Broithe

I saw an official announcement including the phrase "making tracks" and immediately assumed it would be the full range of track, points, crossovers, etc, all in 21mm... I'm going for a lie down now.

It does work - and it's not always helpful.

Talk elsewhere of a time when I did a bit for a plant hire firm has had me thinking about the mad stuff that went on. The owner did not look the part at all - when I first met him, I would have guessed he was a geography teacher, but he was hugely competent at his work, if a little unconventional. He had plant involved in a project which was running a new bridge across a dual carriageway. The bridge spans arrived and were hanging on the crane when it was noticed that an existing streetlight was in the way of one of the spans being placed. As with all such projects, huge numbers of organisations were involved and a dispute arose about what to do. The lighting had to remain operational, but the post couldn't stay there. It was not really any of his business, but whilst dozens of blokes were arguing in a Portakabin, he spoke to the crane crew, to ascertain what height was acceptable and got an electrician to disable the wiring up the pole, but leaving the connection in the base, as a 'junction box', so the rest of the lights would still work. Then he got a saw and was lifted up in a bucket to cut the top of the lamppost off, leaving a few inches clearance from the bottom of the bridge, so there was no chance of rain ingress. The stump was there for many years after, under the bridge and unnoticed by thousands who drove past it every day, although it is gone now. I always used to acknowledge "Martin's lamppost" whenever I went past it.

I was about to suggest that "they need some mud!" - then I remembered a time when I used to do a bit for a plant hire firm and a brand new bucket for a Caterpillar arrived. It had the best finish that I've ever seen on an 'industrial' product. Thick, hard, perfectly even, high-quality paintwork. Pushing it into the ground the first time would actually have been painful.

I have a general tendency to not go out on a Saturday, and I've not had a TV since 1983. The encounter below has me considering running through my Prisoner DVDs again now. Other things that I'm happy to re-watch are:- The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. The Beiderbecke Trilogy. The Sweeney. Citizen Smith. The Avengers. Whoops, apocalypse! UFO. Etc. Sometimes, I will watch episodes a week apart, like real telly, so you have time to mull it over, like it used to be. Also, sometimes watching things repeatedly over the years gives you a better view of the whole thing. I've listened to Round the Horne many, many times over the years since it finished and still spot the odd 'new' hidden joke. One was only a few years ago, when I realised that a punchline had two meanings, dependent upon whether you 'heard' a word with a capital letter of a lower case one - this was only given away by one of the laughs you could hear as a result was 'in a different' tone to the others. Of particular note in The Prisoner is the episode where he thinks he's managed to escape and the first 25 minutes are just him on a raft on the sea, alone. Then he gets 'rescued' and the first words spoken since the start are in German. I doubt you would get away with it now...

If you'd used the cue ball, it could be a scene from The Prisoner.

Amusingly, and demonstrating how the web really is an actual web, the famed Andy York, who is, by geographical coincidence, a member of my other forum, tipped me off about a dodgy new member, who seemed to be very similar to someone who had caused issues over on RMweb. His suspicions turned out to be correct and a death warrant was executed, before any harm could be done. In a way, it's a bit reassuring, it was our first visitor of a risqué nature, all the others have been just inept 'marketing' for streaming sites and IT equipment purveyors in far-off lands. I had wondered if we just weren't attractive enough?.

Eye halve a spelling chequer It came with my pea sea It plainly marques four my revue Miss steaks eye kin knot sea. Eye strike a quay and type a word And weight four it two say Weather eye am wrong oar write It shows me strait a weigh. As soon as a mist ache is maid It nose bee fore two long And eye can put the error rite It's rare lea ever wrong. Eye have run this poem threw it I am shore your pleased two no It's letter perfect awl the weigh My chequer tolled me sew.

Not keen on messing about with track, points and ballast? Just slap a few tyres on and relax.

I saw it - after I had downloaded it, though. Worth the effort.

Edit - Blimey! Just realised that today is July 20th, the day of the landing - that must have been an omen...

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=647559310740767 Kingstown / Dun Laoghaire.

We had one of these. Idiot MD bounded into the room and thumped the big grey box by the door "How many megabytes in there, then?" - "Bloody loads, mate, that's a filing cabinet. The computer's over there, with the pretty lights on. Best not to punch it, though". Our Japanese bloke hand-drew a graph to convince 'them' to do something. They wanted 'better evidence', than what they considered to be merely his opinion, so he got the machine to print out the graph, using the same figures. This turned into into a 'computer prediction' and it became totally true. We had a rudimentary speech synthesiser. You could type things in and it would attempt to say them, but many things needed to be spelled in a way that would give you the right sound. We rigged it up to ask you to type your name, then it would just say "Go away, (name)", except it didn't really say 'Go away' quite so politely. A lot of names would fail to be said correctly, Geoff, David, etc, but Barry would work, and our Barry was a real technophobe. So we persuaded him to do it. He was so offended that he refused to go back in the room until it said "Sorry, Barry" whilst he stood in the doorway.

We had a Commodore Pet. I remember someone spending ages typing attempts at commanding the cassette player to open, being given 'helpful' hints like, try 'eject tape', try 'cassette eject', try 'eject cassette', maybe Americans spell cassette as casset, or with two Ts, etc..? After about ten minutes of failure, someone gave up and lifted the lid for him. He may also have been the person who was told to 'Press any key to start' and then spent ages reading every key before announcing that he couldn't find the 'Any' key.

I think it has its uses, but not, as you say, for large-scale coverage. For things like small jobs and covering the tops of guard rails, etc., after you've cleaned the track which wouldn't be polished by traffic.

Austrian prototype electric loco, using available parts. One for the scratchbuilders?

I aspire to Subbuteo...

You can fit them to your car - onto the dust shields, and look like a racing driver... If you really want to...

I presume a lot of them are what I call 'pretend marketing' and want to show widespread penetration of the links. It's just a bit weak... Some of it is clearly malicious, with intentions to harvest data once a link has been clicked. My other forum is named after the town where it started as a local forum - most of what goes on is local, some is national, some is even international and there is an astronomy thread for the aliens to join in, although I have not seen an IP off the planet yet. Anyway, this does mean that we do get genuine mistakes, with the British habit of renaming places all round the world and lazily not picking a new name, so we get people innocently wanting you to use their motor repair services in Australia or hairdressers in Virginia, for example. And it is also the name of a breed of dog, so we get a few of them from all over the place (the owners, not the dogs, as far as I know), they could stay, as we also have 'real' owners, but they rarely do, if they're from 'outside'. We do, as with this forum, have genuine members outside the obvious area and I can see the IP addresses used, so somebody new, posting from Vietnam or the Philippines, etc, would be looked at suspiciously, but they could just be on holiday. I like there to be a clear contravention before I kill them. Spammers is just one problem - we have had some seriously weird real people - feuds have developed to the point of police intervention several times. Threats have included physical violence, bombings and arson. We have had people whose 'sport' is to pick fights. Some spammers will put their links in their profiles and signatures, too. There is another 'clever' thing that I've seen a few times when an edit has occurred. I call them "white links". The poster will edit in the link at the end of the post, but change the text colour to white, so that it doesn't show in the post, but it will be found by the cursor, should that hover over it. Whether that is to maybe get an innocent person to click the hidden link out of vague interest, or to 'show' that it has been posted somewhere and survived, I don't know. It all seems a bit quieter here, but that may be down to @BosKonay doing a sweep most mornings..?

I deal with some of this sort of thing on another forum. There is an interesting trick a few spammers have. They will make an innocuous post, then return a few days later and edit in a spam link. I have a daily ritual of going past the current suspects, to see if they have returned since their 'innocent' post. Usually, a return will be for an edit - then I kill them. It's nice to let them waste their time. As you say, the names often have a 'style' to them. this helps, but it is not proof, until they reveal themselves. A lot of them are probably the same person. Other suspicious moves are filling in the birthday as Jan 1st or today's date (although some people will do this genuinely for 'privacy' reasons - and choosing a slightly posh English name. If they do post, English is not always their first language, so a tactic used is to copy an old post from earlier in a thread and repost those words, so it 'looks real'. They will often post in a thread from the distant past, so that the edited in link will be relevant to the subject. Another thing they do is to sign up twice, or more, and then 'respond' to themselves. Probably 90% of the time, they sign up, don't post anything and never return. There are also genuine people who sign up and read the forum, but never feel it necessary to make an input. IP addresses can be a clue, but again, not conclusive. My other forum currently has 192 'people' online - 10 are real individual members, the other 182 are bots, some of them identify themselves honestly, Bing, etc., they're just harvesting stuff for search purposes.

Be careful with the chinchilla dust. I've had a few drying off in the hot press for months now, but I still just get a horrible sludge when I run them through the liquidiser.

This morning's thunderstorm reduced the options for the Sunday morning excursion, but we made it to the summit of Arderin - 527m/1,729ft. This is only a short walk from the 'new road', despite being the highest point of the Slieve Blooms. Anyway, the point is that I found a solitary sleeper, half-buried and there for no clear reason, a hundred metres from the summit cairn. Possibly the sole remains of an abortive plan to rival the railway up Snowdon?