Earthling

I recently dumped Virgin, I was paying £75 pm just for the XLXXLLLLXXX (or whatever) bundle with Sky Sports. That's all, just TV, no phone, no BB. I really do not like their pricing structure, which seems to come down to 'What bargain the individual can strike with Customer Retentions'. Went over to BT TV, which is just recycled Freeview or YouView or some such. It's crap, anyway, BBC 4 and that's about as good as it gets. I don't really watch much broadcast TV, I miss Discovery, Nat Geo and Eden but I'm not paying premium prices to get 1,082 channels of dross just to get those few channels. I tend to get what I want to watch from the Interweb.

I used to referee kids' football matches on a Sunday. As mentioned, good exercise and a bit of cash. I gave it up in 2005, when I started thinking that I'd rather stay home and be abused by people I know instead of by strangers. It's in the back of my mind to take my badge again and give it another go for a couple of years. Before I went off sick, I used to get home, stare at the wall for a little while then crack on with the business of living. Cooking, tidying-up, change the budgie's water and so on. I started building a model railway just before Christmas. Long, slow, contemplative, sometimes absorbing, sometimes frustrating. I'm trying to theme it on 'Red Dead Redemption'. Difficult on a 6 x 4 layout. I've started decorating the bathroom with stencils and an airbrush. Never used one before. I always have Chill DAB radio on Chill. Listen to chillout music online or iTunes library on shuffle when Chill gets repetitive.

Are you sure you should be listening to C&W(ish) given your post in the 'other' thread? Sometimes, it's not the ...uhh....jolliest of music to listen to.

Says it all that my favourite M&S song is a cover. Loads of covers of it. Good song. Easy-ish to strum, not so easy to sing. I wasn't so keen on OCMS' version when it came out. I think it was all the de rigueur semi-clad women they used in the video. Instantly ruins any musical credibility, but it grew on me the more I heard it and the less I saw the video. In actual fact, the version I like best was the one I heard from the two guys and two girls in the tent opposite mine at Cambridge last year. That's the one I hear in my head when I sing it to myself, as one does.

My favourite M&S track https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXJO7FZegeI Old song, cover version, live BBC session. It was the sound of my summer last year.

We've been using them for years. No other supplier that cold calls us has come anywhere near the same arrangement. No-brainer, I believe, is the current phrase. They run really good forum competitions, as well, with really good prizes. Brown envelope stuffed with cash to be left in the usual place, please, Karen.

I bought an LG 42" Smart 3D in January. TBH, I haven't even looked at half the smart apps, I didn't buy it for that. The council have just put in new digital aerials all over my block and I wanted Freeview HD so that I could cancel my Virgin subscription which has just gone up to £75 for no extra channels or provision. They offered me the immediate £25 off per month, if I sign a new contract, but I'm not going for that. The lack of some OD channels and Catch-up, iPlayer, 4OD, etc, doesn't bother me in the slightest. If I miss something, it's rarely good enough to bother catching up with. In fact, I rarely watch broadcast TV. Everything I want to watch I down off the Inter. Vikings, for example, just on series 3. I've never seen it on broadcast TV, don't know what channel it's on or which day or time and not interested anyway, but every Sunday, there's another episode available for , somewhere or another. TV provider boxed sets? I get them all off the you-know-where. Movies? 3D Movies? Same same. Even when Spurs aren't on Sky Sports or BT SPort, I can watch their game on the i******t. The LG Smart Share app for playing PC content on the TV works, but it's not the most reliable of applications and has to have its arm twisted to update the content if I add new stuff to the shared content folder, but nothing's ever perfect, is it.

Rather than you having the end say, you mean? I'm only saying what I think should be on the BBC, if commercial channels or broadcasters want to pick it up, go for it, knock yourselves out. If commercial broadcasters don't pick it up, then that's a measure of how popular it really is.

Maybe the real answer is to drop it off the BBC altogether, then I don't have to pay for it, and you can watch it as much as you like.

How many of those 300,00 actually pay the license fees themselves and how many are teens and early-20's still living at home with M&D paying the license fee for them?

Personally, I'm fed-up with paying a salary to a middle-aged man with the all the maturity, propriety and sense of humour of a Year 9 student. I'm a license-payer and I don't like being told, 'If you don't like it, don't watch it'.

Wheeler Dealers is brilliant, a real car show for real car people. i always wanted to be like Ed China but never quite got the workshop together to do it in.

Richard Keys and Andy Grey thought they were bullet-proof, too. Now I only ever see them on some obscure foreign (usually Middle Eastern) Sky spin-off channel when I'm .

Couldn't agree more, and we license-payers pay his enormously over-inflated salary.

My wife (we're separated but neither of want a divorce, hence she's not 'my ex' nor am I hers...confused? You will be) did a two week meander up the California coast from LA to SF last year. Her and her friend from work rented a Mustang convertible. Not sure of the cost but it was 'reasonable'. I still call it their 'Thelma and Louise' trip. When I saw the photos, it made up my mind of how, where and which car. Have yet to decide when, though. Could be next year or the year after. Could be next month, the way things are going here.

+1 for the road trip across the States. Personally, I'd rent a car. Route 66.......iconic, famous and you can listen to the Stones all the way with impunity. New Orleans to San Francisco across the south, is the one I really fancy. Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, on to California from Arizona or through Nevada. Otherwise, you have other 'iconic' road-movie trips. Denver to San Francisco in 60 hours (Vanishing Point, not recommended) or the non-existent 'Interstate 60'. Interstate 60: Episodes of the Road (2002) - IMDb Definitely go on your own.

Lost interest at this point. I've been alone again for eight years and I just don't get the same buzz from preparing and cooking anymore. Got a slow-cooker and a 'food-processor', and slowly worn the novelty of those out, too. I tell myself I'm being lazy, but the fact remains there's other things I'd rather do than stand there and clean and chop carrots, peel, par-boil and roast, potatoes, chop peppers, onions, garlic and so on. So as well as baked potatoes, I eat a lot of steak. Expensive but affordable for the moment. Quick, tasty, filling, easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. And I don't care about all the warnings about red meat either, so win/win.

I eat a lot of baked potatoes and things like tuna or avocado, scotch eggs. Main reason being they don't take a lot of preparation time. Two hours in the oven while I work on my model railway or do the housework (as if) and dinner's ready.

Sitting down all day is an easy one to get into in this job, more so than when I was on mainframe operations back in the day, when there were tapes/disks to be unmounted/mounted, cards etc fed into various readers and so on. I'm a bit of a restless person in work. I pace up and down in the office when I have to think through a problem, I get up and walk into the storeroom next door and back, if I get bored I find something on the Help Desk to do in an outlying block, install some software on a particular pc/laptop, change a toner cartridge, anything so I don't have to stay sat down for too long. I've found all these things help to ward off boredom, and to stay relatively fit at the age of 62. I'm lucky enough to be able to walk to work, too, if I don't need my car immediately after work. My colleague, on the other hand (same age) sits down in his chair all day long and I would consider him to be bordering on, if not actually, clinically obese. At home, I'm completely the opposite. A mind is a terrible thing to waste on housework.

Fixed that for you. Can't you tell I live alone, as well.

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So let me get this straight......the punishment for ('slow') suicide is death? That makes sense. In someone else's universe, but not in mine.

We allow them for staff and for 6th Form only.

A year ago, I was in the middle of an evaluation of 10" and 7" tablets, iPad and Android and I was about to buy a Surface when I was phoned out of the blue by the HT and told to get 16 iPads, cabinet, MacBook and all the other stuff. Approximately £9,000. I bought them, no one knew then (or knows now) what to do with them. They have to stay in one room in one block, because we don't have school-wide WiFi. We don't have, nor do we intend to have, a Volume Purchase Plan with Apple for apps, so I was given a £25 iTunes voucher to buy some apps, if we couldn't find free ones to do the things that we didn't know we wanted to do. I've given up trying to keep them secure and in some sort of order. The staff all have access to the cabinet, so they help themselves to an iPad 'for the weekend', and then, of course, have to be chased up-hill and down-dale to return them after the 'weekend'.

I would recommend Silicon Alley, unreservedly. Even though I'm still waiting for the brown envelope stuffed with cash for my last recommendation.