WHAT ATTRACTED YOUR ATTENTION TODAY?

[Stanley]

Walking back up towards the town centre across the Green this morning I was struck be the fact that the gradual transition to LED lamps instead of sodium is already having an effect. There is less glare and this is already improving the view. I wonder what effect it will have on light pollution as regards star-gazing.......

[Bodger]

https://www.youtube.com/embed/LSZPNwZex9s

[PanBiker]

[Stanley]

What day did this appear..... ????
A nice visit by Susan Mick and Joanne..... Jack tried to elope with Mick as usual.... Good job because he is looking after him when Susan and I go on the Fellsman again in August......

[Stanley]

The lovely settled weather.
An item on Farming Today this morning. We have long had an interest in treacle mining on this site and I was intrigued to hear in a report about organic tanning of leather that the workers at the tannery were called 'Treacle Miners' because of the time they spent round the tanning pits which were filled with the dark brown liquid made from boiling oak bark to extract the tannin. I wonder whether there was a tannery at Sabden......

[Tizer]

Perhaps this will make the old-fashioned car manufacturers get on a bit faster with designing their electric cars! Ford makes 100 times more cars than Tesla but the small company is now worth more than the giant one. Of course, there is more Tesla than just cars...
`Tesla's market value overtakes Ford' LINK

[Stanley]

THIS curious report from Scotland caught my attention. A lady was caught short whilst walking on Trump's golf course in Scotland and was filmed as she relieved herself by Trump employees. It looks as though she chose the wrong way to attack the golf course by basing her case on contravention of the Data Protection Acts. If she had gone for simple intrusion or voyeurism she might have won. I realise that she is an anti-Trump activist but sympathise with her. She was not being exhibitionist but performing an entirely natural act. I think we have all been in that situation at some time. If you gotta go you gotta go!

[Stanley]

A domestic mishap.
I was going through my usual morning routine of brewing my daily pint of coffee which includes bleaching my pot, the sink and the surrounds. I had put the coffee in the pot (a very expensive organic Arabica grown at Machu Picchu and had reached for the bleach to put a slug in the pint pot in the sink prior to adding the boiling water. As I did this I was thinking about the origin of the name of the Grand Crux estate, Beychevelle. (Quite normal for this time of the morning) I suddenly realised I had poured the bleach into the pot on to the coffee! Start again Stanley! Feel free to remind me that old age eventually takes its toll.......

[Stanley]

A lovely report on World Service this morning on Red Rum and the Grand National. (LINK) A truly remarkable horse and a good man in Ginger McCain.
The fact that today will be the hottest this year so far!

[PanBiker]

Yesterday actually, scaffolders turned up at ours for our scheduled since last year roof work. Roofer s are very busy and Matt from the end of our street is no exception. Scaffolding lads have managed a double whammy actually as next door is having their back wall pointed so we have a linked scaffold over two kitchen roofs and up onto mine. We are having the ridge tiles re bedded, chimney stack repointed and some flashing over the kitchen roof sorted. I will take advantage and do a bit of antenna maintenance outside of roof maintenance time.

[Stanley]

Take care Ian! Working at height is always dangerous even with scaffolding. I gave it up when I sold my ladders to Doc a long time ago.



What grabbed me yesterday was finding out that I have got to re-design my bearing link on the Fieldhouse Winder, I got it wrong!



I promise I will do better. They call it engineering.......

[PanBiker]

We had a lad chasing all the pointing out on next doors wall and then on our chimney stack yesterday. I got him to take down the redundant UHF TV antenna and its lashings, no good to me now and it was on it's last legs anyway. A clear run at the stack now apart from my HF wire antenna that is fastened back to it with a carabina into a round steel eye drilled and plugged into the centre of one of the stones on the side of the stack. I have a toroidal transformer in a box which is part of the feed circuit for the antenna also fastened to this. This is what I need to remove. When the lads are next here I will get them to leave the cat ladder at the right side of the stack for me to retrieve the bits I need in for maintenance, the ladder will run between our velux and the stack. We have full scaffold above our flat kitchen roof right up to the troughing and it is boarded out with a guard rail, nowhere to fall unless you are a complete idiot. I see elf and safety were absent when you were up that stack in your brogues Stanley!

[Stanley]

It was 30 years ago and none of us wore any safety gear, there was no requirement. Today they are encased in full harness and many of the older ones reckon it's dangerous at times as it hampers movement.
The Gas Man Cometh, it's annual inspection time for the CH boiler..... Between 8 and 12 this morning.....

[Stanley]

The house was suspiciously warm last night. I checked the thermostat and the Gas Man had reset it at 20C after checking it. Back to 18C!

[Tizer]

`BMW left embedded in Banbury factory wall' LINK

[PanBiker]

Back from kitchen work to see that the site is back up after the afternoon outage, it was off just after 1 pm with a general SQL error. It wasn't the site itself but a 1&1 hosting site outage. Live site and dev site both down and I couldn't get get onto either via SFTP. Just had a look and there is nothing in the site logs so definitely a 1&1 problem.

[Stanley]

Never noticed it, but of course I logged off at Noon and never attempted to come back.

[Stanley]

The use of an almost completely useless but impressive bomb in Afghanistan. This is sabre rattling of the worst order and is so dangerous. I would describe it as provocation of North Korea and it remains to be seen what the outcome will be. Informed sources expect a nuclear test by North Korea as a response. What does Trump do then? Escalate? This is the ultimate version of gunboat diplomacy and will backfire.

[Tizer]

We've noticed an outbreak of white efflorescence on red brick retaining walls in our garden. They were built about 7 years ago and they've always had some of the white powder but suddenly it's become much worse. It's usually caused by water seeping through the brick and mortar so it seems odd that it should get much worse at a time when the weather has been dry for weeks. We've noticed it on other brick walls in the village too. It also seems more common on walls built in the last decade than earlier. I wonder if something has changed in the manufacture of bricks or in the composition of mortar?

[Stanley]

Interesting question.... Could it be that the dry weather has allowed the efflorescence to become more visible? The main thing that has changed and I believe for the worst, is the almost universal use of straight cement/sand compo which is impervious to water. The traditional mixes which include hydrated lime are porous and allow the walls to 'breathe' and dry out naturally to the outside through the joints. Impervious compo forces the water to come out through the bricks making the deposit more visible. That's my theory but I am not certain.
The US NSA have revealed evidence about international bank transfers which suggest that they have been hacking into the encrypted SWIFT system used by the banks.

[Tizer]

This efflorescence is mainly on the lines of mortar. I brushed it yesterday and a surprising amount came off, a bit like fine snow!. Then I used a watering can with a rose to sprinkle water down the walls. That's done the job and there's hardly any white material now. Perhaps it was a combination of rain weeks ago causing the efflorescence to form and then drought preventing it from washing off. I was surprised at how it seemed to be so soluble in cold water; usually I have to use acid to remove it. It must have formed calcium bicarbonate rather than calcium carbonate.

[Stanley]

I don't know if it is still used but builders used to use a weak solution of fluoric acid to do the job. They called it 'snot remover'.
What struck me particularly yesterday was how cold that wind was coming in from the NW. We have another month to go before we can expect to see any warming up......

[Stanley]

I was very sad to read THIS about World Snooker's interaction with Ronnie O'Sullivan. I often wonder about sport's governing bodies. They seem to believe that they are more important then the players. Ronnie is mercurial and has had many personal problems but is still arguably the best snooker brain ever and always attracts large crowds. He is a snooker genius and this is far more important than the governing body.
Maintaining discipline in the sport is one thing, harassing one of the game's best assets is another.

[Tizer]

I have a large plastic bottle of hydrochloric acid from the DIY shop labelled something like `mortar remover' which is intended for removing mortar marks after laying bricks but it can be used to treat efflorescence. The trouble is that it only takes off very thin surface coatings and you need to keep re-treating.

What grabbed my attention just now is that the phone scammers are working even on Easter Monday!

[Stanley]

Funny you should mention that. I had one from the 'Microsoft Technical Department'. I asked if his mother knew he earned a living by stealing, the line went dead.