Nice People Thread No. 14, all Nice and Proper

Yorkie1

Fab result from parents' evening Sue :j :T

Masomnia

michaels wrote: »

I have a colleague who just bought one of the new build flats down there - are you starting to think of buying yet?

Back still annoyingly bad, old man shuffle embarrassing and painful

Shipping tomorrow Niks - soz so slow.

Can't see me being in a position to buy for some time yet unfortunately. Not sure I'd buy where I work anyway, but someone I work with owns one and seems to like it. It's very convenient for her and Euston is ~30 mins away so it's good.

vivatifosi

Generali wrote: »

As an aside, it astounds me how much more energy efficient things are today. I bought a 30" TV not so long ago and have had light bulbs that consume more power!

We bought a power bank recently so that we have power on the go. It has enough power to recharge a tablet or a phone ten times before it too needs recharging. We worked out we could watch about eight hours of streamed content on my tablet before it needed recharging, and do that over and over. We can also run an led light off of it. It was one of those Amazon lightning deals.

I was also thinking the same about cars. My new little noddy car has a 1 litre engine. It is not fast by any means, but it is probably 3 or 4 seconds faster 0-60 than an equivalent sized engine of 10-15 years ago and sips petrol too. It's not that much slower than my old 1.8 Audi, though a few horses have escaped that particular corral over the many years I owned it.

zagubov

My mate used to design boilers and when he visited our previous house 10 years ago he had a look at our decrepit-looking boiler we were thinking of getting rid of, as it had a cracked window where the pilot light kept going out.

He reckoned we were bonkers - it had years of life left and wasn't unsafe in any way - we just needed to invest in a box of matches costing a few pence to start it up on the few windy days when the light went out.

GDB2222

Gen, thanks for explaining re ISS. I sometimes see planes in the sky, in bright sunlight, even though the sun is below the horizon for those on earth.

Loanranger

About the space station, it presents itself as a moving point of light. Stars don't move and they twinkle and aircraft do move and have flashing lights.

zagubov

My uncle (long since passed) used to show us all Skylab, many moons ago (actually four decades ago). Not bothered looking at any of the later six space stations. Can't see any details apart from a light moving at a specific time.

Generali

GDB2222 wrote: »

Gen, thanks for explaining re ISS. I sometimes see planes in the sky, in bright sunlight, even though the sun is below the horizon for those on earth.

The ISS orbits at an altitude of about 400km/250 miles and has 8 solar panels that are (according to Wikipedia) each about 58m by 7m. The bright light you can see is the sun reflecting off the solar panels.

The weather is all over the place today. Nice and warm but it was chucking it down when I woke up. Now it's lovely and sunny but with some really brooding clouds on the horizon.

Generali

I saw the most terrible thing today. A giant beetle dragging a huge dead spider past my front door.

Australian wildlife is just wrong.

GDB2222

PasturesNew wrote: »

As there's a Brit on it ... you'd think that the BBC might've seen the marketing value of flashing up across the bottom of the screen a vague countdown to when you'd be able to see it .... enabling people who'd have not bothered, or who intended to, but would've forgotten, to realise "it's about now" and step outside for a peek.

It's easy enough to get the times, eg
http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings/view.cfm?country=United_Kingdom&region=England&city=London

However, these are nearly all at fairly unsocial times, eg 5AM. From what Gen said, I expected all the times to be either just before dawn or just after sunset, but the only ones NASA published for London over the next week are pre-dawn. I don't feel like getting up at 5 on the off-chance that there are no clouds in the way at this time of year.