Time on our hands

[Mike Costigan]

Dave, I've got that Wills Finecast chummy, too. The wheels are a superb reproduction of the original, but sadly not strong enough to support the weight of the substantial body; I see your wheels are buckling, too - any thoughts on re-engineering them?

[Dave Mann]

I built it many years ago and some time later I found the front axle broken, apparently a neighbour's young son had been playing with it, pushing it over the carpet as small boys do. I repaired the front axle when I broke my pelvis and decided not to tempt fate with the wheels, if they survived a small boy they can't be so bad.

[Tony Griffiths]

Tony is quite right about the fragility of the WWW. It has turned into a wonderful resource, and a great many institutions and individuals have carried our scanning programmes making a huge amount of material and information accessible.

One of the mistakes that website owners (and people with many photographs or other saved material) make is not to keep off-line backups. It's all very well having a website or other material backed up on some remote server - but even that can fail. The trick, if you have a lot of data, is to employ two external hard drives and back up, manually, to each. Don't reply on automated backups; I've tried several and, guess what, they don't always work. Last year my web hosting company managed to loose over three-quarters of my site - and, naturally, they had no backup. However, with three offline copies available, it was soon restored.
Need a reliable external hard drive? I've found Western Digital "Elements" very satisfactory. I run them for three or four years and then retire them, just in case (though as an experiment, I kept one going for over six years I believe).

[Bruce Nicholls]

One of the mistakes that website owners (and people with many photographs or other saved material) make is not to keep off-line backups. It's all very well having a website or other material backed up on some remote server - but even that can fail. The trick, if you have a lot of data, is to employ two external hard drives and back up, manually, to each. Don't reply on automated backups; I've tried several and, guess what, they don't always work. Last year my web hosting company managed to loose over three-quarters of my site - and, naturally, they had no backup. However, with three offline copies available, it was soon restored.
Need a reliable external hard drive? I've found Western Digital "Elements" very satisfactory. I run them for three or four years and then retire them, just in case (though as an experiment, I kept one going for over six years I believe).

Absolutely agree about the value of hard drive back ups. My computer has suffered various "infestations" and breakdowns over the years leading to total loss of data, potentially serious to me as I keep all rental accounts for our various properties on it. However I have always used a separate hard drive to back up and for the last few years free backup software from 2 Bright Sparks which only backs up changed files and is therefore quick. This has always had me back in business very quickly. You do have to remember to back up when you have done work and keep your hard drive safe. At work we used two and kept one in the night safe at our bank rotating them daily ensuring the worst that we could lose was 1 days data.

[andrew34ruby]

Time on our hands?????? Difficult to see just why, but there's no time here. Somehow a longer list of emails to send, adult offspring to appease and teenage grandchildren to send reassuring messages to.

[Chris KC]

Me neither Andrew, I'm up at 6.15 every morning, working at home from 7 till 4, then working on projects of my own till it starts to get dark. Then there's dinner to prepare and perhaps an hour in front of the TV relaxing. Used my lunch break yesterday to mow the lawn. As soon as I'm done on Friday I'll be out in the shed looking to see if I have enough paint to start work on the house. Nobody bored here!

[Dave Mann]

[b]Here's another a South East Finecast 1:43 RP saloon built as an RN saloon, what else.      [/b]

[Dave Mann]

Whilst I keep a log of all activities on our cars on an Excel spread sheet, it gets printed off annually to go in a file with all receipts, MOT certificates, tax discs, etc. Computers are very useful however, you can't beat having something you can get hold of. Whilst storing anything on the internet is not such a good idea, there is no guarantee that you can retrieve it or it won't get hacked, there are a number of young ladies who have stored compromising photos there and wished they hadn't. Again the internet's usefulness is declining, I can do a Google search for something and have loads of responses with 90 odd percent having nothing to do with what I asked. Whilst most of the rest are fictional. Whilst the degree of usefulness of company websites is inversely proportional to the size of the company. Then we have companies who advertise an item and don't remove it when it is sold.

[Chris KC]

If I have to read one more forum post along the lines of "dude u don't no what ur talking about" or "chevvy big block always had that cuz that's wat worx I heard it from a guy who knows" I swear I will attack the internet with an anvil.

[Dave Wortley]

And Facecloth can be even worse!