Other What's ruining your life right now?

Think yourself lucky, my rear is £250+ on its own

 

The bikers in work highly recommend Chris @ Black Round & Sticky Byron, he's a mobile guy that can come to you for tyres and the like.

 

Had a better look at my bike’s rear tyre and checked the tread depth. Yeeeaaahhhh, that’s well beyond “dodgy” territory and firmly into the realms of “highly unsafe and also illegal”. As in, “£2,500 fine, 3 points on your license, and potential to cause an accident that could result in a horrible death.”

Safe to say the bike’s off the road until it gets some new rubber.

Already messaged him this morning, he’s fully booked until next week. I will shortly be contacting him again to see what he’d want to fit a pair of new tyres.

Assuming my garage hasn’t already ordered new tyres specifically for me after I said “yes, please order new tyres because I really definitely do want you to replace them” a few weeks back.

 

Complain to site services and insist they buy (and use regularly!) a "magnetic sweeper"

 

Good call.
I need a new magnetic sweeper at work, where we're having refurb work done.

 

We got one for the car parks after we had solar fitted to the roof. There were discarded screws and cut-off bits of metal everywhere!

 

Simply bust open 500 defunct HDDs and use the magnets to cobble together your own sweeper!

 

Project/build thread or it didn't happen.

 

Wasn’t on-site . Was on a road going past an industrial area: metal recycling, steelworks, sewage treatment plant - what I like to call the “Cardiff Scenic Route”. I heard the “pop” noise, but at the time I wasn’t sure if it was just a stone that got trapped at an awkward angle and pinged out.

 

Sounds great. I have a scrap guy who uses super powerful magnets from a washing machine to test for ferrous parts.
Maybe some of those on a rolling bar?

 

Luddite field blokes that can't read.

Our lab DMZ is getting a new internet connection so its public facing IP address is changing, we put out routers preconfigured with this range in their firewalls so in the meantime we need the guys installing them to add the new address in advance of it going live. Well I've had a guy replace the old address instead of adding a new one so everything he's installed is completely invisible to us and will be until the new connection is put in. In the meantime we can't access them to configure the VPNs so everything he's installed is sitting dead in the water.

Ok maybe he can read, but he just can't add? I dunno. It's frustrating to be a person who uses words to convey their meaning, and have to deal with people who use word in a far more vague way.

 

Bugger!

 

When I discovered the puncture yesterday morning I think I said something more along the lines of “**** **** ****ing ****”

 

Despite knowing I'm a lifelong amateur astronomer and local space expert, my girlfriend just casually mentions at 1am last night that her neighbours are annoying her talking loudly about seeing the aurora.

My understandable reaction is "what?"

Because if they're seeing aurora this far south of England, we might have 5 hours left to live.

I discover the news, go outside during the absolute peak, and the night sky just looks normal. I see a distant satellite and that's it. Maybe a faint white line or two, that would be unnoticable or just a cloud, if I wasn't specifically searching.

Give up after an hour or 2, as my casadastraphobia-megalophobia kicks in.

Next day, everyone, including people down the road, posting all these pics. As if the sky was just glowing purple the whole time.

I hate everyone right now. How in the hell?

 

Call from my mother about half 8 this evening (.... this evening? ..... last night? .... whatever) - she's in a taxi to the hospital to see an out of hours GP. Can't breathe properly, asthma/lungs playing up, fever, vomiting... Was a good thing I hadn't had a drink - about 5 minutes before she called I was contemplating whether to open a beer or a can of Relentless.

All the tests are fine, aside from a fever and tight/scratchy chest - doc says she's got a respiratory infection. Not much else to do besides dose her up with antibiotics, paracetomol, and rest. Dropped her off at her house and she apparently passed out within about 5 minutes. I'm back in Brecon now - nothing else I could have done, and I have both a paid-up B&B and all my kit here at the LAN.

Have to say though, that was an exhilirating drive. Pitch black on unlit national speed limit roads (not that I was actually doing NSL for a good chunk of the time). I've done the A40 to/from Brecon plenty of times on a motorbike, but never in the car and never at night.

 

Wales and their poxy assed 20mph zones

 

Because:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C611QY4CQaS/

 

This is what I was suspecting. I already knew it can be somewhat monochrome and faint. If you're somewhere where there's snow on the ground, it can be significant, but even a strong storm down here won't be crazy, right?

But NO ONE's saying what it looked like. Like they're all trying to fool each other because it's social media peer pressure, even though they're all part of the conspiracy. I just needed someone to say what they really saw and end the lies.

(I'm aware that anyone who was awake and outside at that time was also very drunk.)

 

Many years ago I was in Harrogate, on a whiskey session with the uncle of my then girlfriend. He kept pointing at the distant glow on the horizon and saying "them's the northern lights that is", problem was he was pointing south and it was Leeds.