WHAT ATTRACTED YOUR ATTENTION TODAY?

[Tizer]

I must have missed out on the fuss back in October but this photo shows you what twisted minds some of those social media people have. The photo shows a statue of a Roman fertility god discovered in Papcastle, Cumbria. When the local In-Cumbria business support service tried to post it on their Facebook page it was rejected as unsuitable. When In-Cumbria asked why, "Facebook said: “Your ad content violates Facebook Ad Guidelines. Ads are not allowed to promote the sale or use of adult products or services, including toys, videos, publications, live shows or sexual enhancement products.” Just think how those social media sites have allowed bullying and other nasty things to go on and yet they'll ban a photo such as this! There is a photo on the Facebook page now but it's only the top half, cut off so that only the upper part of the penis shows.

http://www.in-cumbria.com/home/roman-fe ... -1.1171346

[PanBiker]

Sunday 21st December



Love is Photograpy

[Stanley]

David, I already have a spare hoover but it lives in the shed outside so I can use it for the workshop carpet. Don't want to attack the new one with swarf just yet!
Facebook ban.... incomprehensible.....

[David Whipp]

Sad to see that the North West Sound Archive is to close. Lancashire Telegraph report

As a newly elected county councillor in 1981 I persuaded Lancashire's libraries committee to support the project, which was in its infancy at the time.

[Stanley]

That's bad news, the original copies of the tapes and transcripts from the LTP are in there.....
Must ask the LRO if they are taking them in.
A late Xmas present for farmers contracted to Arla for their milk. Price drops another 2P in the New year. Charming! Will the last ones in the industry please switch the lights off as they leave..... See THIS LINK.

08:30. All my tasks done. Last minute shopping for milk etc accomplished. Dinner is on the stove. Wonderful, I can go in the shed now.....
I wish you an equally straight edge!

[PanBiker]

It says in the report that the material will be redistributed to regional centres appropriate for their content. Liverpool, Manchester and Preston mentioned.

[Moh]

The space station is supposed to pass over around 6.30pm - should see if it stays clear.
All shopping done, apple sauce (made from apple from our tree earlier in year) thawing, stuffing in oven. We are going to our granddaughters but we cook the turkey, apples, stuffing & gravy, daughterJayne is doing veg. granddaughter is doing roast potatoes, roast parsnips & sweet - think we drew the short straw and it has to be transported to Padiham in our Nissan Micra!!

[Stanley]

Thanks Ian, that's what I expected would happen. Looks as though it will be LRO but I will ask the question....
The bad news from HQ is that the old fart, as part of his tidying up of the old year, has saved all his 2014 data to two separate external hard drives and started a new archive for 2015. The 2014 data is still on the FM3 data HDD but there are two copies archived. You know you should do it, just think of all the trouble it could save if a hard drive went AWOL.
Sorry about that.....

[Tizer]

Moh, I think you need to look at 5.22pm and it will be visible for 3 minutes, rising from the south west to a maximum angle of 10 degrees and going down in the south east, so you need to look low towards the south horizon. Those are the figures for Preston and it shouldn't be much different for Barlick. The NASA guide is here (could be a slow link):
http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sighting ... VJrqbLAMYA
It will be higher (40 degrees) at 4.31pm on Christmas Day.

[Stanley]

I was going about my business yesterday afternoon and the carol service was on the radio from King's College. It's a long time since I have heard the first lesson read out, the one describing the Fall in the Garden of Eden. A young woman read it and I wondered how she could do it in this day and age without either laughing or feeling shame. In case you have forgotten it blames Eve for the apple and condemns her to pain in childbirth and subservience to her man for the rest of her life.... It struck me that sometimes tradition goes a bit too far and should be re-examined.... (Adam didn't get off lightly either....)
They used the King James Version which contains this: "Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."
Now here's the funny thing. I did a bit of digging and if you look at the official order of service this sentence is omitted but in the actual broadcast yesterday it was read. Now why should this be?
Another thing that struck me was that there was an advert for a dating service on the same page.... Very strange....

[Tizer]

If any of you have the chance, listen to Desert Island Discs at 3.15 this afternoon. It's a repeat of the 3000th edition with Royal Navy test pilot Captain Eric 'Winkle' Brown, an amazing courageous man who has probably flown more different aeroplanes than anyone else alive. If you can't listen this afternoon you can download the podcast and listen to it on your computer, mp3 player or whatever gadget you have. Available here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04nvgq1

The BBC web site has this blurb:
Kirsty Young's guest is former Royal Navy test pilot Captain Eric 'Winkle' Brown - the programme's 3000th edition. The Fleet Air Arm's most decorated pilot, his life reads like a handbook in beating the odds. Landing on a flight deck is acknowledged as one of the most difficult things a pilot can do. Eric Brown has held the world record for the most flight deck landings - 2,407 - for over 65 years. He was one of only two men on his ship, HMS Audacity, to survive a German U-boat bombing.

In a long and remarkable life he has witnessed first-hand momentous events in world history, from the Berlin Olympics in 1936 to the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp. Flying, he believes, is in his blood. He originally climbed into the open cockpit of a Gloster Gauntlet as a child to sit on his father's knee. Thirty years later he would pilot Britain's first ever supersonic flight. He says: "It's an exhilarating world to live in. There's always that aura of risk - you come to value life in a slightly different way."

--------------------------------------
Moh, thanks for warning me about the International Space Station. It made a marvellous pass, the best I've seen, because it was at dusk and there were only a few stars. When I've seen it before it was against a sky full of stars and it's less impressive then.

[Tripps]

" It struck me that sometimes tradition goes a bit too far and should be re-examined."

Well spotted - I increasingly wonder how these churchmen can get away with spouting such nonsensical (to me at least) words. Example being the service following the recent Glasgow tragedy. I switch off when I can stand no more, which is usually almost immediately.

That said, I regularly go the long way round the Cambridge inner ring road so as to get a look across the Backs at Kings College. Lovely building.

[Stanley]

See THIS for bad news for all the kids who got Xbox or Playstation as a present (and all the other users as well.) There must have been a lot of distraught parents yesterday!
The big light over my kitchen table has now gone permanently AWOL. Mo is on the case......
City Link goes into administration at the worst time it could happen for both customers and staff. (LINK) The 'venture capital' company that owned the firm have pulled the plug with no thought for anyone except themselves. The Market at it's finest. All perfectly legal but the union man is right, an absolute disgrace..... Rentokil sold the company for £1, I suppose that said something about its viability....

[Stanley]

I was struck by the way that the Sony and Microsoft hacking had disabled even gamers already registered because the games they have 'bought' rely on a witless connection to the Cloud. Evidently this applies to some car and a lot of aircraft management systems and one wonders what the effect of a large scale hacking attack would have on these. I don't trust these systems that rely on data, even personal data, stored on some anonymous server in a remote location. I know that in many ways we rely on connection to function, I am doing it now, but in terms of my own data archives I have them all stored internally and can work with them even if I have no connection to the web. So many people must be hostages to the big companies and the Sony and Microsoft hack over Xmas shows how this can affect customers....

[David Whipp]

'Witless'... good 'un!

[Stanley]

I shan't alter it, it's too good a typo!



Mo came round with the tubes for my lamp but the shop had given him the wrong ones! He went off to scour the shops, got a refund for the offending tubes but couldn't find the right tubes. He knows an industrial lighting company and will go there on Monday. He's a good lad, this meant travelling to Burnley and back. But, he wasn't going to leave me without a proper light till then and bought a lamp which he knows Jessica has been wanting. This is it, not as much light as the fluorescent but still a great improvement. Thing is they are quartz halogen bulbs and when both are on it burns 200 watts! I can stand that till he gets the tubes but my god, it wouldn't do much for the leccy bill if you had a few of these about!

[PanBiker]

Spending most of the day in Airedale Hospital Emergency Department - see Medical Matters.

[Stanley]

I've mailed Mo this morning and asked him to get four of the tubes when he finds a source. They are thinner and longer than the usual 'thin' tube. The ones in the other unit are the same age, we might as well be prepared. Come to think, we might as well change all of them!
See THIS for a Guardian report on the missing Indonesian Airlines Air Bus 320 200. 150 passengers and two hours overdue. Contact was lost over the Java Sea. It all sounds dreadfully familiar....

[Tizer]

'Witless'... good 'un!

Oh, I thought he'd written witless deliberately because that's what he thought of Cloud storage!

[PanBiker]

Stanley, if your tubes are 5ft (I think it's the 5ft ones) they are rarer than hens teeth, existing stocks only I believe. We had a similar problem where I used to work. It was cheaper to replace the entire fitting than to buy a single tube.

[Stanley]

I think you may be right Ian. I am talking to Mo.....
No news of the Asian Airbus. The thing that puzzles me is that in these days of radar, ATC and automatic transponders there isn't a continuous record of position. Did I hear (when the Malaysian plane went down) that the planes only report automatically at certain intervals and that it would be a very cheap upgrade to make it continuous?
The ferry fire off Crete is just as dangerous but we know where that is so we get more news.
Later, I heard the Met Office forecaster this morning say that a temperature of -8.8C this morning in Northern Ireland was the lowest recorded in Britain this year. I can't believe that. Surely there were lower temperatures in some of the Scottish Glens?
Just heard Jon Moulton 'defending' himself over City Link. He failed miserably. His version is 'not me Guv''. He thinks he is bullet proof....

[Tizer]

We're going to have to accept that long distance transport - by sea and air - is going to be more dangerous in the near future, not less so. Extreme weather events are here until we sort out climate change and that means travelling the oceans and the atmosphere has got to be riskier.

Moulton claims he lost money on CityLink but I'll bet he's using that as part of his `tax efficiency plan' and he will have got other benefits out of it, while we taxpayers will be paying the redundancy packages of the workers. The firm should have been shut down some time ago and the workers given plenty of warning they would be made redundant; then the remaining company assets could have been used to fund the redundancies. Instead the vulture capitalists smell an opportunity and pick over the corpse...

[Stanley]

Dead right Tiz, I think we are both singing from the same hymn sheet...
Just talked to Mo, he's got 4 tubes and is en route to East Hill Street. What a good lad!
An hour later and Mo has been, changed all four tubes, put the ladder and the good tubes out of the way in the corner of the bathroom and both lights are working with brand new tubes. Wonderful, he's a good lad. Oh and by the way he had £6 left over so I told him to use it for petrol. I am a very happy bunny, I hate having things about that are not working!

[PanBiker]

All clear from the TIA clinic, so with my newly restored driving capability I drove down to Sandbach to pick our Ruby up. We had to put that on hold pending my results. All good so were cooking on gas as they say.

[Stanley]

Life is funny and intermittent faults are a bugger. The lamp has failed again this morning.... I've asked Mo to get a brand new 6ft twin tube unit.....
Debris field found in the Java sea and reports of some bodies in the water. It looks as though they have found the airliner.... At least the relatives will have definite news....