Broithe

I quite enjoy the hunt and the stalking of the 'victim'. It's like being a virtual hitman. I'm surprised my messages to the Forum's owner have not sparked off a visit from law enforcement.

On my other forum, we have a current spate of fake applications. Most of them just seem to be automated things that fail to complete the process, so they aren't able to do anything. Occasionally, one does become active, these give at least the impression of being real people, as they make a good effort at posting plausible things. They are, however still easily identified as 'fake', as they post things that are intended to look like an interaction, but without any real content. One of them was posting every few days, without any direct contravention, not even coming back to edit in a link to a post, after it had seemed 'clean', etc. So, I let him waste his time. But, then he made a mistake that I wasn't prepared to let lie, so I removed him straight away. A couple of weeks ago, he posted in an old thread about plumbing issues, in an effort to make himself look real - but, he claimed to have recently used a forum member who was a plumber, although he never posted much. He found that strategy by reading a few earlier posts in the thread. That was his mistake, as I know that the reason that the plumber hasn't posted much lately is that he died five years ago. The plumber's widow still pops on now and then and has just been on, in fact, but all trace of the errant spammer is long gone now. It's not necessarily a victimless crime...

The Scammell Routeman always seemed the pinnacle of both style and function to me, but without being comfortable enough to allow the driver to nod off to sleep...

I spent Septembers in Ireland from 75 to 80, and not at all again until the early 90s, by which time the future had arrived. A particularly noticeable thing on the roads in those years was the absolute preponderance of Hinos, although they were virtually unknown on the Big Island. Harris seems to have started assembling them as early as 1968, but it may have taken a few years to corner almost the whole market, to the extent that they eventually did. As a 'marker' of the second half of the seventies in Ireland to me, a Hino would be as necessary as a few cars with different coloured doors...

We've all splashed out on trees at some point, when it has been necessary...

Concrete, like tarmac, is never the same colour as another piece. They used to say, of the US colour TV system, NTSC* - Never The Same Colour... In real life, patching hardstanding will never merge in, even over considerable time. If you ever need to hide a body under some, put it in from the side, without disturbing the visible surface. * OK - color, in the example given...

Search terms can sometimes be quite unexpectedly ambiguous. I once needed to stop two adjacent doors from swinging into each other and getting the paint chipped by the handles hitting the faces of the doors. Both doors would never really be open at the same time, so I just needed to limit the swing available to each, so they wouldn't go far enough to strike the other, closed, door. I fancied something like those sliding arm things that you sometimes got on cupboard doors, but a bit more substantial, to cope with the mass of the 'full-size doors'. I decided to do an image search to help weed out the lightweight items. Wondering what these things might be professionally termed as, I decided on "door restraint". About a quarter of the pictures that were suggested to me showed young ladies, tied to doors and not wearing adequate PPE.

Mmm, it works OK with four-figure years. Presumably, / and : don't 'count as a real characters'..?

Is it 8.3cm, perhaps? Or 83mm.

Cork-backed rules seem to be still available. A lot more friction, but the risk of a slight parallax issue, unless you keep the blade at the same angle carefully. It's not a great problem, compared to the benefit of the lack of slippiness.

I have one stashed away somewhere. The intention was to use it as the basis for a garden railway. One of the possibilities was to have a tunnel section and there was concern about what would happen if the signal was lost. Investigations found that it defaulted to full speed, which seemed like a reasonable result for the circumstances. Another one of the many things that may still happen - if I live to be a thousand years old.

Oh, how much fun we mechanicals had, showing the old Yellow Pages heading to you lot..

Yeah, but the rails don't go right to the extremities. Don't be dispiriting the lad - he's probably already done about a quarter of it...

No point in imposing unnecessary limits - just do the whole island in 00 - it will fit neatly inside Phoenix Park.