first heard of it, but since Mrs_Duke surrounded the lettuce plants with some old offcuts, they've been completely untouched (while the rest of the garden gets ravaged as usual); our sections aren't even properly joined together, but it still does the job.

Also, half-bury margarine or ice-cream tubs around the garden and fill them with cheap/undrinkably bad beer. Just remember to empty them every day - the smell of fermenting slug is unlike anything else you will ever, ever experience and (the remains of) your stomach will never forgive you.

 

 

EDIT: Oh, and for everyone who lobs slugs/snails into a nearby field/neighbour's garden - they WILL head directly back to your garden, straight away. Unfortunately death is the only solution. If you can be bothered, stick the snails to a bird-table, at least they won't be wasted then.

[Volksy]

Go all Guantanamo on them!

[willswitchengage]

Tried the beer in an old plastic milk bottle trick - only killed one and if anything just attracted more to the garden. Used to have them in two houses and in the first I often had to wash them down off the bathroom tiles before an early morning shower Moved into the second house assuring it was 100% slug free, got up for a piss in my first night's sleep and there are three on the carpet... oh... and one had made a meal out of my beer mat collection My solution worked though: gaffer tape up and polyfil every available orifice (they were getting in through the meter boxes) and blitz the ground outside with slug pellets. Haven't seen another since and the flowers outside look lovely

[Ross_K]

No pay for me today thanks to the fucknuts in Ulster Bank/RBS and their "systems issue".

 

I wonder if I can send them a demand for 30 quid cos they fucked up for a change?

[messerschmitt owner]

  Ross_K said:

No pay for me today thanks to the fucknuts in Ulster Bank/RBS and their "systems issue".

 

I wonder if I can send them a demand for 30 quid cos they fucked up for a change?

I wonder if it was cos they got hacked! Expect a big fine from the Data Protection lot ...

[dollywobbler]

Another grump is that my email account got hacked in Vietnam in the wee hours. Someone had fun sending spam to my contacts (over 300!). Yahoo kindly told me that my account had been accessed 'unusually' but failed to prevent the 'unusual' activity of mailing blank emails with just a link in them to all of my contacts. That's not really the sort of thing I do! Needless to say, password changed to a more robust one and log-in details beefed up too. There's an awful lot of this going on at the moment, so you might want to do likewise yourself. Now I'll just have the problem of forgetting my new super-strength password...

 

While I'm grumping. The bloody weather. Great for slugs, not for very much else. It just keeps raining, with more rain to follow, and then more rain. I know I live in Wales, but this is pretty bad. Flooding very likely again if it doesn't ease up. Doesn't help with the slug evictions!

[Ross_K]

  messerschmitt owner said:

I wonder if it was cos they got hacked! Expect a big fine from the Data Protection lot ...

 

Hacked eh? Interesting. It'd have to happen the week my credit card's maxed out to the max.

 

The fuckers managed to debit mortgage payments from people's accounts all the same...

 

Sooo...The "system" which is buggered to such an extent that I can't be paid is working well enough to allow money to go out to pay mortgages. Good to see they got their priorities right.

 

It pisses me off no end when this kind of thing's blamed on the "system" or "the computer" rather than the arseholes operating the "system".

[barrett]

re: slugz. They get in the house as babies caught in the fur of your cats/ dogs, only way to stop it happening is to shave the little bastards (possibly leave the head and tail as-is for comedy effect). We've got a fuggin' colony of the things in the kitchen living in a tiny gap in wall. Haven't actually seen evidence of them for a while actually so hopefully they're all DEAD.

[pompei]

There was some real genuine straight up scientific research done a while ago about this homing instinct that slugs and snails apparently have. They removed a number od slugs and snails to some considerable distance away having previously marked them up in some way. The boffins confirmed that the creatures which are evicted do come back

 

Problem with slug pellets is that we have 2 cats...

[Lankytim]

Mrs lankytim's car insurers are going to cancel her policy because we can't prove her 7 years NCB- the previous insurance company keep telling us they have sent it to us... but it never turns up. GREAT.

[Mr_Bo11ox]

Theres nowt to stop Mrs LT's insurer ringing up the previous one and confirming the NCD (if they could be fucking arsed that is) as per the almost universal 21st century insurance practice.

[Lankytim]

Apparently that's not allowed anymore! (or as you say, they can't be bothered)

[meshking]

Had a classified ad for the missus' Ford CMAX in ebay, with best offer. Received a few stupid offers, so reduced the price a little and started to get much more promising. Also, because it was getting nearer to the end of the 28 days, I guess it was appearing in the first page or two.

 

Received an offer. Accepted it. Wow - that makes it looks like they have 'bought' the car. Oh, and it ends the listing too.

 

Cue a few panicky emails, and then a phone call to the potential purchaser: no panic, come and see the car at the weekend. If you like it, make me an offer.

 

received an email last night - can't get a loan, so won't be coming. Ok - so, how do I get the remainder of my classified ad 28 days back? Ebay not forthcoming on that one! Just to say "buyer doesn't have to purchase" but my ad doesn't exist any more! So I have to pay another £14.99 and then wait another 20 days or so before it comes into peoples reasonable search?

[cobblers]

Bought a new PC case for £40 cos I fancied something a bit quieter. Stripped the old case bare and set about fitting the parts in the new case, to find the motherboard didn't fit (Apparently those shuttle PCs aren't any kind of standard ATX motherboard) but that was remediable by just using 3 proper standoffs where they fit, and a couple of little sticky rubber feet to support the very end of the board.

Not ideal, but it would do til I can afford a new board and CPU.

 

Got it all built up, and somehow the board is now dead, and I need the PC back together ASAP to do some bloody work with.

 

Trotted off to various shops hoping to just spend £45 on a new motherboard or something, but it seems that I must have some kind of moon processor cos nowhere even stocked a board that would fit it (LGA 775)

 

Ended up spending £140 in PC World on a new board and CPU combo. I really daren't look online for what I should have paid for it.

 

Anyway so I get it all built up and it won't boot - just BSOD halfway through startup. Seems you can't get away with changing motherboards with windows 7 like you could with XP and Vista, so I had to reinstall windows twice - once on a spare drive to boot the machine up with so I could backup my files off the main drive to it, and then again finally on the main hard drive.

 

 

A £40 steady hours worth of job turned into taking me all day and costing the best part of £200, and the ASUS SURGE MONITOR thing is now going mad at me cos apparently the voltage levels on the brand new power supply are up and down like a slappers knickers.

 

But now I have a marginally faster computer

[Des]

Car insurance, getting awkward to get cover for an LPG converted vehicle lacking an installation certificate. If the insurers were to insist on an engineers report that would be fine by me, but now seem to require a certificate from an lpg installer, fine in principle, but in reality the qualification to certify is having been on a weeks course and paying a sub. This explains why I've seen comedy installs with all the right paperwork.

For years I've merely rung various insurers, ask if they want a cert, keep going until I gather a few who are cool and go with the cheapest. Now it seems 90% and rising are insisting on a cert, insured with Adrian Fux, who then changed their mind, and wound up wasting 3 hours ringing around ending up with some obscure outfit called Stavely Head.

On asking the internet of this predicament, it appears that the lpg association charge their members an extortionate amount, and do very little or nothing for them, started loosing members and have retaliated by replacing / enhancing the paper cert with an internet database, and have been busy lobbying insurance companies to insist on registration, a clever move, and thanks to the bastards I'm going to have to be arsed to get 2 cars inspected. Anyone know of any LPG guys in the South Herts N. London area?

[wuvvum]

I've also finally had to bite the bullet and upgrade my desktop PC - my wheezy (if ultra-reliable) old Tiny with its 2.66 GHz Pentium 4 CPU, which I bought secondhand nearly five years ago, has been getting slower and slower to the point of being infuriating. To be fair, I don't think it's the computer that's got slower, but websites have become more and more resource-hungry as web designers fill them up with more pointless Javascript shit to make themselves look clever (insert comparisons with car designers here).

 

So I've bought an IBM Thinkcentre, which isn't ideal as it's an office-style PC in a compact flat case so not a lot of room for upgrades. It's running a dual core Pentium processor though, and despite running Windows Vista it's so much quicker than the old computer I was genuinely surprised. It even manages to run Google Instant searches without shuddering to a halt. I was so impressed I even forked out £15 for a secondhand LCD monitor for it from CEX (they didn't have any CRT monitors in stock ), so I'm now fully in the 21st century computing-wise... Remains to be seen if it'll be as reliable as the old one.

[Negative Creep]

I'm still trying to keep my ancient PC and laptop going, so recently reinstalled XP on both.Problem is I now don't have the drivers . for the video card and ethernet connector respectively, have no software so no idea what is actually installed. Therefore I can't search for the correct drivers

[skattrd]

NC - to search for unknown drivers, go in to windows device manager, select the device and in the properties there will be a hardware id. Google the hardware id and that should tell you what it is and what drivers are needed.

Alternately for a desktop open it up the motherboard should have the manufacturer & model on it somewhere. Google is your friend again for drivers if the manufacturer website no longer does legacy drivers, but most do. If the video & network are onboard the motherboard manufacturer should have the drivers

 

For future reference use drivermax link before re-installing windows to backup your drivers.

[Negative Creep]

thanks - been searching by device ID for the last hour or so with no joy. Just lots of dead links, wrong files and dodgy Russian sites. Toshiba don't even list it on their site anymore

[philibusmo]

  Negative Creep said:

thanks - been searching by device ID for the last hour or so with no joy. Just lots of dead links, wrong files and dodgy Russian sites. Toshiba don't even list it on their site anymore

 

Do you have the serial number of the toshiba laptop, I'm posative I will be able to find your drivers.

[Negative Creep]

  philibusmo said:

  Negative Creep said:

thanks - been searching by device ID for the last hour or so with no joy. Just lots of dead links, wrong files and dodgy Russian sites. Toshiba don't even list it on their site anymore

 

Do you have the serial number of the toshiba laptop, I'm posative I will be able to find your drivers.

 

 

I've managed everything bar the ethernet controller. It's a Satellite m50 with serial z5179477k if that helps