Nice people thread part 6 - thrice by twice as nice :)

vivatifosi

PasturesNew wrote: »

For those that haven't opened the curtains yet .... it's p155ing down out there.

It isn't here yet, but I'm hoping it will hang off long enough for me to jump out and do a quick visit to Mr Ts before the heavens open. Herts NP note: we're forecast heavy rain (7.9mm) at 4pm and torrential rain (10.4mm) at 7pm, with more moderate rainfall either side of that. If you're around Herts tomorrow, weather at lunchtime is also forecast as torrential (11.9mm).

hjd

zagubov wrote: »

Watched "The Thick of It". Pure comedy magic! On to iplayer to catch up on the episodes I missed.

After DD mentioned her halls had a TV room , I spent a lot of today thinking of when my parents dropped me off at uni - all of 36 years ago. Three TV channels, [STRIKE]no[/STRIKE] barely any local radio, and cinema only just starting to recover from being slaughtered by bingo halls thanks to blockbusters like Jaws. There were only three ATMs in the whole city. There was a Tesco Bank where we all cashed our cheques on Saturday. Some pubs didn't admit women and nothing but church was open on a Sunday.

Also, several NPs weren't on the scene yet!

37 years ago for me..
Newcastle was slightly more advanced than that, had quite a few pizza/Italian restaurants. I was still only 17 when I started so couldn't get into some places to drink (managed the cinema for an 18 film though!)

zagubov

chewmylegoff wrote: »

Sounds like she might be in the same halls as I was as I can only think of one which had a tv room. It also had a bar, a much better place to spend time!

No but it's near your old halls I think. It's a place that was revamped and probably didn't have a TV room a few years back. I was pleased to notice there's internet connections in every room.

Chewie, was there anywhere to store belongings over the hols? It took us hours to pack/unpack the car and I'd hate to have to to that at the start/end of every term. Was it difficult/common to get casual work?

hjd wrote: »

37 years ago for me..
Newcastle was slightly more advanced than that, had quite a few pizza/Italian restaurants. I was still only 17 when I started so couldn't get into some places to drink (managed the cinema for an 18 film though!)

I was 17 too (which was standard north of the border). There were a few restaurtnts and takeaways although no MacDonalds. The uni ID card didn't have our date of birth on it so we could get into the student union (and could get into other university unions where their own 17-year olds couldn't as their ID cards excluded them).

I grew up spoilt for Indian food annd when I went to uni there weren't enough Indian takeaways for my liking. Still aren't even in London.

Never went to the ciinema, as the union had a film club which I kind of overdosed on tbh.

kabayiri

PasturesNew wrote: »

At the bottom end of the budget spending though I think you probably do still get more for your money in a PC.
Also .... I can't just go buying new PCs etc. Would you believe I am so hardware challenged that I get somebody else to choose my kit for me

So, when it is time for something new.... I'll be asking the NP to find the best one for me.

Shuttle PCs are great. I've a few, mostly acting as servers now. The box is the size of 2 shoe boxes, and you can get nice holdhalls to cart them around. Not cheap mind.

I've also got a few laptops here, expensive quad core i7 one and less expensive ones. They all suffer from the same basic problem :-

- should you have a problem, try and get an economical repair. It's tough. Especially the screen. It's like they don't want you to fix things, just throw them away. It's irritatingly non green.

michaels

On the tv now they are saying that more than half of families with kids are now not married. I am not making any moral call on this but more questioning how much it diverges from my personal experience locally. Not sure if it is because our kids attend an RC school but I think only 1 or 2 in each form have unmarried parents. Is it only because it is an RC school or is it actually that this is very much an income/class thing?

zagubov

kabayiri wrote: »

Shuttle PCs are great. I've a few, mostly acting as servers now. The box is the size of 2 shoe boxes, and you can get nice holdhalls to cart them around. Not cheap mind.

I've also got a few laptops here, expensive quad core i7 one and less expensive ones. They all suffer from the same basic problem :-

- should you have a problem, try and get an economical repair. It's tough. Especially the screen. It's like they don't want you to fix things, just throw them away. It's irritatingly non green.

The disappearance of electrical repair shops is a sign of society's decline for luddites like me. On the way into london yesterday we drove past a derelict electrical repair shop whose flaking sign had a 071 number on it (not sure when that dates it to).

Apart from the surprise that there are still so many empty store locations in a place as "overcrowded" as London, it alarms we we're throwing away something so green.

A prominent engineer/entrepeneur (maybe Dyson/Sinclair / Bayliss can't remember who suggested we need university courses in machine repair and maintenance to raise the profile of an important skill and abliity, and I'm with him on that.:beer:

kabayiri

zagubov wrote: »

...
A prominent engineer/entrepeneur (maybe Dyson/Sinclair / Bayliss can't remember who suggested we need university courses in machine repair and maintenance to raise the profile of an important skill and abliity, and I'm with him on that.:beer:

I agree. I've long since held the view that some mainstream goods are too cheap, and that the emphasis should be on higher quality; longevity; and repairability.

I've spent probably too much money recently, updating a lot of my hifi. I was able to update every single English component, and not have to throw it away. Every single component was from a niche UK manufacturer too.

I'm proud we still have decent if small UK design and manufacture companies.

michaels

zagubov wrote: »

The disappearance of electrical repair shops is a sign of society's decline for luddites like me. On the way into london yesterday we drove past a derelict electrical repair shop whose flaking sign had a 071 number on it (not sure when that dates it to).

Apart from the surprise that there are still so many empty store locations in a place as "overcrowded" as London, it alarms we we're throwing away something so green.

A prominent engineer/entrepeneur (maybe Dyson/Sinclair / Bayliss can't remember who suggested we need university courses in machine repair and maintenance to raise the profile of an important skill and abliity, and I'm with him on that.:beer:

I guess this is because things are now so cheap relative to local labour costs - perhaps because they are made in the first place using labour far away that is so much cheaper. If a TV only costs a couple of hundred quid then the cost of repair in terms of a qualified persons time is likely to make it uneconomic, regardless of how much or little the parts cost. In theory it might make economic sense to ship the product to a cheap labour country and have it repaired but of course no one wants to be without something for the months this would entail.

I'm not sure if the answer is building things to last as in a lot of areas technology is changing so quickly that old devices ae outdated after a short while - for example why repair a 250gb hard drive when the standard size is now 1gb.

kabayiri

michaels wrote: »

...
I'm not sure if the answer is building things to last as in a lot of areas technology is changing so quickly that old devices ae outdated after a short while - for example why repair a 250gb hard drive when the standard size is now 1gb.

Err, because a 250Gb hard drive is 250 times the size of a 1Gb drive?

I don't know about this technology thing.

I mean, I can sit here and read the BBC news site in comfort on an iPad, but then....I could do that on a desktop PC years ago, or a laptop years ago.

Take hifi. It's about listening to music isn't it? I doubt our ears have changed much over recent years.

zagubov

michaels wrote: »

I guess this is because things are now so cheap relative to local labour costs - perhaps because they are made in the first place using labour far away that is so much cheaper. If a TV only costs a couple of hundred quid then the cost of repair in terms of a qualified persons time is likely to make it uneconomic, regardless of how much or little the parts cost. In theory it might make economic sense to ship the product to a cheap labour country and have it repaired but of course no one wants to be without something for the months this would entail.

I'm not sure if the answer is building things to last as in a lot of areas technology is changing so quickly that old devices ae outdated after a short while - for example why repair a 250gb hard drive when the standard size is now 1gb.

I agree completely but I lament what we're losing. When Total Energy Costing became better known, we recognised that half the lifetime energy costs of running a car involved dragging the minerals out of the earth and turning them into the car in the first place. Even Jeremy Clarkson recognised that the car scrappage scheme was a dodgy notion!:eek:

Cuba's got no car manufatcuring facilities AFAIK but it has got a massive car repair and mainentance industry. That's out of necessity and I'm not pretending to envy other aspects of their economy.

We've got a vast small business sector dealing with car maintenance and house maintenance. It's a shame that's all we do. The planned obsolescence built into so many goods to keep us coming back for more keeps us trapped in a red Queen's race to just stand still, and it's a massive waste of well everything really.

Rant over! I think this belongs on a non-NP thread but I don't know of one.:cool: