yen_powell

I'm working within walking distance of Blackwall Quay (as was) next week. The dock where the Jamestown settlers left from in 1606, now renamed Virginia Quay as a nod to them. It's a bit rough round there, no wonder old John Smith left on the first available boat out and hooked up with Pocahontas.

Summink wrong with your website there!

Looks like a Golden Hind or Mayflower replica

You worked in a building society? 'Computer says NO, look you isn't it!' I think I've been to Chepstow, one of those places that used to keep changing nationality. We were visiting my girlfriend's best friend who was living in a hotel where her hubby was the chef and she did house keeping. They had a lovely flat attached to the hotel and all looked nice and cosy until I spotted a glass framed stairwell against one wall and a bloke walking up the stairs. That was the boss, their whole living area was in plain view any time he used the stairs!

1998 was a good year for me computerwise. Windows 98 was out and worked pretty well as I recall, AutoCAD R14 was the first decent version with icons instead of just a side menu and tablet and making customised buttons which combined commands was easy and saved much time. I had lots of shortcuts on my screen, my own printer and my own desk. I could knock out work like billyo. Today I have an unstable desktop that loses shortcuts and customisations so often it's no longer worth bothering with them in the first place, we now have tool pallettes instead of menus so one click items take three clicks. I have no desk to myself and the one I am allowed to use has to be cleared each time I leave it, so reference items or other handy things are no longer to hand. If I want to look at a map of the borough for reference, there is no longer a big print on the wall, this is not allowed, I have to look at it online where it is slow to pan and freezes a lot and has numerous mistakes. The printer is two rooms away and there is always a queue at the thing and if there isn't it's because it is not working. If it is working my print sometimes doesn't make it through. When I received a letter, the writer didn't expect a response within a few minutes like email. My mobile phone battery lasted more than two weeks. The mobile phone itself did not make it look like I am trying to steal a book out of the library by pushing it inside my trouser pocket. I feel better now.

My first smart phone was about 12 weeks ago, forced on me by work, I had to find a small child to show me how to work the poxy thing. They also made me have my first ever lap top a few weeks ago, it's like a proper PC but with a less usable keyboard, stupid small screen and no proper mouse, they'll never catch on. I'm gonna have to get one of those switches so I can use my main keyboard, mouse and screen with it, I do my CAD and estimates on the proper PC and email them to myself when I've finished. I don't have WiFi at home so the lap top is using my phone for the WiFi connection when I work from home which is most of the week at the moment. I can see the amount of data used flying up on the phone, I wonder when work will get a red flag on that.

I haven't snapped many bolts over the years, but I think most were when using a torque wrench, I prefer doing bolts by feel. I save them for wheel nuts and front/rear sprocket nuts which are impossible to break mostly.

Look at the starch on those lapels in the middle. How ever were we on the winning side in WW2, Churchill looked like Wurzel Gummidge in comparison, no two pounds of him hanging straight!

Which is fine if unlike my mate, you haven't bought a new CCM only to find the company folds, your warranty goes up the pictures and the reformed company say, 'nothing to do with us matey, keep that muddy thing away from us, would you like a trendy cafe racer with free lumberjack shirt?'.

Don't CCM get sold and go bust every 10 years and then get bought back by the original owners and the process repeats itself?

I thought you did damp motorcycling, or is that just inside the trackies? By the way, is that a mirror in the middle of the shelves or a doorway?

No, they look like they have been put together with proper tools. My ex Father in Law is a Brummie and I once watched him use a hammer to put a screw into a piece of wood. "Aha", says I, "The famous Birmingham Screwdriver I have heard about. What do you use screwdrivers for then?" His answer was, "Them's fer opening tins of paint obviously, is yow stupid??.."

Aha, they were built in Blighty.

Grassy Arse my old gringo, bloody boneos idlios, that's your trouble. I googled the name of the company mentioned and it said that it was built using British money. I suspect the hand of either a Brit engine designer or something built under licence based on UK designs. "The GSSR was a British undertaking, built in southeast Spain at the end of the 19th century. Its original purpose was to link Murcia in the province of the same name with Granada, also in the province of the same name. A lack of money and an underestimation of the terrain to be crossed meant that the final project only linked the three towns of Lorca, Águilas (Murcia) and Baza (Granada). The remaining sections of the line were eventually constructed by other companies. Although the termini were in other provinces the major part of the line went through the scenic Almanzora Valley in Almería."

That is a very British looking engine, can someone translate the text?

That really looks like one of those roofless Quasars from the 70s.

He's the Douglas Bader of trail riding! Hopefully he's friendlier to Germans though.

It's his knob, it is just out of sight up his shorts and wedges into the sleeve of the artificial limb so it holds on tight. That's why he is doing a few little stamps after refitting it, to make sure his balls aren't trapped in it as well.

Not a chance, these things will be on the internet forever!

So this is you getting on and off a bike when old and fucked. I can see what you mean, very careful movements, the slight breathlessness. What I really want to know, is how long ago were you fucked before making the video and what was his name?

I watched that On Any Sunday. It was good, don't get me wrong, especially the stuff about Steve Mcwossitsname, but I swear the film lasted about a week. My fave bike film was Stone, the Australian film with lots of big Kawasakis and the beheading in the opening titles.

That collapsing wall may have been lacking in drain holes at the bottom. I went to Seville once, waited most of the day for tyre shop staff to come back from their lunch time snoozette so my mate Charlie could get a new rear tyre. Charlie's knobs had detached on the motorway not long before you see. This is because he was too tight to put a new tyre on before we set off, just used an old one with what he thought was a decent amount of tread on it. I have vague memories of riding around a large bull ring hoping I was using the right bit of a one way road and wondering where the marmalade factory was.

Here he is when it got sehr nippy.

Oh if only there was a Distinguished Scruffs' Ride...Sigh.