It calls several times a week, and if I call back it says there is no need to speak to them, it’s just a courtesy call. I can remove my number from their database by sending an email with some specific details, but I don’t remember inviting them to phone me every week when I entered into an insurance contract with them.

It seems that maybe when their computer is bored, it picks people at random to try and talk to. Why it calls during the day when any sensible person would be at work is beyond me.

Price £700
Tax 11/11
MOT 09/11
174,000 miles, but the engine was replaced at about 130,000 miles with a brand-new one.

Gearbox, turbo, roof and various other parts have been swapped from a donor car which had done about 70k miles (and the car has done maybe 10k since then)

Bluetooth Hands free/USB MP3 playing stereo (Blaupunkt Hamburg MP57)

Exhaust is new-ish all stainless.

Paint on the boot has peeled off, been resprayed, and not stuck too well. Also some paint peeling off the driver’s door. Doors are a little rusty although this is mainly just showing as marks on the sills.

Location Cambridge/Royston. Selling since I have bought a new CRZ, and I don’t need two fun cars, plus I no longer have time to maintain the RX7.

The passenger wing mirror is a replacement (painted red). The original is available, and just needs new glass. It hit the garage door on the way to it’s last MOT.

Click on the photos to see more from an album at picassa.

The dance venue seems quite well laid out – One building with bar/lounge, blues room, dining room and WCS room, then main room in another building about 50 yards walk outside. Each room has a bar, and the 2 secondary rooms are a reasonable size.

Good points were:

• Blues room layout, and good sized proper dance floor
• Afternoon freestyles in the middle of the venue seemed to attract enough people
• Atmosphere seemed generally quite good
• Live band in the blues room on Sunday evening. Could have had maybe a little more slower, and less funky stuff, but I liked enough of it.
• Tango Milongas in the blues room every evening
• Afternoon sets were generally a good compromise for the people there.

Bad points were:

• Queues for dinner on Friday evening (venue not prepared for 500 people to eat), although the situation did improve significantly over the weekend.
• Lighting in the blues room. The approach seems to be to hope it will work, and not be prepared in case it doesn’t.
• Several blues room sets were a bit too monotonous, although there were enough good sets to almost make up for it. The only problem is deciding when to stay up till dawn, and when to give up in favour of sleep.

I didn’t do any classes, but the standard of dancing (at least in the blues room, and afternoons) seemed reasonable but without many people who stood out. Certainly it has potential, and I had enough really good dances to make it worth the effort, which was a pleasing surprise.

£3200. 103,000 Miles

More photos on Exchange and Mart

Smart ForFour 1.3 Passion. Manual, petrol. 54 reg. Air con, alloy wheels, panoramic glass roof. 12 month MOT. Metallic blue/dark gray colour. Wired in Bluetooth Hands-free and USB compatible Blapuunkt stereo.

My dancing has moved on since those days, and I now search out exclusively blues or tango-esque music, finding that many events do absolutely nothing for my dance mojo I do less dancing for more driving. Even Scotland for a weekend!

There might be more awareness of blues, but that seems to spread things out a little more, so it will be great to see who turns up this weekend and if we can manage to re-create the magic of a full weekend of blues room goodness. (It’s not quite 24 hour dancing, but I do prefer to be able to sleep at night, rather than work the night shift just because that’s when everyone thinks the best dancing is to be had).

I’m not competing this weekend (it just isn’t something that interests me), but I will be there taking a few photos and at all of the freestyles. (Fri, Sat, Sun).

Hope to see a few familiar faces at Buckden this weekend.

In response to the comments by Richard on this thread.

Sean Houlihane The practice of hiding the detail of a method is (and was admitted by Jones) not beneficial in the sense that a robust theory can look after itself. Transparency in the method will improve the method. This is not really a matter for sensible argument (and that was the IoP’s submission)

NOT BENEFICIAL??? IMPROVE THE METHOD??!! WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

How can a theory be “robust” when the “detail of the method” is hidden? When that happens “the theory”, (read temperature trends), are not worth the paper they are written on, much less the basis on which to commit trillions of dollars of public money, shutting down our power generating infrastructure and moving us back to the stone age.

Stop for a moment and read what I intended to write, not what you think I wrote. I can see no logical argument which supports Gavin’s position that the secrecy is justified. Gavin says that providing more open access to the data and the method is risky because it might be abused. I say that if, and only if the theory happens to be correct as many people for various reasons believe then it can look after itself. At a scientific level, there is a need for as good a temperature series as is possible – this is how we justify having satellites and collations of instrumental data.

Not much new is known to suggest that the data is any different now compared with 6 months ago.

True but what is now known is that data is crap.

Not proven. In order to argue this, you need to be specific about which data and why you believe it is crap. Is Roy Spencer’s data contaminated by the problems you don’t elaborate on? Would you claim that the last 10 years might have seen strong warming? The only data issue I could imagine being affected by recent events is the question about comparing today’s temperatures with the MWP (and there the answer could be ‘maybe’ rather than ‘almost certainly not’)

No alternative temperature reconstructions have yet been accepted as moving the science forward, so the evidence is unchanged.

Because the bloody thick headed stupid deniers, or those who are crooked and willing to sell our future for 40 pieces of silver, will never accept the abundant temperature reconstructions which show that todays warming is in no way unique!

Too many variables. I was thinking of 1850-2010 temperatures, which are sufficient evidence for many who claim that something must be done. Go back to 1000, and the uncertainties are too large. Go back further, and the continents were not in the same place. Progress is being made, people are looking, but there is an abundance of short term environmental evidence that change is occurring which scares many people who imagine we might be at fault.

.The quality of the evidence is in question, but not by enough to justify a change in policy.

Its just a smidgen less is it? What would be enough to wake the warmists from their brain dead stupor?

You’ve got the logic back to front. Go back 30 years, and you’ll find a group of people with concerns about ozone, heavy metals, energy dependence, overpopulation, clean water, food and rain forests. They have seen the AGW issue as being aligned with their ideologies, and will take every possible fragment of supporting evidence to further their cause. They are scared, and even if this is irrational, it will take more than some scientific wrangling to convince them that the policies they support are either impractical or have significant un-intentional consequences. Try talking to a wamist about the relative costs of microgeneration and nuclear power for example.

This question is unrelated to the original submission from the IOP – they have not yet bothered to re-assess the scientific basis for current policy. It is not that they don’t care, it is not as simple an issue as ‘should the data be freely available‘.

. I can’t fail to see comments such as ‘Richard’ as being the cause for the IOP having to issue a clarification. I am disappointed that there are veiled accusations of bias being made here.

Bias? The managing committee issues a statement “The institutes position on climate change is clear: the basic science is well enough understood to be sure that our climate is changing, (changing? bloody hell – who would have known) and that we need to take action now to mitigate that change.”

The IoP has taken what you interpret as a biased position for many years. My issue was with this

This is very interesting. I think I follow developments on the climate front as closely as anyone, but I can’t say I’ve heard anyone suggest that the IoP was saying anything more than it actually did – that the climategate affair had worrying implications for the integrity of climatology.

In these circumstances, one also wonders who it was that “forced” the IoP to issue a clarification.

The forcing of the issue was fairly clear to me, the various contributors to the comment threads who were claiming that ‘this means it’s all over’. All they said was the behaviour of this one group of scientists did not meet the standards they had assumed.

When some in the Institute of Physics state that the integrity of scientific research in the climate science field is in doubt and its credibility of their use of the scientific method is in question, how on earth can the managing committe state that we need to take action to mitigate that change? How will that action be any more effective than throwing rice over your shoulder or doing a rain dance? Just because it will cost trillions of dollars more?.

Originally posted at http://www.houlihane.co.uk/blog

Scam profile

Mr X manages to find my facebook account profile, and starts opening chat windows with anyone he finds online.
Hi… I’m in big trouble… Need help… Got mugged last night at gunpoint… Need to get home and need to pay hotel bill… Thanks, that would be great… can you wire the cash by Western Union

Scam Detection

You might think noone would fall for this, but rest assured that it does not matter why people fall for it – if there wasn’t good money to be made through this scam people would not bother. It only takes one of the 30 people or so who are online falling for it, and that’s £50 or more made in the space of an hour… these guys are probably chatting to several people at once, and have a list of hacked accounts to work through.

Action

Facebook do have procedures for changing your password, or retrieving a hacked account. It might help if you know you always have access to another account who is your friend, e.g. at work, or a sleeping account. This will help you determine why you can’t log-on.

Recovery

Even once I regained access to my account, there was some cleaning-up to do. On order to prevent people spreading the work the hacker had:

Preparation

If you’ve got this far, you probably want to take a few steps to be more prepared to fend-off a hacking attempt.

This is the classic 419 scam. Someone gains the ability to plausibly impersonate you, contacts people who may not know you well (those who do know are discarded) and spins some panicy story about being mugged, needing cash in a hurry. I don’t know the rest of the story as noone fell for it.

If in doubt, phone, email, check blog. Remember, if they are not in trouble, people will be able to access their email. Check other people’s status, spread the word, check if their wall is blocked or hidden.

Things to reset: