El Pibe

i think you can actually say shit, it's just twat you can't say. Well, that and cunt obviously.

H has it. Barring that bung them in hot tray and generous splurge of cold olive oil is fine as, let's face it, oven doesn't need to get that hot. Presimmer your garlic in milk to sweeten and roast for about 45m-1hr depending on clove size. Good sprinkle of crushed salt too. Wild rabbit. A bloke with wellies and shotgun is probably your best bet.

Ooooh "bad witch sister from Merlin". Might be worth watching after all *rubs thighs vigorously* Yeah, Homeland is good. It's weird seeing Clare Danes as a grown up as I last saw her being some soppy self-obsssed tedious teen in something so long ago I can't remember its name. It turns out she can act after all mind. Much more excited about Inigo Montoya of 'you killed my father, prepare to die' fame playing Saul though!!!!

Sorry are we talking about Sherlock, I'm confused? Does every BBC drama have the same is-he-isn't-he 'cliffhanger' then? *presses play on Homeland on TiVO*

I'm quite enjoying Occipital 360 for making google street view type affairs. The equivalent on the iPhone I think is calles photosynth here's an example of one near my office turned into a sterogram thingy

A book each? Something military and geeky for him and something travelly and beautiful for her* replace Vietnam (the sort of place well tavelled couples are AAALLWAAYYYS farting on about) with a.n.other country they like. Just some suggestions like...

Nicely sums up why I love the Decemberists. If this sounds like something that might be you, then the new live album would make a great starting point !! http://drownedinsound.com/releases/16869/reviews/4144599

Basically everything eats them, birds, fish and each other. If you've a few fish in a small pond they're basically doomed. Mind you back a the family pile this weekend ironically the well fed fish got gobble up by a passing heron. altoghter now "It's the ciiircle of liiiifee....." A second crop of spawn is faring better in the newly fishless pond.

marvellous http://woodcutmaps.com

In her head maybe. Don't get me wrong, I was perfectly polite, but they refused to accept that charging 12 quid for a boil in the bag frankfurter form sainsburys and selling it as something it wasn't was wrong and offered no alternative nor money back. It was the last time any of us ate there to be fair so something less pithy (be it unspoken or not) might have been wiser. I'll miss the Buena Vistas though!!

"There are two types of chorizo. Fresh and raw" Not in Spain there isn't. There it specifically means smoke cured sausage (or a silly billy). Paprika is optional as you can get chorizo blanco without it. There's probably a governing body which decides what the difference is between salchich?n, fuet, lomo (which presumably is made only from the back of a pig), chorizo etc. I think the meaning has been extrapolated internationally to mean any sausagey pork product with paprika though. In fact I once had 'chorizo' in the dearly departed Black Cherry which was actually a spicy frankfurter. Eek! I made my feelings clear about this. But enough with the pedantry, the type you refer to does need cooking (but chorizo it ain't!!).

My mum has been instrumental in setting up one of these in a small town in Middle England's herartlands as part of the whole transition towns thingy. I must say, as noble and sweet and well intentioned as it all sounds, my reaction was a little bit like Huguenot's. The moment it stops being good folk acting all neighbourly to each other and becomes a medium of exchange I can't see how it avoids becoming a different version of money. Surely anyone who's skills are in greater demand gets more of other people's services in return for their own, in other words they get paid more. And to echo Huguenot, if it becomes popoular and formalised then the state inevitably wants to get their fair share, at which point everything becomes quantifiable and divisible and you either have to work for the state or use some sort of transferrable means of exchange to reflect the value of your services offered, perhaps by creating IOUs out of paper and writing different numbers on them to reflect how much of a service they can be exchanged for or for anything of equivalent value. You can see where I'm going with this can't you.... ;)

8-Bit google maps has just made my day!!!

Except of course they didn't have some special knowledge, they were either too optimistic, misguided or stupid. I was right. Admittedly they slightly learnt from their mistakes. At the third attempt they didn't make people redundant, they outsourced them all to EDF. A better strategy but one that hadn't invloived reading private eye. EDF were the worst employer of all time and all the capable people left for Barclays and RBS, leaving them with the detritus as the experienced developers and all the good ones replaced by the EDF detritus who weren't even good enough to make it to Peterborough County Council. ABN were tied in to the contract for 5 years and unable to take on permanent staff independently. They hired in expensive contractors to plug the gap, then gave EDF a huge pay off to change the contract and left them looking after the hardware whilst they had to spend a fortune building up their expensive IT skillsets again. Thinking the management know what they're doing because they're management is just plain foolish if you ask me. You only have to look at what happened to ABN to see this, it went virtually bankrupt and dragged down RBS when they didn't do due diligence. THey probably assumed the management knew what they were doing too. Oops again. Oh, and I said this one would fail too. It hurts to be able to see the wood for the trees sometimes, even when you're a dull drone, devoid of the superhuman powers granted to management. ;)

That was more or less the case in the Netherlands when I lived there. It was also very difficult to make someone redundant as redundancy applications have to go past the local authority who are also the same people who have to pay the generous benefits. Forced redundancies are thus practically unheard of, so packages tend to be ludicrously generous to make them voluntary. ABN went through two tranches of reducing headcount whilst I was in Amsterdam (sadly I was deemed to be part of a critical function despite my pleading for said generous package), conservatively costing a billion euros each. They needed to do it twice because after the first one they couldn't function and needed to hire lots of people....who cost too much, and they decided the best way to reduce costs was more sweeping redundancies.... Both times I tried to communicate the shortsighted stupidity of the strategy up the chain, but the likes of Huguenot the board weren't interested in the opinions of negative nancy minkies like myself and think that pointing out risks is just being a party pooper, because it'll all work out in the end. ooops!!

Ohio Cooperative Development Center? Or is this a pun about people who are obsessively finickety about who they sleep with but not about their gender?

Although, to be fair, the 'phone app' didn't work terribly well on my old iPhone.

Indeed, that's the beauty of the EU. If you want to live somewhere warmer with a better quality of life you can do so. Obviously you need to learn a foreign language and stuff and actually do it in the first place though. Good luck enjoying life in St Tropez on income support though ;)

I've stumbled upon Tasker http://tasker.dinglisch.net/index.html It is 4 quid, but cheap at the price. It gives you really fine grain control over your phone. I'm squeezing much more battery life out of it by getting it to switch wifi on when I get to work and home, but off when I leave and switch all data off during the wee hours. It can block unruly apps from contacting their third party ad scrollers. It can even do things like turn your phone silent when it's face down.

My brother's diesel skoda Octavia has been chugging along without a single problem for 10 years now.

NOt to get involved in this ridiculous discussion, but it's quite easy to set up i/android phones to automatically send photos to iCloud, picasaweb respectively on taking the photo. In fact it took me a while to work out that that's what my phone was doing as I realised that's what was chewing up my data usage.

I want to be chelonian

and just to be clear on my general position. I'm not against change. Clearly the NHS can benefit from reforms, indeed the status quo was arrived at following Labours own attempts to 'solve' the NHS. I just don't think the problems are as intractable as people like to make out or that the NHS is sick. We'd obviously all like more for less, but ultimately the NHS is something the electorate is willing to pay for no matter how costly, it's the closest thing we have to a sacred cow in this country. I'm simply of the opinion that reform isn't something applied in an ill thought out manner every 4-15 years or every time there's a new prime minister trying to make his bloody mark. As I've said before there should be a much longer term strategy built into the precepts of reform proposals. Those proposals, whilst obviously being under a political direction, should be, as much as humanly possible, free of the vagaries, ideologies and political point scoring of party politics and under the direction of cross party/camera bodies with substantial input from independent reviews. Change should come in small manageable, achievable chunks as part of an evolutionary process of improvement. This will mean meaningful change can actaully be achieved and hopefully without demoralising the workforce and putting patients at jeopardy. I have little doubt that we will see both as a result of the introduction of the health bill.

Again, competitive environment is not something anyone wants to hear when it comes to the NHS as what that really means is privatised. Hospitals that underperform commercially will simply be shut down, see also high street banks, cash machines, post offices and railway stations (ghost trains notwithstanding). Having to drive thirty miles for a cash machie is a p.i.t.a., in terms of emergency medical care we're talking dead people. Plus I'm still looking at the porposed structure and trying to understand why terms like streamlining or minimising beauracracy are being bandied about.

That may well be but doesn't serve as an anolgy here where the suppliers are very powerful and know how to play the game far better than the happless procurement managers/GPs et al.