GentleGiant

Yeah, isnt it, and then I foolishly deleted it, forgetting that these forums are populated by assholes. Yeah, dont bother with the ban, I quit.

I will reiterate, we were following another vehicle at a safe distance, we werent speeding up, or slowing down, we didnt try to undertake the lorry; we were sat minding our own business; the lorry was fast enough to come up behind us, pull alongside within a few seconds of pulling out to overtake, start honking his horn, pull another 1/4 length of his lorry in front, THEN start forcing his way in. The gap between us and the car in front was safe for our speed, but it WAS not large enough for a HGV, at the end of the manoeuvre he was only a few feet behind the lead car. There was NO justification, the car in front of us was the ONLY other vehicle in front for as far as we could see in the visibility, the lorry could have easily continued and pulled in in front of that car (remember, we were matching speed), so if he was overtaking us, he was over taking the other car as well. Just checked the video file, I was shaking so much, I accidentally hit stop after only 5 seconds, and didnt get the details, bummer. A lot of hostile HGV drivers in here, so I will also mention I spotted a Staffordshire NHS Ambulance tail-gating at speed in the outside lane, not long before this happened, no flashing lights, just screaming along at 80+ (in the fog) and 10ft off the back of the car in front - shocking.

So, I was passenger heading North on the M6 yesterday morning; thick, heavy patches of fog, so we were keeping our speed down, and maintaining a safe gap to the car in front in the inside lane. Around Stoke, a large HGV came up behind us, pulled out and started to overtake. When the lorry was ~ half way past us, he started sounding his horn... cue looks of WTF in the car; THEN he started drifting his lorry into and out of our lane; when we still didnt get the hint, he just came straight across, forcing us to brake hard. No junction, no hill and (at that time) very little other traffic. If we hadnt braked, we would have either been forced off of the motorway, or crushed under the lorry, it was quite scary. I managed to get my phone out, and start recording, but it was all over by then; I did get a good recording of the sign writing and number plate, so the company will be getting a call Monday; but a waste of time contacting the Police I suspect; depends if the video has a clear recording of his ranting and middle finger waving at us as we pulled out and went around him to film the side (and try and find a phone number)

My sister managed to badly break her wrist/arm a week before Christmas; every day except the Bank Holidays, she had to be taken to the Hospital for 7am and then wait until 4pm in the hope a bed would come free and she could have an op to insert the metal plates she needed. Finally done on the 29th. (I TOLD her Webbs of Wychbold is a jinx, EVERY TIME she goes there something bad happens)

Loudon Wainwright, Songs for the New Depression.

I'm at that age where (if she had boobs) I could quite fancy her.

I've always described it as paint stripper. They serve it in tiny ceramic cups, about half the size of a thimble; it makes Saki taste like lemonade.

Just watched an old episode of "The Antiques Road Show", and had a thought. Anything that old and that ugly is probably worth millions.....

I used to have an Electrical Foreman (and shift leader), who couldnt handle anything more complicated than a two way light switch. I didnt last long there, as I refused to do, or sign off on, dodgy installs (Kay&Co.Ltd).

I didnt have a HomeHub, it was a Netgear DGN2000, and the engineer was supposedly monitoring my connection at the exchange, as the DSLAMs can be monitored, and configured remotely. (The DGN2000 later melted, but I dont think the problems were related :peek: )

It will sell well in Lancashire, honest; it will clash nicely with the orange and dark purple paintwork I spotted in one house in Nelson.

I have some Chinese "White Wine", that's starting to eat its way through the ceramic bottle; I wonder if I should risk it; last time I had any - 8 thimble fulls; I was totally ga-ga (on a full stomach and drunk slowly over a 2 hour period!!). OFFICIALLY, it is 55%, but............

I find seaweed wrapped around a hockey stick works best. But it has to be at least a 64bit hockey stick.

Off by default?? When announced , it was going to be on by default, so perhaps they DO listen to customers now and then.

I take it you block all windows updates then?? My Win7 box hadnt been modded since I built it in 2008 (other than a HDD failure and replacement) and had a genuine licence I paid full price for; yet Micro****e suddenly decided my licence wasnt valid back in the spring; I had to run Anti-WAT to get my PC back. The same thing happened to my sister a month later, and her PC hadnt had a replacement part AT ALL, the damn thing was only a year old, and again, had a genuine license.

That issue might be because MS now use a version of Torrent, so you would have been uploading to other customers, at the same time you were downloading, exactly how much extra, I dont know, as it will never be exactly the same for any 2 people, even at exactly the same time.

The LED bulbs I have bought recently have been VERY bright, well above the 1w =10W incandescent level. 9W LED is going to give you somewhere between 100-150W equivalent. Cant you just buy LED replacements for what you have?? Thats what I did for my bathroom when a bulb blew a few weeks ago, a 3.5W LED from Lidl replacing a 30W Halogen, the colour is slightly different, but the brightness level is exactly the same..

If you dont use a lot of data, Three do an unadvertised 40GB for £20 per month, with free 4G router - I think on a 12 month contract. So that is £1.01p more than BT charge for line rental only. I'm trying to persuade some friends to switch to this, as they are currently paying BT an average of £70 per month for a 200kbps connection and phone calls.

Of course they arent keen to fit a logger; this will prove what we've known for years, their metering system is a joke. I can remember one argument where their tech support was adamant he could "see" my router connected and transferring data, when it was switched off and I had the phone cable unplugged and in my hand. That one was chalked up to "faulty equipment at the exchange", but they didnt replace it, just rebooted it; I used to get exactly the same issue (and run-around) every 6-8 months from then until I gave up in disgust and moved ISP. The new ISP couldnt get BT to replace the equipment either, but they were a lot faster at getting an engineer to go reboot it (2-3 days v 2 weeks).

Actually, we CAN blame the government for this accident. For years, various governments have allowed the number of police patrols to drop to near extinction; most drivers now have no fear of encountering a police car, and even when they ARE doing something wrong and encounter a rozzer, there is a good chance the rozzer will ignore them. I got undertaken on the M5 coming out of Birmingham by two cars who come off of the M40/42 doing well in excess of 80mph; they both drove past the ONLY Police car I had seen all day, who completely ignored them (yes a rozzer, not a faux "Highways Agency Patrol"), they switched to the hard shoulder to undertake the lorry I had pulled out to overtake, and then took the Bromsgrove exit ramp. No fear of penalty = not bothering to obey the rules/speed limits/common sense. Ditto VOSA/DVSA, in 35 years of driving, I have seen only one random stop and inspect operation. According to the national press, that single day identified hundreds of dangerously defective vehicles, and invalid licenses; so why arent more carried out??

When I were a nipper, t' fog was so thick, ye cudna see yer own eye lashes.

So they colour-matched their fog coloured Mercedes.

Our last Pyrex measuring jug had the lip chip the first time it was used (about 4 years ago), not dropped, but as above, it flaked off when pouring hot liquids; luckily it didnt land in the food. Stopped buying them. I do wonder if the really cheap Pyrex seen in certain supermarkets is US stock made of the cheaper glass; it doesnt have the greenish hint of colour I remember from the old stuff.

4-5pm last night, M5 southbound, patches of light fog, VERY heavy, slow traffic due to roadworks starting just before Bromsgrove.. A about 5% of drivers had NO lights on, (in one case he had front lights, but no rear lights - NOT DRLs), another 10-15% were driving on side lights; another 15% were driving nose to tail with their fog lights blazing fore and aft. I got so hacked off, I turned off at Bromsgrove and took the "A" roads.

In prior versions of Windows, various people managed to create a hack that deleted system references to IE, but I think MS have it pretty well tied down now "YOU WILL USE OUR BROWSERS!!!" is the message Win10 gives out. There may be a registry hack to sort this, but I wont use Win10, so havent bothered looking for it.