Who has time to die? Sheer luxury...
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What's made you grumpy today?
This is clearing up. Not as quickly as I’d like but I have been well enough to travel. I would like one night that is cough free for a solid nights sleep, though. I’m currently in New Jersey, “assisting“ with some modifications on a piece rail equipment. I’ve ”assisted“ so much that I again went to urgent care. This time with the short end of a 4MM Allen wrench imbedded in the palm of my hand. Not as much fun as it sounds. Four letter words flew.
I’m no worse for wear. No muscle or nerve damage. No broken bones. I pulled the Allen wrench out for the doc and swore a few more times. Once the doc got my boo-boo cleaned and the bleeding stopped, he glued my boo-boo shut, applied a butterfly, wrapped it, and gave me a tetanus shot. There was no more pain, so I had him release me to go back to work. There still is no pain. Jeez, my throat still hurts worse. I want to get this trip done so I never have to come back to New Jersey. Ever.
Watching blue lights..
Seems canny but oh my good god the car continuity is worse than line of duty..
Gets into Audi A3...Skoda Octavia interior. Mid scene an Octavia becomes a Vauxhall Insignia estate with battenberg livery..when the Octavia was blue over white just some highlights from about a 10 minute period.
Seems canny but oh my good god the car continuity is worse than line of duty..
Gets into Audi A3...Skoda Octavia interior. Mid scene an Octavia becomes a Vauxhall Insignia estate with battenberg livery..when the Octavia was blue over white just some highlights from about a 10 minute period.
This reminds me of the Mitchel and Webb sketches of the "lazy Writers" plenty of videos on youtube.
Honestly it's aggressively terrible..
The first car you see... Skoda Octavia in battenberg, the battenberg is blue and orange...so it looks like a private security company. I did give it benefit of the doubt..maybe it's a Northern Ireland thing. But no they are meant to have the same livery as the rest of the UK.
I may have Googled this after another "marked car" turned up...this time a navy blue Octavia with a white stripe on the bottom of the doors with police written on it like a child's pedal car.
Yes it has no bearing on the plot...but it ain't half distracting when mid dramatic scene the car they are hiding behind during an incident changes!
That and using a V8 engine noise during a chase involving an Octavia and a 320d..
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In getting the Strada Abarth 130TC readyfor MOT next week and extracting the old girl from hibernation we hit a problem.
The good is the wash went well. Mechanicals, gaiters, .... all OK.
However the O/S front indicator was not blinking. Tap tap tap, thump, ... etc. no result. Conclusion possible blown bulb after 34 years.
Sadly those 80's Fitt coloured plastic head screws got the better of me. One came out OK. The other two just desintigrated.
So I drilled the offening items out and removed the lens. Wobbled the buulb and all was OK....but not really. The two seized stems despite Gas Plu, WD40 etc. refused to be removed. So much so they sheared off. Not good. Strada 130TC spares are hens teeth and I was beginning to think I'll just have to bodge it for the MOT.
Went back indoors to check my parts in stock listing and found that I had a complete O/S indicator unit rescued from a 105TC in stock. Had been there for many years and the bulb even worked. However I wanted to remove the plastic head screws and waterproof the screw threads but faced breaking these screws as well so left them alone and just fitted the indicator unit. Future problem now pending!
For the old unit I used a dremmil to cut off the screw mounting bosses and drilled through each of them from the back. I can now, if needed, use this unit again by using 3mm long (preferably stainless) cap head bolts to secure the orange lens. Wont be 100% original but keeps an old girl on the road.
Also those red, orange, white plastic head screws are still available (I have a small selection) so if I ever have to use the unit I just modified/drilled out I can cut the coulred platic screw head off and just intert it as a plug into and over the now hidden bolt.
I love the 130TC as I do all my cars but you sometimes wonder what you are getting yourslef into as both they and you aged. This simple bulb change/check turned out to be a 3 hour+ epsisode. Time was not such an issue but for those 3 hours I was fearing all may be lost. Read frigging stressful!
Were this a mini, ford, ...... make I could no doubt have readily found the spares I need. But being an 80s low producation Fiat all bets are off.
The good is the wash went well. Mechanicals, gaiters, .... all OK.
However the O/S front indicator was not blinking. Tap tap tap, thump, ... etc. no result. Conclusion possible blown bulb after 34 years.
Sadly those 80's Fitt coloured plastic head screws got the better of me. One came out OK. The other two just desintigrated.
So I drilled the offening items out and removed the lens. Wobbled the buulb and all was OK....but not really. The two seized stems despite Gas Plu, WD40 etc. refused to be removed. So much so they sheared off. Not good. Strada 130TC spares are hens teeth and I was beginning to think I'll just have to bodge it for the MOT.
Went back indoors to check my parts in stock listing and found that I had a complete O/S indicator unit rescued from a 105TC in stock. Had been there for many years and the bulb even worked. However I wanted to remove the plastic head screws and waterproof the screw threads but faced breaking these screws as well so left them alone and just fitted the indicator unit. Future problem now pending!
For the old unit I used a dremmil to cut off the screw mounting bosses and drilled through each of them from the back. I can now, if needed, use this unit again by using 3mm long (preferably stainless) cap head bolts to secure the orange lens. Wont be 100% original but keeps an old girl on the road.
Also those red, orange, white plastic head screws are still available (I have a small selection) so if I ever have to use the unit I just modified/drilled out I can cut the coulred platic screw head off and just intert it as a plug into and over the now hidden bolt.
I love the 130TC as I do all my cars but you sometimes wonder what you are getting yourslef into as both they and you aged. This simple bulb change/check turned out to be a 3 hour+ epsisode. Time was not such an issue but for those 3 hours I was fearing all may be lost. Read frigging stressful!
Were this a mini, ford, ...... make I could no doubt have readily found the spares I need. But being an 80s low producation Fiat all bets are off.
I had a capri years ago, the front indicators had metal crosshead screws on the front, looked like two blobs of rust when it came to change the bulb.
I'm beginning to think that either I'm getting worse at typing, my PC is trying to auto type/correct my posts or I'm finally losing mental capacity and my brain waves are all get corrupted.
e.g. "No rust, no need to wash and polish (just hope pipe and garden broom), now worrying who is going to ding of scratch your car etc."
The typos in one sentence! Now the hope should be hose, the now no and the of or.
The hose/hope is the hardest to understand as the s and p are miles apart on the keyboard. The no and now could be explained by the following worrying word. or and of are adjacent keys so readily explainable.
e.g. "No rust, no need to wash and polish (just hope pipe and garden broom), now worrying who is going to ding of scratch your car etc."
The typos in one sentence! Now the hope should be hose, the now no and the of or.
The hose/hope is the hardest to understand as the s and p are miles apart on the keyboard. The no and now could be explained by the following worrying word. or and of are adjacent keys so readily explainable.
I replaced two keyboards before I realised it was "operator error"
.
The Panda Nut
Nutty about Pandas Infected by Panda virus and OPD
Im legend at this. In my case I have gone off and I was bad in the first place. Keep it up and you WILL make me feel better and I will have to post in the happy thread.
The way I look at typing errors, my handwriting is considerably worse, in the days of hand written Mot certificates I have had customers return saying the Post Mistress couldn't read my writing when issuing car tax discs. I used to feel bad about my writing until I saw my uncle's, it was just the same as mine and he had managed to aspire to Royal Navy Lieutenant during WW2.
Conversely I had an elderly customer who used to write in copperplate beautiful cheques in payment to me, apparently before retiring from the City in the 1950s he worked for one of the big banks and had to write cheques for figures in excess of a million pounds at the close of day for companies like ICI etc. so no mistakes allowed!
The Panda Nut
Nutty about Pandas Infected by Panda virus and OPD
Yep my handwriting is awful too. My dads when he was with us, and brothers scrawls are uncannily similar, I keep thinking I will try and retrain myself to write better as I get older, but may leave this till any after life. Something to do when sitting up to my neck in boiling pooh and chatting with Beelzebub.The way I look at typing errors, my handwriting is considerably worse, in the days of hand written Mot certificates I have had customers return saying the Post Mistress couldn't read my writing when issuing car tax discs. I used to feel bad about my writing until I saw my uncle's, it was just the same as mine and he had managed to aspire to Royal Navy Lieutenant during WW2.
Conversely I had an elderly customer who used to write in copperplate beautiful cheques in payment to me, apparently before retiring from the City in the 1950s he worked for one of the big banks and had to write cheques for figures in excess of a million pounds at the close of day for companies like ICI etc. so no mistakes allowed!
The Panda Nut
Nutty about Pandas Infected by Panda virus and OPD
In my case something would be good!We can't be good at everything
I got sick and tired of being graded on my penmanship in school. I said "Screw it" and worked out my own style with a mix of cursive and block. I still use it today. No one bitches about it anymore but I'd get points knocked off an essay for it when I was in school. My penmanship style got called into question when I was in a conference with a teacher and my parents. I'd developed a pretty thick skin about it by then and REALLY didn't care. When the teacher told my mom that I'd be at the top of her class if I wrote in full cursive, I replied that it sucks to be me but it really sucks that you're so petty. Then I walked out. My parents backed me.
My typing...meh...it works.
My typing...meh...it works.
I grew up in a house with a typewriter, so learnt to type from an early age. As a result, I tend to type too quickly, and usually all the letters are there, not necessarily in the right order. If I miss it, you will often see teh instead of the, and words ending ing often come out as ign, and becomes adn. Somehow, my left hand can type two letters, before the right hand can place one between.
And all the above, came out correctly first time.
My handwriting is usually quite neat, but very small. Small enough that a standard medium point pen is difficult. My fountain pen, not used for years sadly, was specified with a very fine nib.
One time, at work, I wrote a page of A4, and a colleague photocopied it, expanding it to A3. It was perfectly readable at that size.
At school, I was often criticised for short essays. Whilst most classmates would get 6-7 words per line, I would achieve 10, or 13 on the narrow lined paper. I used to use the narrow lined paper, as otherwise there was a lot of white space above the writing, so a 300 word essay was just under a single page, when classmates using the standard line spacing, and writign bigger, would produce one-and-a-half to two pages, for the same number of words. I used to have to put a word count in the margin to pacify the teacher.
And all the above, came out correctly first time.
My handwriting is usually quite neat, but very small. Small enough that a standard medium point pen is difficult. My fountain pen, not used for years sadly, was specified with a very fine nib.
One time, at work, I wrote a page of A4, and a colleague photocopied it, expanding it to A3. It was perfectly readable at that size.
At school, I was often criticised for short essays. Whilst most classmates would get 6-7 words per line, I would achieve 10, or 13 on the narrow lined paper. I used to use the narrow lined paper, as otherwise there was a lot of white space above the writing, so a 300 word essay was just under a single page, when classmates using the standard line spacing, and writign bigger, would produce one-and-a-half to two pages, for the same number of words. I used to have to put a word count in the margin to pacify the teacher.
Got wood? Fecks sake..
Didn't have the good grace to go in a repairable section.
My writing was bad , but thanks to my mum my reading was good, when at school and my turn to read aloud came along, I was often berated by the teacher for not knowing what page they were on, until I pointed out I was about three chapters ahead!
Yep....Didn't have the good grace to go in a repairable section.
New one booked for tomorrow..100 quid lighter..if it wasn't BH weekend could have got one for mid 80s but first available booking date next Tuesday...and I'm off this week not next.
So either running round hoping it doesn't come out and go down (to be fair it did 170 motorway miles yesterday like that...) But now I've seen it don't trust it at 70ish. Do have the spare...but the full size wheel fits nowhere on board except taking up the entire boot.
Now let's see if it drives the TPS mad and makes me buy a matching new one as it's being fitted next to a similarly worn 5mm tyre.
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