Vauxhall recalls 220,000 Zafira B cars over fire worries

It's this bit, right at the end of the article that gets me:


Don't use the heating or ventilation system... in November, in Britain.
I don't know about anyone else but my experience is that at this time of year most cars mist up pretty damn fast without the use of the heating and ventilation system. That's an awful lot of people who're going to be driving to the Vauxhall garage with their windows down.

The heating in my Escort packed in during December, during snow... I had to drive from Southampton to Basingstoke every day for a week, before I could get it seen to... Scraping ice off the inside of the windows every 10 minutes was "fun".

Pentagon plan to close Guantánamo expected to include Colorado prison | US news | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015 ... ado-prison

If it wasn't for healthcare Obama would actually be one of the worst presidents yet.

Quite the opposite for me, for me, Guantanamo is a relatively rare blot in an otherwise remarkably successful Presidency, especially when you consider the utter lunacy he's had to deal with from the GOP lead Congress.

Whilst I don't necessarily agree with everything on the list here, there's a lot he's done well:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazi ... p?page=all

It was the list of broken promises that really got me, the rest were mostly reactions to situations the country was already in. The sort of decisions he often had no choice but to make. When it's really mattered he's often been found wanting (the environment, guns, the FBI and NSA, diplomacy and warfare). He's not the worst, but he's more of a Republican than he lets on... to use a very lazy description.

His first task in Office, will be to remove all troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. "And you can take that to the bank."

His first task in Office, will be to close Gitmo. "And you can take that to the bank."

I'm guessing he still hasn't actually found his way into the Oval Office yet... Maybe somebody should load Google Maps on his phone.

http://www.ihatethemedia.com/obama-afghanistan-troops

I'm off for a few days this week. I ordered some stuff from amazon. Figured instead waiting who knows how long, I'd pay the extra and get one day delivery. Ordered around this time yesterday and went for one day delivery. Four items were dispatched in one delivery and the fifth item in a separate delivery. The four items were being delivered through RM and arrived 10am this morning. The fifth item hasn't yet appeared. It was supposed to be delivered by "Amazon Logistics". Whilst typing this post, I checked my emails. Amazon now say the item remaining can't be delivered, to allow one extra day for delivery and they will aim to deliver it to me by 14th.

Seriously, WTF!?!?

Having been somewhat bemused by the trend for massive patches for games I'm now experiencing the same thing for what I believe is the first time and I don't even have a console.

Good old Blizzard. So, in the run up to Legacy of the Void they started downloading background content and updating the game client. The various updates IIRC came to somewhere between 5 and 10GB. This was ostensibly so that people could start playing as soon as the game was released. Fair enough I thought, although it's a bit of scunner if you don't actually want to play the game (but I do so not problem there).
So LotV was released this week and I have fired up Battlenet today for the first time this week and it's busy downloading another 5 - 6 GB of data.

I'll never snigger at my brothers console downloads again.

You should try the PSN store - you'd have to leave it running for half a day to download all that. Assuming your connection was up to it. I'd like to see EU law that makes it a punishable offence to knowingly release broken software. I mean if something has massive day one patches, you knew it wasn't ready and still released it unfit for purchase. There will always be exceptions, but it's gotten past a joke.

Guess which console my brother has... yup, PS4. Although I don't think things were that much better on his old XB360 tbh.
I will give credit where it's due, the download from Blizzard was reasonably fast - managed to saturate my fibre broadband connection.

Decided to get up early this to go to the gym. Left the house at 7AM. Got there. Realised I'd left my gym bag at home.

Been there, done that...

But my gym also has a sauna, so I just went in the sauna for half an hour - here you do in the sauna naked, so the fact I didn't have my gear with me didn't matter (I did have a spare towel in the car, because, you know Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

Once upon a time, they'd have told you to do it anyway, just in your pants

Don’t know if this is a fail on my part or someone else. Anyway, it’a fail.

Last week, I got a phone call from a company telling me that they will be installing something big in a house in our road and will be blocking it for a while (a conservatory), and they wanted to apologise to the people in the street by offering a discount on a quote. They actually said that the discount would be around £500. Normally, I’d send them packing, but we had been talking about replacing the front door, and I thought that this would probably cover most of the cost of that, or at the very least give a good enough discount. The quote, I was told, is goo for two years, so clearly no rush. So I agreed to a salesman calling round to talk to us about a new door.

Oh, good grief. They sent a child. He told us that he’d only just started, and he was very nervous. He took over an hour talking about the company, various payment options, and was flipping around an iPad with slides on it like there was no tomorrow. At one point, he ran through an example credit deal with a nominal figure of £10,000 to see if we liked the sound of it. I did ask at that point how he expected us to agree to something which was purely hypothetical. Show m,e real numbers and we’ll have a think. He said he had to explain all of this to start with. It seemed to me like an attempt to gauge how much we were willing to spend or could. I actually said that. No doors had been shown, no measurements taken. He also wanted us to give various problems with our current door marks out of ten. Things like drafts, security. It was fitted by the previous owner of the house, who bodged everything. The door frame doesn’t quite fit the door.

Eventually he did measure the door, was confused by the dimensions (it’s an old house, built to imperial measurements). he showed us some pictures of some rather uninspiring white uPVC doors. Some where ghastly, some looked like prison doors. None really fitted with the ideas I had for what we wanted, so we chose what I think was the best of a bad choice.

So some questions about the door? It had security locking, like our back door has. Spy hole? No. Security chain? No. Choice of colours? No - but we could, he supposed, paint it.

So the price came. Brace yourselves: around £3100. Now, there was this deal where we could agree to have photos taken, a board on the house and write a testimonial and they would drop it, but even the dropped price was really just under £2900.

This is for a white uPVC door. Nothing special, it’s fairly basic. We decided that no, we weren’t going ahead. So phone calls to the boss (who we could hear over the mobile and whose voice I recognised as the person I had spoken to before). At this point, we called it a day. It was 8pm, he was clearly out of his depth, either his manager was genuinely getting pissed off with him, or there was some kind of theatrics going on.

After he went, we found the invoice for the back door. £670.00 which we had put in a few years back.

Following day - a follow up call from someone else from the company. Did the appointment go OK, well, yes, but it did go on. Was there a problem with the product? Well, yes. I listed lack of colour choice, styles not really in keeping with the house, no security chain or spy hole. Apparently, we SHOULD have been shown composite doors which may have been more interesting and had a colour choice, and that security chains and spy holes were pretty much standard and he should have known that. Also he should have been accompanied by a manager as he was new, and any difficult to answer questions could have been answered, and we would have been shown more products.

So, no sale there. In fact, I’ve been speaking to another person I know who does proper wood work, and he said he could do a door we wanted for less, and out of real timber. So we may well speak to him next year when we have the cash together.

I may post a rant about doors in the ranting thread because I have other thoughts on the matter.

To contrast this with the people who we chose to remodel our chimney and fireplace and install a wood burning stove last year. He turned up, measured, did a survey of the chimney, and we talked about the house, what it had when it was built and what he felt would work in the room, and what I felt the house needed. Then he got a calculator out and worked out the price based on what we had discussed. He and his partner spent two days working very hard installing, plastering and rebuilding, and the total bill for that job came to less than this door would have. We have the fireplace we want.

Lesson learned here: deal with the people who actually do the work, not a salesman.

I had all my windows done including 2 doors for £6k