Be Excellent To Each Other

Is this right: the Greater Manchester ambulance service was sold/taken over by a bus company!?

Non-emergency I think, picking people up for appointments and whatnot.

There's this new thing they've come up with, a 'search engine' I think they call it? Looks pretty good.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-ma ... r-19883403

It's not the emergency service they've taken over but the other part:

I'm driving and stopped at the lights so less of your lip, son.

Seems they undercut the rival bid by the actual ambulance service and then turned out to be shit:

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/ ... me-7247960

Bloody hell that's pretty embarrassing - 54% didn't make their appointments and 60% weren't picked up on time. That'll surely put a strain on the hospitals affected by this service whilst they are waiting for their patients to turn up.

But I suppose that's back-door privatisation for you.

would be interesting to see what the service was like before.

Yeah, for all we know that could be a better service than the one they had.

Just got emailed this



At work so wont visit the page but its been gone for years and seems strange for it to restart like this ?

(Also wasnt this one of the sites where various US agencies were trying to get user info from ?)

It's been back for a while, I logged into it last month sometime then had a poke around and forgot about it.

I had not seen - at the time it had a much better selection of books (written and Audio versions) than any other torrent site although i guess all of the others going or being blocked in some way often just help out TPB becoming bigger

Had a look through one of those "crazy shit on google earth" lists that get posted on facebook this lunchtime. Had all the usual weird lines in the Nevada desert etc... and then the next picture was the Whipsnade zoo chalk lion, which is about 10 miles away from my house. That was a little weird.

"I hope that you had a nice Eid". This is a perfectly fine thing to say, isn't it?

Too bloody hot here.....

I made a google calendar reminder to send the turkish phrase "Bayraminiz mubarek oslun" to my old Team Leader where I used to work as she was always dead pleased that I actually paid some attention to the Muslim calendar etc.

She sent me something back in Turkish which probably means - "Cock off Cock face"

Or "put your cock in my face".

London next week! for a one hour meeting! Then back again! Sorry, Troops, I can't probably do lunch or anything as I'll be running up the road back to Kings Cross from Holborn (which is pronounce "Ho-Burn" much to my amusement), and I'll have people in tow.

Say you forgot something and ditch the losers.

Just got tickets for 'Avenue Q' when it comes to Oxford again in early August. Saw it back in 2012 and loved every second so looking forward to seeing it again lest I forget what the Internet is for.

Fucking love Avenue Q. Best thing I've seen at the theatre by a country mile. Then Blood Brothers. Then Book of Mormon.

I've been very bored today. That bored that I've started to add developer and publisher columns to my spreadsheet.

That's a euphemism for having a wank, right?

I'm starting to notice approx. 50% of forum responses to poor old TheVision's posts seem to revolve around wanking, for reasons unknown.

I think we should be told.

I presume it's because at least 50% of the forum think of me while having a wank.

I don't think I'll be able to sleep this evening with that thought.

I certainly won't be able to go to sleep until at least 30 seconds after the wife has now, in any event.

Thirty seconds? Boy, you keep yourself peaked!

So Jason Statham used to be a competitive diver.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/commonweal ... s/28292980

Huh.

I'm including time to find a packet of kleenex (and then find another one that isn't fucking menthol) in that timeframe.

He wasn't going to do it, but he spoke to a careers advisor who suggested he take the plunge and when it didn't work out, he caused a big splash elsewhere. It's not many actors who manage two turns before hitting the rock bottom but that's what happened with Expendables 3 and (BANG! - Enough! Grim...)

Yeah, not being a brilliant diver worked out quite well for him in the end.

I really want to see 'the Book of Mormon'.

You're an absolute amateur for not having those in the first place. Next you'll be telling me you don't have a serial number column either!

Myp wanks a lot.

This doesn't merit a whole thread so: I started playing Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs a few days ago and holy shit is it ugly. I mean it's all low-res textures and whatnot as well, but that's not what I mean. It seems to have this weird 'wash' over the whole thing which makes stuff difficult to look at in a really weird way. It's not just that it's dark, because I've tried turning the gamma slider up pretty high and all that does it make everything go a weird colour, while being a bit brighter of course, but it's still really hard to look at for any length of time. The entire time I'm playing it I feel like someone's managed to rub a layer of vaseline on my eyeballs without me noticing. It's so bad I began wondering if my monitor was actually fucked, although it looks fine on the desktop and other games I've played recently. It's almost exactly like the effect you get when you look at a flat screen TV from too wide an angle; bits of the picture drop out and others lose their contrast.

The game itself hasn't been very interesting thus far, although that's probably due to my immersion being utterly fucked by the hideous visuals, and I'm getting a bit annoyed by the 'puzzles' (i.e. go right up to every object in every room and see if a hand icon appears which means you can do something, otherwise you'll miss something and spend ages circling around the same area wondering what the fuck's going on) but I want to play through it. I'm curious whether anyone else has played it and whether you experienced anything like what I'm talking about? Or whether I really should start investigating monitor/driver issues. I'm half-tempted to hook the PC up the TV in the living room just to see what it looks like there.

How a master assassin rolls in Dishonoured.



Damn that game was groovy.

I sez.

viewtopic.php?style=19&f=3&t=9897&p=826962&hilit=Amnesia#p826962

Weirdly I noticed a weird hazy blue/brown hue to everything but I imagine I must have thought it was part of the style (I imagine). I do remember having some issues though.

Mind you, I didn't miss any puzzle pieces. I thought it was fairly linear and reasonably choreographed so you knew when you had to poke or pull something.

I refused to buy it as I couldn't get the first Amnesia working because it used OpenGL. What is this, 1995?

But only if it were.

Yeah, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about and I imagine it has been done on purpose but, perhaps in combination with my admittedly crap monitor, it's making the entire thing near impossible to put up with. This is totally going to end up with me buying a new monitor, which I was going to do about a year back and didn't go through with. The reasons why I wanted to, and why I didn't bother, are lost to me though.



It's probably just me being dim but I was wandering about the house right at the start and to progress you need to 'open' on a painting in the bathroom. I'd been in the bathroom and walked around it a good few times and saw nothing to make me think, "Ooh, I better go right up to that random object as it'll have a crucial secret behind it!" The same thing happened at another point when you have to shift a glass case containing a bear around or you can't progress. It's possibly another consequence of it looking all weird and shit for me though, that's hardly going to improve my ability to pick out important objects after all.

If I had a stuffed bear in a glass case it would be THE most important object in the room that wasn't me. To eBay!

OMG, the Jesus shot!

In videogame related news:

Borderlands is still super fun. more so now that I'm getting harder, stronger and faster. I'm playing as a soldier and have reached level 13. Tesco have a special offer to get Borderlands 1 and 2 for £18, so that's worth a look.

£11.71 from Amazon if you don't mind them second hand.

Everyone should play it! it's acebest!

Just come off the phone with a hosting provider that is providing hosting for one of our clients.

Said client has paid for hosting with these guys up until the end of the 31st July.

They've switched the site off at 12 noon and are refusing to turn it back on because, and I quote, "we won't be here at midnight to turn the website off when the hosting expires."

I am both disgusted and dumbfounded.

WTFF?

Inorite? I was hoping to do a HTTrack on the website to take a copy of it before it went down (said host provided me with FTP access to download the actual files, but refused to provide a DB dump) but now that plan is scuppered.

Like a big van that goes 'ner-ner, ner-ner' full of poorly people.