Other What's ruining your life right now?

Man flu.

Thought I'd tough it out and go in to work anyway, thinking I'll just sit in the office and do some paperwork, then had a violent coughing and sneezing fit and nearly put the car through someone's garden wall. Feels like my ribcage is in a vice every time I cough or sneeze (i.e.every few minutes).

Called in at work, handed the keys to the gaffer, loaded up with many flu remedies at the pharmacy across the road and came home.

 

Why can't people drive properly?

First one: a white van driver realises he's in the wrong lane on a roundabout, so tries to cut across all three lanes of a roundabout to get where he needs to be. He's alongside me at this point and there's a massive queue of traffic behind me - no way am I slamming my brakes on and risking being rear-ended just because some idiot van driver doesn't know the rules of the road. Bloody tw@ has the cheek to blast his horn at me and give me the finger when I won't let him over.

Second one: I come off a stretch of 70mph dual carriageway on to a slip road which is also 70mph but reduces to 30mph after maybe half a mile or so. I glance to right-hand mirror to see what a car overtaking me is about to do and as soon as I turn back - the entire head movement took about half a second - I see that some f'wit two cars ahead has slammed his brakes on. The nice comfortable gap between me and the car in front is rapidly disappearing and I had to move out between the two lanes in order to avoid rear-ending the car in front.

Riding a motorcycle really opens your eyes to just how many dickheads are allowed behind the wheel. Still wouldn't swap it for a steel box though

 

My thoughts are with you in this troubling time my friend.

 

Byron, nothing tops how **** drivers in the US are. I’ve seen so many people go through red lights that it’s absolutely mind boggling. Then again, all you do is drive around the block and make six or seven turns in a 25 to 35 MPH zone and you pass your test provided you can perform a parallel parking maneuver at the start of your test. It’s amazing how easy it is. No wonder no one here knows how to drive properly.

Please don’t get me started on how **** they are when it snows. Everyone in my family told me that I absolutely must have a front wheel drive car or I’ll be dead in the water. Absolute BS. I have only put my truck into AWD a few times and the rest has been RWD the entire time on slippery surfaces. Besides, who doesn’t enjoy a slippery drifted corner once in a while??

My wife’s cousin just got her car written off this weekend by exactly that. She was in the turning lane with the permission to go as per the lights... two people, both in separate lanes, went through the red light. The first missed her and the second smashed into head on her, with an added bonus that they suspect the red light runner was on drugs and likely high at the time too.

 

Do you have right turn on red where you are TMDD? best thing about the USA that was (well, in NJ any way). You just treat the red light as a stop light.

And yes, they are hardly vetted. I remember my driving test. Drive up the road, turn around, come back "Here is your license".

 

At least they're not attached to your car.

 

That usually means they were misplaced and not lost.

 

As my Finnish other half says, you were looking like you were looking for a horse.

One of the lesser odd sayings from her fatherland.

 

Woke up to find my internet cut off... Can't do anything about it till the end of the month... Just hope my mobile data lasts

 

Yesterday sucked. So bad. I am amazed I did not cry.

It all started out well enough. Take rig apart, clean furiously, put back together. Did the PSU, board, case, SSD tray etc etc. I also had to work out exactly how I had wired it all up (using only blue wires, idiot) and that took some time. Any way, put it all back together and the floor box wasn't sitting right. Pushed it and *CRACK*. Managed to crack the entire cathode tube into two parts. It still worked though, so I wrapped some selotape around the body and it worked OK. Put it back, nose cone light had gone out. Took it all apart again, realised the LED power converter had been getting very hot and the wires had gone brittle and snapped. Got the soldering iron out at 1am and fixed that. Turned the rig on... Got the point of booting Windows, then said some crap about can't find Windows and shut itself down.

It was then that it dawned on me that my boot drive was the M.2 drive that I could not put back because I had lost the screw. A screw, it seems, that is unique to MSI. I first took apart a NVME to PCIE adapter and of course dropped that screw too (and lost it, because it was too big) and then I took apart a M.2 to 2.5" apart and again, dropped the screw again because it was too big. I managed to find it though.

So at about 1:20 AM out of desperation I dug out a 1080Ti cooler I had bought to mod. Still couldn't find a screw small enough (it's about .5mm) so ended up having to take the back spacer out of the mobo. I then found a screw that fitted that, and used a spacer from the 2.5" kit. Finally got it fitted. Went into bios, no SSD.

Another 30 mins of rebooting etc etc then I realised I had to dig deep into the boot stuff and set it as the primary drive or it doesn't show up at all (being M.2).

Finally booted the rig at around 2am. By which time I had just about enough strength left to go to my bed and collapse. Oh, and I scratched the crap out of the panels too so I had to touch them all up.

Nightmare. I am glad I only do this once every two years or so.

Oh and the £12 vacuum cleaner I bought was garbage.

 

We have that, yeah. I almost saw a truck (my size truck, RAM 1500 ish) collide into another car that decided to turn right on red, which is prohibited between 7-9 AM on this road, as indicated by the signs. It had snowed the night before and was heavily snowing when I was on the roads. The roads were slushy as they hadn’t plowed it yet, so he decided to pull out, but he can’t gain any speed. He was crawling at less than 5 MPH and this truck almost smashed into him as it was so difficult to stop due to the conditions. Absolute retards that drive here. I cannot fathom how dumb people are.

 

They don't have many but for god's sake try and avoid "Circles" as they call them. IE - roundabouts. It seems not a single one of them actually knows what you are supposed to do. So it becomes a death match.

It also used to make me very cross that stupid fat soccer moms didn't know that one lane is called a passing lane for a reason. You are not supposed to sit in it, dead level with another stupid soccer mom admiring each other's Dodge minivans. You are supposed to haul your stupid fat ass back into the driving lane.

I wouldn't even mind if they were doing a decent clip, but 40 in a 55 zone where you can't pass becomes incredibly grating.

But yeah, sometimes it even has "PASSING LANE" painted on it.

 

Oh, I know. Everyone in my family hates them and both myself and my father in law who’s British says they’re amazing. Roundabouts are phenomenal at moving traffic and much more efficient than the lights.

Haha! Man. I’m not the only one with the hatred towards these imbeciles.

 

Even Mythbusters came down on the side of roundabouts.

 

Pah forgot the most annoying part of my whine. I sat on the toilet last night (well, this morning) and that bloody cracked too and pinched my arse. I've no idea what type it is either.

 

There is nothing wrong with roundabouts that wouldn't be solved by not allowing morons to drive on public roads.

 

Nail vs tyre. Nail wins.

Big one in the front driver's side tyre of the Polestar this evening, tyre was entirely flat in the few minutes it took to go into the school to pick my daughter up.
I call green flag and am really impressed with the response time, though less impressed that they sent a tow truck and not a flatbed!
Point out to the driver that it's AWD... ah. Wait another hour for a flatbed :/

I was planning on calling around garages this week to replace tyres anyway, shame it's the rears that are the ones that need replacing, whereas the fronts only have a couple thousand on them!