AMLinington

I am not convinced that a Zombie-esque plague is not a possibility - after all parasites that control insects have been around for a long time and parasites that affect the human brain are myriad - Toxoplasmosis for example... I don't for a second imagine that we'll all be running from the undead and rotting, ambulatory corpses, but The Black Death was fairly apocalyptic so it is not a great stretch of reasoning to see that we may have an episode of an out of control parasite/infection that devastates our population.

The whole decay issue is the core weakness of the Zombie genre. I can get past the idea that parasites or viruses 'take over' the brain of a dead person and animate their limbs in a semblance of 'life' but as the body starts to rot, so too will the brain, quickly becoming unusable as a 'nutrition source' for the virus/parasite. Additionally the rotting body doesn't produce enzymes and stuff that are needed to digest the 'food' zombies are driven to 'consume'. I can get past this too by imagining that this is more about spreading the virus/parasite than actually imbibing nutrients but what I really can't get past is how a corpse is able to move limbs without muscles or where connective tissue has rotted - movement is a ballet, full of form and colour (sorry, 5th element ref, couldn't resist) that relies on muscles connected to bones via tendons and sinew. The muscles rely on nerve impulses from the brain and spinal column. Even the smallest bit of damage to this would result in paralysis - particularly around the neck area yet we're seeing fully ambulatory zombies with clearly broken or damaged spines and in some cases missing parts or muscles that are required to move the limbs. Sorry but I don't buy it. Yeah, I've given the zombie thing waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much thought... Also, 28 days later was kinda clever because people didn't have to die before they 'turned' - it was an infection that took over their brain and they were killable so technically the 'zombies' in 28DL weren't undead. After all, they survived by waiting for them to die of starvation...

The irony is that the more you HAVE to run, the better you will get, so if you can stay alive for a year, your chances of surviving longer increase because presumably you'd be fitter than you are now from all the running away.... Yeah I'm thinking about this WAY too much.

If I change my answer to the running question I get 10 years.

I got a year but I suspect that was because I TOLD THE TRUTH on the running question XD

Some people find that they can't bear to get a new pet so soon after losing one but some people find that they need to fill that gap straightaway. I don't view a new pet as a 'replacement' but instead I see each pet as contributing their own personality to our family. When a pet dies that special thing they offered (in my case, Truffie had a specific way she would 'give loves' where she would rub herself on you really vigorously) can't be replaced, but there is room in your heart and your home for a different personality. Enzo is nothing at all like Truffie and I love him for his own quirks, not because he replaces her. She was never a lap cat for example, but would rub herself vigorously. Enzo is an unashamed lap cat who is happy to keep you company without needing lots of petting. Truffie was very clever in her play - she understood that when she pulled a mouse on a string out of the box, the ping pong ball on the other end of the string would rise up and she'd dash backwards and forwards around the box pulling the ball then the mouse in turn. Enzo on the other hand loves to play with fishing rod toys and climb the book case. They are two different personalities that occupy the same space in my life in totally different ways and I love them both for their individuality.

BLASPHEMER! It is not possible to have too many Cat videos. Clearly you are being mind controlled by Apple.

Honestly, We mostly use the X-box for Kinect controls - 'X-box pause' when watching Sky Movies is win.

Google is Skynet. I've been saying it for ages and my tin-hat theories are a bit of a joke in the office but I'm starting to think I might be right. Google has wormed their way into our lives so thoroughly that if they disappeared tomorrow we'd stumble quite noticably - first they dominated the search engine arena, then they got in on the free email bandwagon - almost everyone has a Google account of some kind, then they got their hooks into the mobile phone market and almost every household has an Android device of some kind (unless they are Apple Slaves ofc), then they started working on robots with military applications and now they are starting to control our home environments - I am telling you - SKYNET.

I still cry over my beloved Cat Truffle who died a couple of years ago. There is no shame in loving a pet this much. They are part of our families and they are easy to become emotionally invested in. When Enzo was hit by a car I was in such a mess I had to use annual leave allowance as I couldn't face work when I knew he was sick and hurting. When Truffie died my parents were out of the house and came home to find that she had clearly had a seizure of some kind and was lying in the middle of the floor. Her little body was cold and a bit stiff so they think she had been gone a while and they found our other cat hiding under a bed upstairs - she seemed quite traumatised and wouldn't walk through the lounge where Truffie had been. My dad removed Truffies bed too soon - he couldn't look at it but he didn't give our other cat, Tigga, time to come to terms with Truffie being 'missing' - she howled for weeks and searched restlessly all the time. I know it is hard but don't pack away his bed or toys - the gradual fade out of his smell will help your other dog realise that he is gone. Don't change her routine if you can help it as this will stress her. Give her plenty of attention and time. Don't be tempted to get another dog to keep her company - at least not straightaway. I miss my beautiful angel:

I serve Hot Lava Java to my parents - anything less than a 6 in strength and my dad calls it 'Weak as Gnats P-155' It is nice but I try to avoid coffee generally. In this office we have a Rijo42 machine and it is constantly moaning 'Empty Waste' - I think our developers actually have blood in their caffeine system.

Wrist Supports - these are as much of a holy grail as Mugs. Stress squeezers with a decent memory-foam type action - not just cheap foam balls but the ones that take a few moments to recover their shape. Or better still the ones with actual gel in. Lanyards. I LOVE Lanyards. USB Sticks are good but promo ones tend to be really small capacity and I CBA with those. Lego is instant-WIN as are those 'office supplies construction kits'. I'm addicted to whiteboards and whiteboard markers. And magnets. LOVE magnets. Am trying to get @ibpalle to arrange a little SIT roadtrip to BETT this year but I think we're too late (also I'm pretty sure they might make me wear Smoothwall branded clothing so my ability to anonymously sneak about and nab freebies would be severely curtailed). Desktop organisation like pen pots or organisers are good. I love mugs too but I have a thing about cylindrical mugs. I can't bear to drink out of them and they end up used as pen pots. I have to drink out of 'conical' mugs - you know the ones that taper gently towards the bottom. It's a weird idiosyncrasy I have. Those thermos cups are great freebies too although they leak. I recently bought @ibpalle this awesome drinkpod thing that is sort of a flask but not - it holds a cupful and you just unscrew the lid and drink out of it rather than have to faff with pouring into the lid-cup. Best of both worlds IMO and no leakage. Probably way beyond the freebie budget though but I'm pretty sure the company that makes them do custom ones. I also really like those little tins of sugarfree mints and the grapefruit flavoured ones are lovely too.

I'm a non-smoker who avoids caffeine and I've been struggling to sleep lately too. My usual default go-to is that I write a story in my head. This distracts me from the 'physical things' - like an uncomfortable PJ wedgie, or creased sheets and because my body is still, my brain tends to shut down - usually when I've reached the good bit of the story. Although it has to be said for more persistent issues a change of routine is probably needed. Try getting up half an hour to an hour earlier - you'll be more tired at bed time. Also make sure to be up early at weekends - oversleeping at weekends is usually an issue for me because I sleep in on Sunday morning so find it hard to sleep Sunday night and am tired on Monday. I used to take 'Kalms' to help me sleep - not sure if they did any good or not but they are fairly gentle. I also find that fresh bed linen helps - try changing your pillow case every couple of days. It sounds weird but I always sleep really well in a fresh bed so I tend to change the linen as often as practicable (although getting it dry in this weather is a PITA and tumble drying it will destroy the embroidery). Horlicks is good too. Also, make sure you aren't eating too late. I grew up in a household that would eat dinner around 8.30pm. My partner grew up in a household that would have dinner on the table by 6.30pm and when he used to visit us he'd always have trouble with how late we ate and now we are in our own home we tend to eat around the 7pm mark giving us 3-4 hours before bed to digest dinner. I can't sit still and do one thing either - if I'm watching TV I have to be doing something with my hands so I'm a fairly prolific sewer which tends to tire me out too. Also - do you have pets that are allowed in the bedroom? Dogs are worse than Cats but I find my sleep more disturbed when my Cat is in the room because he has a different 'approach' to sleep. Maybe try shutting your pets out of the bedroom. If your problem is really bad and the pets howl or scratch put them into a boarding kennels/cattery for a few days to recover your rhythm. We moved one of our cats 'activity towers' upstairs and he discovered the 'bowl' and sleeps there (despite not fitting in it) so he's gone from sleeping in the bed with us to sleeping out on the landing and my partner is thrilled with the compromise.

To be fair, you didn't specify that in the original post... What do you mean 'clearance of the mattress from the floor' anyway? If the bed has drawers in it there won't BE a gap between the mattress and floor? The mattress looks like it lies flush to the edge of the frame so I'm guessing the frame height is the mattress clearance?

Part of the reason I had to give up caffeine - I used to get the 'caffeine come down shakes' - it was quite embarrassing. It reached a head when some woman literally veered out in front of my car in a cark park - she was walking on the path and did an abrupt 90 degree turn into the road and bounced off my bonnet (I was going super-slow - it was a multi storey car park and I was parking). It left me a bit shaky but I went off to lunch, had my usual coffee but by about 3pm I was huddled on the floor of a back room in a warehouse (I was a rep) trembling so hard I couldn't co-ordinate my hands enough to punch in the door code. Needless to say I had to drastically cut back after that... My theory is that the adrenaline released when the stupid bint walked into my car amplified the effect of the caffeine I consumed immediately afterwards. Bad plan. Bad bad BAD plan.

I R HARDCORE! Caffeine does nasty things to my kidneys so I avoid it. I drink fruit teas. I even order decaff lattes when I'm out and about. I don't even drink 'normal tea' at work. In an office that literally operates on caffeine I'm the only one that is 'dry'.

Don't forget that twitter uses a lot of cloud hosting domains like amazonaws.com so simply allowing the twitter domains won't solve this I'm afraid. You have to allow the cloud hosting domains too and I'd be cautious of allowing too specific a domain as the problem with cloud hosting is that you don't always get the same host twice. So allowing s3.amazonaws.com one day might work fine but the next it'll want s4.amazonaws.com etc. So some content - particularly user generated content won't have the hosts listed in the page source.

This explodes my brain.

LMGTFY: FLAXA Bed frame with storage - IKEA Length 207cm, width 98cm, Height 45cm. The IKEA website posts dimensions for all its products.

Ironically my two black eyes from my face-to-face meeting with the fence lost out on Bruise-of-the-week to a woman with an orange-sized bruise on her bum. I managed to get a spectacular black, purple and blue bruise on my knee from the most ridiculous of falls a couple of years ago. We had pulled to one side of the piste with our instructor to let some snowboarders pass while she explained our proposed route and I was standing there perfectly fine one minute then for no apparent reason the snow under my right ski fell away to reveal a bit of a hole and I very very gently pitched to one side on my bum. I didn't even think I'd hurt myself until I saw the vivid bruise that must have resulted from my knee coming into contact with the binding of my opposite ski. I won bruise of the week for it. I felt like a fraud when our class nominated me.

Ultimately Ski-ing is a dangerous sport. You strap yourself to two pieces of wood/plastic/carbon fibre and hurl yourself down the side of a mountain covered in powdered frozen water. Accidents happen, people get injured - sometimes very seriously, sometimes fatally and sometimes just enough to win bruise-of-the-week at the ski school awards. The person in question in this story was demonstrating good sense in wearing a helmet he just happened to be one of the unlucky ones that clobbered his head while having an accident doing something he was quite capable of doing - he wasn't out of his comfort zone, it was no-ones fault. It happened to me and it didn't dominate newspapers and news bulletins for days. I came over a blind crest on a short, steep red run that I've done hundreds of times that was well within my skill level and a beginner had accidently ended up on the run and instead of putting her skis straight and going for it (schuss) or taking them off and walking down to one side of the piste she was snowploughing. As it was a blind crest I didn't see her until I was already going quite fast. I attempted to avoid her (snowplough takes up a good chunk of the run and this one was pretty narrow), caught my ski in the side wall of the chute and went face first into a fence. I had migraines for months, debilitating, horrible migraines that landed me in hospital waiting for an MRI a couple of times. I nearly lost my job at the time because my then-boss (this was a previous role long before my current job) didn't believe that a migraine could be bad enough that I would be unable to work through it. I wish anyone suffering ski-related head injuries a swift recovery but know from experience that it will affect them for a long time - I still have trouble with it 5 years later especially when the weather gets cold because it aggravates the damage I did to my trigeminal nerve.

There is a particular sort of sound the Snowboard makes, especially when the piste is packed hard its a sort of Skrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrsssssssssssssssshhhhhhhh sound and it's terrifying when it's coming down behind you. I should clarify re: Boot clips and Ski bindings. Ski bindings are designed to release at a certain force. This is set by the technician according to your weight, experience, height etc. This is the DIN setting. If you own your own skis you likely manage your own DIN settings and more experienced skiers will likely have the release force set considerably higher than a beginner. If you rent skis at resort (TBH I prefer to rent skis rather than have to worry about maintaining my own. I have my own boots though) the DIN setting will be high enough that the boot stays put under standard ski-ing 'stresses' but low enough that it will release before you end up with your knee bending the wrong way. Front and back tensions can be managed individually. This is a good link for basic info: Ski Bindings Guide - Ski Equipment - Mechanics of Skiing Similarly ski boots are not uniform. The more experienced a skier, the less flex the boot will have because it makes it more responsive. My partner has a much harder boot than I do. Different brands of boots will have different types and numbers of clips. I have a pair of HEAD boots similar to these but about 3 seasons old (they will need replacing in the next season or so): Head Dream 8.5 Ski Boots (Women's) | Peter Glenn My boots have multiple clip adjustments from macro to micro adjustment and this was what I meant when I said I've skied with the toe clips undone - the top 2 and the power strap are the ones you open to be able to walk in the boot (out the locker room for example) but you can't ski at all unless they are done up. The one at the top of the foot is the one I have the most trouble with - too tight and my foot goes dead, too loose and I ski like a beginner. The bottom toe clip for me isn't all that important as the one at the top of the foot will often be tightened to the point that the toe clip can't get any tighter and it sits loosely. The fit of my boot changes throughout the week and day by day so there are no 'default' settings - what fits at the beginning of the week is really loose by the end - I don't know if others have found this but I defo end up doing my boots tighter towards the end of the week (apart from Black-and-Blue Wednesday when I can barely move). Some boot manufacturers have less clips - I once hired a spectacularly uncomfortable pair of NORDICA that had two clips (they were pretty old tbh) I ditched them within about 30 minutes of attempting to ski in them. Different boots fit differently too. Salomon tend to be really narrow which seem to work well for my partner but they shred my ankles. HEAD are wider so they accommodate my ankles better. Rossignol are too expensive for me lol. Although I do have a lovely pair of custom heat-moulded insoles for my boots - they are lush. I have quite flat feet though so to avoid ankle shreddage the techs at the boot shop built up my left arch support. My boots are brilliant now. Really not looking forward to having to replace them :-(

Mines a bit patchy atm as we've only just sorted the house enough that we can start putting our PCs in. We have a Virgin 'Superhub' and I have an additional Netgear Access point upstairs to attach wireless stuff like our Chromecast and Xboxes to. 2 X-boxes and a Wii Sonos Play 3 and Bridge Google Chromecast 4 Laptops, 2 PCs and a Netbook. 2 Galaxy Tablets and 2 Galaxy S3s Sky box The NAS The Printer When I get around to it I'm going to use some spare components I have lying around to build a small form factor device for my home Smoothwall. I have enough disk space and processing power in my main PC to run a few VM Servers until I can afford to upgrade my PC and turn the old one into a dedicated VM host. I'm quite enchanted with Zentyal atm so I want to get a server environment built with an AD and Exchange type server. Register my own domain and start hosting some web services for our own use. Will probably see if I can get all the media devices running through a single VM attached to the NAS so we can stream our various media sources. It's a big project with lots of tinkering. I also want to build a RaspPi Security cam that feeds to server storage so I can put a big fat middle finger up to the barstewards that stole my hanging basket, the dude over the road that vandalises cars he thinks are parked in 'his' space (it's a public layby with no permit requirements) and the obnoxious School kids that keep throwing litter into my garden. I will probably host a web front end for the feed so I can access it from work. I'm too cheap to spring for a static IP too so I'll probably sort out some DynDNS.

Ski Bindings are designed to pop open in an accident so I'd be wary of assuming too much and reading too much into 'journalist' reports. I've become separated from my skis a few times in accidents. He may have had a faulty binding on the ski but boots have multiple binding points and an experienced skier will KNOW when their boots are too loose immediately so it is doubtful he'd proceed onto a run with loose boot bindings. A too loose boot is not always detrimental to the skier either - it depends which bindings are loose - as long as the shin bindings are done up then the toe bindings are more or less superfluous. I've skied with my toe bindings loose loads of times. Purely speculation but what is more likely is that he hit a patch of something - ice, dirt, protruding rocks etc, spun out and whacked his head. A lot of it will be determined by how fast he was going and what method of ski-ing he was using - the 'french' method has skiers ski with their skis very close together and they zoom around like crazy - I'm not brave enough to try it tbh. I just stick to my hip width stance and my carving.

Shazam is a handy app for this too.