Flyby PC

From Beevor's book, I seem to recall the mice being called "little partisans".

Massive Air battle video was excellent too Hellshade. You got the distinct impression the AI were genuinely covering each other's tails. If you're not a half decent pilot, with trackir, I reckon you're dead meat.

Fightin' talk gents. Let's see if multiplayer in 'doable', and have the Combat Ace Woffers take on the Sim HQ Woffers in an airborne dogfight to settle our differences and bragging rights. Might be fun, and a regular occurance too with any luck. Once we're all pals, we could fly missions together with bomber flights and escorts etc..

In terms of reality, the bombed prison building at Amiens in Operation Jericho was repaired and is still standing, and you can see it on Google Earth. Many moons ago I could have given you the coordinates. Its more urban round about, with more buildings, but clearly recogniseable. There were other missions too. 2TAF also bombed a barracks near Poitiers. I'd need to research the details and names, (Bon Mateurs??) , but they were targetting the barracks of the German troops who had tortured and beaten to death SAS troops in the weeks running up to D-Day.

Just a quickie. I have 2 windows XP machines down with hard drive issues. (Where they are is powered on a generator, and the constant on/off corrupts the dll's etc). I need to make an XP repair disk. I have the 4.5mb utility downloaded to make a disk, but the PC I'm using is 64bit, and says it cannot create a 32bit (actually it says 16bit) disk. Naturally, I can't get either XP machines to boot to a workable interface. Sometimes Microsoft can be so tedious.... Is there a work around? or do I need to walk the streets to find an XP user?

No Gestapo HQ's, nor indeed Nazi parades, but there is a half finished Amiens jail that's been built. Lacked textures and 'blow upyness' but it's out there. Many moons ago, Pat Pattle was going to have a look at finishing it, and he did a grand job doing the gliders and bridge at the Orne river on D-Day. Thinking back I did a video of the raid for Youtube, but early on and I forgot to put snow on the ground. So Operation Jericho is credibly possible, but the Gestapo raids I don't know. Operation Carthage might be on the map, Copenhagen?, but that's a very sad mission to recreate. Lots of kids killed when a Mosquito crashed clipping a lamp post, and the following planes bombed the smoke. They got the correct target too, but many kids were drowned in the basement of their school as the fire brigade put out the fires.

Woohoo!

I know RE 8's were known as 'Harry Taites' but scratching my head, I can't think of any other nicknames. There must be loads. I can't believe the BE2 was actually called a BE2 throughout the whole war. Am I just having a mental block here? Or weren't nicknames the done thing?

I have a hard drive failure, asking me to insert a Win7 installation disk. I do so, it loads windows files, then tries to start windows but freezes on the startup page with the 4 coloured logo. I piggy backed the hard drive onto a WinXP machine, which ran an integrity check on the damaged hard drive. It took 9 hours to 'fix' the sectors errors, orphaned files sector things etc, and now the hard drive loads as a data drive without prompting integrity checks, but when I put the hard drive back where it belongs, I get the same routine: I need the installation disk to install from the DVD, but it hangs / freezes loading windows. I don't understand why XP can fix the drive, at least as a data drive, but Win 7 cannot seem to correct itself or re-write its own startup protocol. Confused... I like Win7, but how can I get it to fix itself? It feels very close to working, but hangs at the same point. Any suggestions?

Hi, sorry to be slow in reply. The pc which failed is a half size PC, and the motherboard has only capacity for one hard drive at a time, although I suppose I could use an external hd. The win 7 installation disk is downloaded from the internet and burned onto a cd. I do have a legit code for it. I'm not 100% confident with the hard drive which has failed, since its already failed once. I'm a stonemason, and we also get faults causing power cuts from time to time, so the dust and sudden shut downs is hard on hardware with moving parts. I suppose I could put a new hd in the pc, and turn the repair into an upgrade, but I don't know to reinstall all the software wholesale. The immediate complication is I'm also working away from home during the week and I've not had much time. I'm wondering whether to bite the bullet and just get a new desktop. There seem to be some good deals on big square desktops, but not sure I'd like win8. I'd like to fix the one I have.

Thanks fellas. I can't get as far as a launch in safe mode. I need to alter the BIOS boot order to load files from the recovery DVD, I get it to load files, then it crashes. If I boot from the hard drive, it fails, and tells me to install the installation disk and restart. I can't even get to a command prompt. I thought the drive was a write off, and only piggy backed the drive to try recovering some data. After the big long disk integrity check, I was surprised to see everything still there. The hassle is its my only Win 7, the old pc & a borrowed laptop are both XP. Lots of my files are newer versions and I can't open them. Its frustrating that I can't fire up the drive with Win7 and have it re-install itself. I don't think its a virus, the PC was moved in a car. I will try that drive analysis check disk thing...

Not sure about these Napoleonic pictures. They might be veterans wearing their uniforms several years later. Waterloo was 1815, and that is too early for such photographs to exist. I'm not a photography buff, but I thought it was the mid 19th century before photography anything like this was established. I'm guessing these pics must be at least 25 to 30 years after Waterloo, which in fairness explains the advanced age of the soldiers. Still very cool pictures I forgot to say...

I was once working on a chimney in Longformacus when a Lanc, Spitfire & Hurricane flew over - Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. Very cool and totally unexpected. A few days later a very low flying C130 skimmed around the trees, flew straight up the vista of the big house, banked right above the same house. Very exciting because I'd jumped out a few. When I say low, I mean 200 ft. Got the sheep running for cover but I f------ loved it. Sometimes noise can be so damn cool!

Whispering Death may have been a name for the Corsair too, but it was definitely the nickname given to the Bristol Beaufighter by the Japanese. Incidentally, for those interested, I caught a trailer for a TV program about the Timber Terror DH Mosquito on at the weekend; the Plane that Saved Britain or some title. I reckon I've seen most Mossie footage that's public, but there might be some newer footage since the Kiwi team of restorers put one back in the air. Sunday at 8 is the time that registered but check the papers.

FB5 was the "gunbus" I seem to recall, or maybe I just read that in a Commando book. I've heard Fee and Brisfit too. Hip bath is new to me though.

Sick and tired of the whole carry on. The Bank will nothing, absolutely nothing to help my business, complaining my turnover has collapsed. The only reason my turnover collapsed is because the Banks wrecked the economy and brought the building trade to a virtual halt. They get obscene massive bonuses, the politicians get a raise of twice the amount I'm currently living on, even the queen gets an extra £6 million a year, and I, the one who does all the work gets life on the breadline for the forseeable future. Makes me sick. I've also just learned what council workers paid, and that 60% of council tax is paying for their pensions. I don't even have a pension. The difference between me and the bug in amber is the blood sucking parasites are the giant reptiles and tiny little me is all out of blood.

Pickled in amber is what happens to bugs who fall into wells of tree sap which hardens to trap them and fixes them in stasis forever, or at least until a mad scientist drills in to hunt for some dinosaur DNA.

Its actually sad to think how few hours flying I've put in over the last two years. Not very much that's for sure. I have actually lost my baseball cap with the TrackIR christmas tree bits on it. I'll just have to glue bits of site safety vest to my forehead, or else a minor assault on a traffic cone could provide the reflective material. Two years eh? And I'm still being pickled in amber by this damned credit crunch.

Yeah, but it wouldn't kill T'pol to smile once in a while.

You couldn't make it up.... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10084348/Kettle-that-looks-like-Hitler-brews-trouble-for-JCPenney.html

Apologies if this has been mentioned before. I missed it if it was. I thought this was going to be really cheesy, but I was wrong. This is brilliant. Chris Hadfield in space singing David Bowies Space Oddity. Sorry about the formatting, for some reason pressing enter wouldn't work carriage return. Hmmm, doesn't work here either. I was going to say it's not WW1 related, but a yardstick for where we've come in 100 years.

The UK has plans to spend £50 million to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of WW1 next year, and there has been some controversy whether it would be better to wait until 2018 to commemorate the end of the war, rather than the beginning. It got me doing some thinking, and frankly, even by 1913, we were already well on the way towards war being inevitable as a consequence of all the instability in the Balklands, especially Bosnia, over several years. It's really quite wrong to think it was the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand which started it all. The situation in the Balkans was already a powder keg waiting to blow. http://www.funfront.net/hist/wwi/crises.htm I dare say this isn't news to lots of you, but it isn't something I'd read up on before.

In a sane world I might agree Maeran, but after the Olympics carry on, there is a worrying precedent. I don't want to dwell on the politics, nor indeed the UK media, or we'll definitely be shunted to the pub.

It's even more bizarre to kick it all off in Glasgow. Of course Scotland did it's bit and then some in WW1, but there were tanks and 10,000 English soldiers deployed on the streets of Glasgow in January 1919 to quell a strike over working hours. It concerns me how much this event this smells very much like Westminster politicking in advance of Scotland's independence referendum. http://www.theglasgo...ion=0&search=99 Incidentally, the picture here in the article is wrong, the tank shown is Julian 113, a demonstration tank promoting war bonds. It's a Mk VI male tank. The tanks deployed on the streets in Glasgow to break up the strike were medium C types. If it was my place to do so, I might warn Westminster that Scotland has a long memory. Curious times we live in. I hope this makes it under the wire for WW1 relevance and apolitical comment, as I say, something doesn't ring true. Edit: More info - http://urbanglasgow.co.uk/archive/tank-on-trongate__o_t__t_677.html

I can't really put my finger on it, but it's just tremendously uplifting. It's not just that a real live astronaut is singing a song about an astronaut. It's nothing spooky that David Bowie mysteriously saw it coming, but just the things that would come to pass actually have come to pass, but the circuit isn't dead and Major Tom isn't lost, the circuit is good, and the astronaut is coming home. I think it's uplifting because it is just a song. Life has a live soundtrack. The other thing is how outlandish David Bowie was considered to be when he released Space Oddity; the emphasis seemed to be less space more oddity, but I've grown up in the same period that David Bowie has become the establishment, and is now being sung by Astronauts to inspire school kids to study science. That's pretty cool. It's nice when someone original shows up to shake the place up a little.