» Vandalism

Geeky graffiti
On the walls of one of the toilets in a college in Durham:
"Physics is like an erection. The more you think about it the harder it gets"
(Thu 7th Oct 2010, 17:37, More)

» Waste of money

Guitar Hero 3
Having played this at a friends house on numerous occasions I really enjoyed it. So I begged Mr CS to get me one for Christmass. I have played it twice having vastly overestimated ones free time with a little Cockroach and a full-time job. That and the whole 'Unlocking' feature makes everything so tedious. Meh.
(Sat 2nd Oct 2010, 12:57, More)

» Narrow Escapes

The disappearing WC sample
Not me but a work collegue. I don't really have much myself yet but considering I am an experimental scientist I will do at some point.
Anyway lets go back to the 1970s when Health and Safety was a bit more lax and our hero was performing some compression tests on various WC (tungsten carbide) samples to see what stress they could withstand.

This involved placing a fist-sized slug of WC into an hydraulic press and ramping the pressure up while recording the deformation as pressure increases. Now WC is a very hard material and thus pressures involved are considerable.

The rig was in the centre of the room which was about 10 x 10 meters. The sample was placed in the centre of the press. There were no guards so the operator could see the sample as the pressure mounted.

So our hero mounts a sample into the press as he has done so many times before and sets it going and retires to a few metres away to monitor the specimen.

The pressure mounts and all seems normal. Until there is an almighty KRUMMMPP and the sample disappears. No trace of the sample remains. Whats going on?

However our hero notices that there are two holes in the walls on either side of the room at head height in exactly the same line as the sample mount. The sample has catastrophically failed and in doing so had split in two and punched holes in the wall.

At this point our protagonist turns green when he realised that if that fracture in the WC had been 90 degrees round he would be missing a head.
(Tue 24th Aug 2010, 20:27, More)

» What was I thinking?

My first boyfriend - a long story
We were in year 11 at school and had been friendly for a couple of years beforehand. We were part of a loose geeky clique and along with my actual undisguised fondness for learning, fondness for heavy metal and general disregard  for boys and fashion generally made me and that group social lepers. But hey, I had been a social leper since primary school.

So we got together as a result that we actually liked each other's company and could talk about stuff like sci-fi and plans for the summer.

  So Steve* and I got together and at first it was fun. Both sets of parents approved (even if our brothers hated it), we spent much time round each others houses and it made us feel good.

 Now I had never bothered much with boys, finding that they eitherwere indifferent or hostile or creeping stalkery, reckoning to hang on to University. But I was surprised at how good he made me feel. 

Now until then most comments made about my appearance were in general negative such that if they were all to be believed I would have resembled Ctullu's younger acne-riddled sister with the personality to match. However I owned a mirror what I actually saw was a short person with long red hair, glasses, a little flat chested (but perfectly formed), well covered and pre-babies a 25" waist. So although I wasn't likely to be on Britain's Top Model I did not resemble a reject from Deliverence which was what a scary number of people at school DID look like. As for Steve he was no oil-painting and slightly overweight but I knew that and he did look presentable when he scrubbed up. Besides I didn't go out for his looks, I went out with him because I felt so good to be myself around someone.

It was the summer of 1995 our GCSEs and we did the usual teenage first love things like promising to stay together for ever etc. I did get to learn about how to refurbish boats ( they were very into boats) and spent 5 weeks in the summer on canal boats with his family and friends. Much running about, swimming in rivers and exploring unexpected corners of England followed. I do recommend trying canal-boating as there are so many places you can only see from the canals but I digress.

But all good things come to an end. I decided to go back home a week before our GCSEs came out, a combination of quitting when ahead and missing things like fridges, baths and ice-cubes all of which are in short supply on a narrowboat. Then the GCSEs came out. I did OK by my standards - 9 A-Cs and in the top 5 of the year while Steve did better than expected, but was he happy? Naahh. I didn't deserve my grades because I was a girl and everybody knows that boys are discriminated against in education.

I didn't think too much about that since he did tend to have the odd bout of paranoia and depression brought on by relentless bullying at school although I thought it was a bit rich aiming it at me. Still we had our post-exam celebrations and I took him on a trip to London where we did the sights of the Big City and he even convinced me he had enjoyed himself.

So sixth form came along and with that the good riddance of the dead-heads and the joys of free periods where we got round to furtive teenage experimentation at my house before anybody else came home. Even with this fun and frolics Steve became more miserable and paranoid. He gave up washing and embarked on a regime of compulsive overeating with predictable results. Naturally I was concerned by this but attempts to get him to come out with me, go to the gym with me along with washing and wearing clothes that still looked like something was wearing them was met with sulking and accusations that wanting to do anything in company was a sign of weakness.

Still the furtive experimentation continued along with the less furtive experimentation of finding out what was wrong with Steve. Que me entering counsellor mode (-a place I have been to too often) where I tried to talk through the problems. This revealed to me that I was irritating, needy ( ie wanting to do things OTHER than clandestine tomfoolery together), demanding and thinking I was smarter than I really was. I agreed I had my faults but strangely when I tried to discuss his faults he was silent.

So I did start a mental tally as to why he was my boyfriend:

1. He is convinced that I am stupid, needy and has ideas above my station.
2. He is critical of my protogoth- metally style of dress while he dressed like a 1970s trainspotter who hadn't washed since then.
3. Critical of MY figure, well BOTH his cleavages were bigger than mine. Not to mention hairier.
4. I have a VERY high embarrassment threshold ( I did LARP for instance) but am getting embarrassed to be seen with him.
5. I am not happy in his company.

WHY AM I STILL HIS GIRLFRIEND?!

So I dumped him. Strangely he was surprised by this? But it turned he was only with me because he wanted to dump the dreaded V-plates then dump me.

*name changed to protect the guilty
(Wed 29th Sep 2010, 19:54, More)

» Complaining

Another Landlord story
I'm sure the qotw will be full of these by the end of the week.

Note to Coventry people beware of a lettings agent that rhymes with "Gluewood" since it is run by my ex-landlord.
Anyway back in 2007 Mr C-S and decided do get on the property ladder since we neither qualify for social housing and were sick of loads of our money going to someone and seeing no return from it.

So we got a house put an offer in blah blah all well and good and all we had to do was wait while the wheels turned.

We had our suspicions about him since he seemed a bit of a wheeler-dealer - he had let slip about a cluster of interest-only mortgages and that he owned four cars. We had to re-seal our bathroom since the cheap 10-thumbed prostidroids he had paid to do it had just put new sealent over old with the result that the kitchen had a novel water feature above the cooker. That and the fact he kept calling me 'sweetie'.
There were some issues with the house. Like the 9 months he took to replace the rotten front windows and only got the job half done. Same with the kitchen window and door only he didn't think about repairing the lintel.

Now just as we had got our offer accepted we came back one night to find we had been the subject of an attempted break-in. Fortunatly the door held so we did the normal police/insurance and contact the landlord

No response. So I kept on contacting him with Mr C-S even though we gently reminded him that should there be a subsequent break-in he would be liable.
We come back from work again to find that there has been some action from the landlord. A To-Let sign. Still no repair. Cue more phone calls to Landlord's office. In fact the window would remain broken right until we left 6 weeks later.

Cue large numbers of prospective tenants coming to view the property. This is what you would expect but we hadn't even got a moving date and our landlord seemed a stranger to fact that they must by law give 24 hours notice to current tenants. It wasn't unusual to come back from work and groan at the lettings agency peon "who are these people and what are they doing in the house!?" They didn't tend to stick around long after that.

Now we finally got a date and since we had paid up for the last month we had agreed with the landlord that if he letted out the property before then end of month he would refund us the difference. We cleaned up the house well and made good any wear-and- tear confidant we would get our deposit back.

The end of the rental period approached and we awaited our landlord to contact us to inspect the house, check the inventory, hand back the keys and get our deposit back. The last day came, still no call so Mr C-S and I went to the house to check things out. We go to the house, open the door and find a surprise all right. A large pile of other peoples stuff and the kitchen window is still broken. We feel it is best to leave quite fast and just has we are out of the door the new tenant's car pulls into the driveway. No doubt he's wondering what the he'll is going on. So we explain who we are and point out the defects like the broken window and the sagging brickwork above the kitchen door and the half-finished work. We also express our concerns that we cannot get hold of him, that there has been no inspection and we still have the keys to the house.

Now we start phoning to demand our deposit back and the rent excess which was £700 in total. We were greeted with various excuses like he's on holiday, he's in India having surgery, his third grandmother has died etc and by the end of May (we had moved in April) we started on the letters. These were polite and to the point as it was clear to us that he was a stranger to returning deposits - he had in the past only rented to recent immigrants and students who did not know better.

Finally just in time for our July holiday we get our deposit back but not the excess and we finally hand back the keys. Although Mr C-S is satisfied with this I was not since we were still £100 out of pocket. So August came and so a new letter campaign started along with phonecalls. By now were where such frequent callers to the office we were almost on first name terms with the staff.

One day, a surprise - the landlord phones ME. Says he is in a meeting and then pours an impressive rant about how we are naughty ungrateful tenants and that we have mad him cry by colluding with the new tenant and encouraging him to leave without notice. (in reality his son had bought him a house). So since we were such naughty children we didn't deserve the £100 "goodwill" money*
He did not call me 'sweetie' once in that exchange.

That might have worked if I was 5 and didn't have a rangy dad but that was not going to wash with me. After the threat of the Small Claims Court went unneeded I decided one last letter with the big guns: my brother the baby barrister. He wrote a very polite, concise and above all very threatening letter with all the above points outlined such that if he it did come to the small claims court he would most likely lose and that we did not take kindly to defamation of character by insinuating we were demanding money we were not entitled to.

Next week the landlord contacts Mr C-S and hands over the £100. Result!

So the moral of this is check out the law, know your rights and be persistent.

*Words are different if not the content or the tone.

edited to correct spelling and wierd line breaks. The perils of posting from a mobile device...
(Thu 2nd Sep 2010, 22:10, More)