Broithe

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?

I worked with a Japanese bloke who was very competent about most things. His Polish neighbour had a goldfish that was a bit poorly and she just assumed he would know all about koi carp, etc. He knew nothing, but he wasn't going to admit that. He went round and looked at the fish. It was clearly not well and had a few scales missing. He told her that she must make sure that the whole tank and the various filters and ornaments in it, etc., were all scrupulously clean, assuring her that it would probably all heal up, if she did that properly. She did all that, but the fish got slowly worse. He laboured the point about scrubbing everything to ensure total cleanliness. It still got worse. After about six cycles of this, he grudgingly volunteered to watch her, to see if he could see what she was missing. She seemed to be doing it all perfectly, putting the fish in a Pyrex jug whilst she removed cleaned and rinsed all the internals and the tank itself, scrubbing everything with a nail brush and a toothbrush. As everything seemed as good as it could be, he was about to admit that it was beyond his capacity to suggest anything else, when she hoicked the fish out of the jug, gave it a squeeze of Fairy Liquid and was about to scrub it under the hot tap. At that point, having managed to stop her in time, he assured her that merely replacing the fish and giving him time to recuperate would probably give a better result...

And yet the two largest municipalities are ports...

Of course, in Laois, a lot of the cars had Craggy Island plates.

In 1958 you would have needed a TV set in a DeLorean to watch RTÉ. It would have been noticed if you'd parked one in Donegal town then.

The aerials are interesting. When you could legitimately run a TV without having a licence..?

Liberator + added confusion.