Steve Walker

Even without the red-eye, they've still got scary eyes!

There's another sort? The one we had when I was a kid would try to take your finger off.

I emailed the Environment Agency about those last time they were selling them. It's not illegal to sell them, and they could be used for other purposes, but they need a big sign saying "not legal to use as keepnets", in my opinion. I did get a reply saying that they were aware of the issue and had contacted Lidl about it.

It's a cultural thing, to many people from outside the UK our catch and release tradition makes no sense at all. At a conference on percid fish, the European delegates couldn't get their heads round the concept of trying to exterminate a good food fish like zander to protect the stocks of roach and gudgeon. Not saying that they should do it, mind, just that they are unlikely to understand that there's anything wrong with it. The EA might not be interested, but the owners of the fishing rights should contact the police; taking fish without consent is theft.

Nah, it's an electric snake juicer. You put snakes in at one end, snake oil comes out the other

Could be worse; I found my desktop PC indexed on Google... I'd opened port 80 on my firewall and mapped it to my PC so that I could show my boss something I was working on. I then forgot to close the port. Doh! Confused the bejesus out of me at the time, because I thought it was pointing to the public webspace, and it was showing pages which couldn't run on that server. Turns out that www.mydomain.myisp.co.uk has a DNS A record pointing to my public webspace, and mydomain.myisp.co.uk has one pointing to my fixed IP address. All shut up tight now, mind, and the entry removed from Google. [ 16. September 2005, 10:45 AM: Message edited by: Steve Walker ]

Oh, that's quite true, climate change is this week's excuse. It's given by environmental groups as justification, though. The real reason is "because we can".

Biodiesel is taxed at a lower rate than petro-diesel, 26p/l. The catch is that the stuff usually sold as biodiesel is usually only 5% derived from vegetable oils, the rest being fossil-fuel, and so as I understand it taxed at 95% normal duty + 5% reduced duty. Even so, charging any duty at all on pure biodiesel is disgusting, and makes a mockery of the notion that the duty is there to reduce CO2 emissions. I can buy a litre of vegetable oil and pour it on a bonfire tax free, but if I instead burn it in a car's engine I owe the treasury 26p. Ludicrous.

Trouble is, you then end up with small, very highly tuned turbocharged engines to get round it, which may not actually be the best engineering solution to getting power efficiently. You also have the problem that weight has at least as much to do with fuel consumption as engine size, and a tiny engine being thrashed to drag around an overweight car will not be the optimum for fuel consumption. It's also unfair to people who have a large engined car but don't use it much. If we want to charge people for the amount of carbon dioxide their car emits, taxing fuel is the most direct way of doing it. I don't actually think it's fair to tax carbon dioxide emissions from cars but not from any other sources; burning fossil fuels for domestic and industrial electricity consumption releases carbon dioxide too, but nothing like the level of road fuel duty is paid. Moving some of the fuel duty to non-renewable electricity generation would boost the renewable sector and give people a choice in whether they spend their carbon tax money on wasting petrol in their car or wasting electricity in their house. Likewise, removing the duty payable on road fuel derived from biomass (biodiesel, etc).

Have to say, the best fish I've ever eaten was perch. Caught in a low salinity area of the Baltic and immediately hot-smoked by the waterside over juniper twigs. Fantastic.

Tastes a bit like a double figure barbel Only joking, I've eaten pike (although never one that I've caught) and you're right, it is very good. Walton said it was too good for any but anglers or honest men.

Firefox will run Java applets too. Java's supposed to run in a "sandbox" and have restricted access to your PC's resources, but if this is not implemented perfectly by the software vendor there's a risk of this kind of thing happening. I agree about ditching IE, mind.

Zed, I used to know a bloke who was doing his PhD on the effect of zander on coarse fish populations in the Midlands canals. I lost touch with him, but was working as part of prof Brian Moss's group at Liverpool uni. You might be able to speak to someone there. For pike studies, you want the Freshwater Biological Association / Institute of Freshwater Ecology (or whatever NERC are calling the IFE this week) at Windermere. FBA Home Page IFE Home Page

Motoring-related taxes far exceed total spending on road transport. In one way, though, it makes no difference; most journeys to work are done by car. Moving the tax burden from motoring to, say, income tax, would by and large hit the same people paying it now. I still resent the tax on mobility, mind.

We took our honeymoon in the Dominican Republic about this time last year (first two weeks in September). Remember hurricane Ivan?

Dunno about hair-rigging it, but I always slip a short length of grass behind the bend of the hook, and it stays on fine.

Aye, but since it had the cosmetic dentistry done, you can barely see the resemblance.

Ah. With both their version and the White Album being released in '68, I thought that it was the usual case of a Beatles album track being released very quickly as a cover by someone else. I'm not old enough to remember the actual order of events

Nice one!

Thought it was a good one; turn 8 is a belter. Nice to see a bit of overtaking for once.

Obladee Oblada was not a Beatles song. Marmalade were the offenders.I think the Marmalade version was a cover, I don't think the Beatles released it as a single in the UK.

Would you like a list? Would be a shorter list than the good ones.

Anybody know any *bad* Beatles songs?

In my old job, I occasionally had to deal with "Corporate Communications" (they were called Marketing, but they rebranded themselves...). These are the people responsible for the Flash presentations on the front of big corporate websites. Style over substance every time. I noticed that the monthly newsletter email (in HTML format) they sent out was getting more and more garish and overstyled, so I wrote a program to parse out the content from the mark-up and compare file sizes. About 20% useful content versus 80% making it look pretty, IIRC. [ 20. August 2005, 04:51 PM: Message edited by: Steve Walker ]

We could send this one round, they're her favourite snack: