Message on a Cup

"What is better than a french bakery open 24 hours a day? NOTHING! Amelie.... "

A good movie, or so I've been told...

Yes, I know, it's been a while since I last blogged. Too long.

Since the last blog on the second of October, I've been rather busy. Mostly at work, but I've been battling with the blackberry briars in the back garden in attempt to curb the takeover next year, and I've been out a bit too, and not to mention a visit back to Skegness (with another one at the weekend...)

Also, I've got a trip up to Scotland tomorrow, to try and get to the bottom of some mysterious failures on site. I think I know what the cause is, but I need to see it with my own eyes to be sure. A (hopefully) nice day out.

Also chatted briefly to Erin Gladstone, another friend of mine in the US. I miss my American friends..

The model railway and other stuff

So, I said I'd mention the model railway when there is something worth mentioning.

In this case, it's a just-about-as-new condition Hornby "Flying Scotsman" model. It's a limited edition of 1 of 5000, and is from the time when Flying Scotsman Enterprises ran the loco with two tenders, for extended range.

It comes complete with 3 limited edition carriages, with Eastern Region numbers, and it's all in original packaging, albeit slightly damaged by previous owner(s).

It has been run before, and I did give it a quick run around my track, but that's about as far as it will go, at least in my possession anyway. You see, it won't convert to DCC, and therefore as soon as I convert my layout to DCC, it will become unrunnable. Not a major problem, as I wasn't going to run it anyway. I might make a display case for the entire train, and put it on a shelf int back bedroom.

I know I said previously that Hornby models are cheap and nasty, but this one is before the badly-made-in-China era, so doesn't count. It's a proper, well made, British model.

Anyhow, Chloe thought the whole model railway was very interesting, when she came over last week, and was forever trying to escape up the stairs to have a peek. Apparently there was always a problem that needed fixing.

Vikki is back from her holiday tomorrow, so I've got a drive over to Manchester Airport tomorrow afternoon. I've hoovered out the car, and given it a quick wash. Won't spend too much time on it this time of year, as it'll only get rained on.

The Grinding Gears

I don't like it when I put a search term into Google or Yahoo (and even Bing, which promised to be different - another let-down from Microsoft...), such as "Free PWI viewer", and I click on the top result link to discover it's just a redirection to another search engines result page that says "No results found".

Hello? Did I type in "I don't want a free PWI viewer"? No.

And why are we wasting time and resources indexing useless crap, such as what it can't find?