Cresta Fiesta

So the son introduced the Mother to legal highs? Is that the case? As you say there does seem to be a mild parenting issue when your 15 year old comes home and convinces you to shovel shit loads of plant food down your gullet. What a fuckwitt. This is my point of course. What's the problem here - the substance itself, or the people involved in the example given? Alcohol can be utterly ruinous and entirely destructive, and yet most folks manage to enjoy 'a drink or two' now and then without flushing their lives down the toilet - who's suggesting 'the problem drinker' issue gets fixed with prohibition? (It worked really well when the USA tried it.......) Call me old-fashioned, but if my child came back to the house talking about new designer drugs and how euphoric it was making them feel, I'd sit them down on the sofa and talk things through. I wouldn't, for example, go on a bender with it (and my child) until my body erupted into some kind of Exorcist-esque sores and my face dissolved into candle wax - or whatever hysterical fucking nonsense it was that IOM Tosspapers saw fit to publish. The most depressing (and brilliant) thing about Brass Eye is that it's turned out to be almost entirely true. (And not just on drugs either, check out the entire series, pretty cheap on DVD these days.)

'My son told me about a new designer drug doing the rounds,' she said. 'He said it made him feel euphoric, full of energy and empathy — it sounded like a ball. He said it was perfectly legal so I thought great, why not give it a try, it can't be that harmful.' Let's play 'spot the parenting problem' as opposed to 'let's make a chemical compound illegal' game........ Regular usage causes rashes and open sores. And how does that happen, exactly? Utterly shambolic reporting on the part of IOM Shitpapers. All that said, WATCH OUT FOR THE WEREWOLVES! (Hint - don't go three days without sleep, you fucking muppet.)

Isle of Man Newspapers, yesterday. It's a fuckin' disgrace!

A Double Sausage & Egg McMuffin meal with a large coffee offers kick-ass hangover relief - and yes, Maccy D's coffee is always very pleasant.

Our regular 'lunch club' has eaten there once and whilst it's still on the list it didn't amaze us. Prices on the daytime menu are reasonable (only a couple of quid more than a pub meal) but the choice was very limited and the food, whilst above average-ish, wasn't overly impressive either. The burgers need jazzing up with something (even a basic relish), the 'tumbleweed onions' on the steak sandwich just tasted burnt and dry, and the all day breakfast was, as one of my chums remarked, 'just about cooked' (he wasn't far off sending the sausages back). TBH if it weren't for the superb games room downstairs, we'd be in no particular hurry to go back. (The games room is, however, fantastic, although there was NO PINBALL when we went.) The place itself is very well done out, and the staff were excellent, we'll certainly be going back in due course, but it's not on the 'take the missus there in the evening' list yet.

I hate Tesco, the whole place just exudes evil, which is hardly surprising as it's part of a thoroughly despicable company. I'm surprised they were allowed to set up shop here in the first place. I refuse point blank to shop there on principle, and even though Shoprite is a bit pants in some regards, we do all our shopping there, and it doesn't make me want to turn suicide bomber every time I go in. Also the Waitrose 'touch of horseradish' crisps are very nice.

Vista SP2 is fine, a lot of complaints about Vista are down to people running it on low-end machines. Less than 1GB of RAM and/or a single core processor - don't bother. Mrs Fiesta is entitled to a free W7 disc for her laptop, but Vista on there runs fine so we'll just leave it. It also doesn't help that manufacturers pre-load their machines with an amazing amount of crapware, which bogs down the OS before you even have a chance to use it. W7 is better than Vista, but they're largely the same under the hood, truth be told.

I tried snorting it once. Hint: Don't.

It depends if you get GOOD CHEF or EVIL CHEF. It's a lottery from the one in Ramsey on that basis as well. I had a Pathia from there a couple of weeks ago that was absolutely heavenly, the last one I'd had before that was pukey. It's really quite frustrating.

It's their recent firmwares that cause the problems in my experience.

Yeah, all our machines are manual IP's. That's weird it's working ok for you, we've had 2 new routers and port forwarding hasn't worked on either. It's not anything we are doing wrong because we put our pre-upgrade router back in with exactly the same port forwarding settings as the new ones and it works fine. I'll check the firmware versions, but it hasn't worked with the pre-loaded MT version, or the latest upgrade as of a couple of weeks ago. Bet you it's a Netgear issue. Their recent firmwares have been crap.

I had the same problem and two 'experts' sorted it for me. Except they didn't. In the end I'm borrowing someone elses old router. Works ok now. When I can be arsed, I'll change back to the old original router - not netgear. This is what I'm saying man, it's a Netgear issue. You can fudge it with statics but even then it can go wonky when DHCP leases in the same range expire. I was a big Netgear fan for years but their recent firmwares have been shit, and their newest Rangemax or whatever they're called routers are shit from a hardware perspective too.

I'm pretty sure it's a Netgear issue, specifically a bug that was introduced in a recent version of their firmware, across (as fas as I can tell) most of their product range. Assigning fixed IPs will work (but you'll have to do it on the clients and the router - one or the other won't fix it with 100% consistency). Alternatively you could switch brands, I went to Belkin (after years with Netgear) and I haven't had a hiccup with IP addressing across my entire network since I made the switch. (This is on a network with nearly 15 clients, including wireless and wired, Vista, XP, Win7, 360s, XBox, NAS, wireless printer etc.) I've also heard reports of exactly the same problems with regards to DHCP on other networks, the common thread is always a Netgear router.

So who did it get contracted out to then? I thought it was still dealt with in-house, the traffic wardens themselves appear to be the same faces?

Any verified pinball sightings yet? Let's stick to the important stuff.

Those super-expensive Belkin ones from the Wi-Manx shop are good, once you've replaced the alarmingly crap firmware with the 'USE THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK' pre-release firmware from the Belkin site. (Do not attempt to use this router with the supplied firmware, the amount of stuff that doesn't work properly is stunning.) http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct....rodid=NW-080-BE I bought one last week from the Wi-Manx shop, same price as online once the P&P was factored in, which isn't bad going. I like the little screen on the front, even though I've just ended up using it as a clock. It's gigabit ethernet which has made a big difference to transfer speeds to and from my NAS (which is also gigabit) and also between my two wired PCs. Better wireless coverage than my old Netgear DG834GT and better transfer speeds, even on wireless g kit. Syncs up at just over 13-meg, same as the old Netgear, and sustains the same download speeds of around 1.2MB per second.

I hope there will be a pinball, nice beer and decent burgers. Are there going to be retro fruit machines as well? If so I may move in permanently.

LOL ROFFLE ETC - http://www.fookinprawns.net/

Hence my point using the 'n' word, but if anyone was offended by the bluntness with which I made that point, I apologise. (Although the same basic point would hold true for just about any mental illness, most of which are misunderstood, many of which are widely misrepresented, and a frightening number of which are often held in the status of 'not existing at all'.) Boredom's attitude isn't offensive as such, I've always believed that a person chooses to 'become offended' rather than have 'offence pushed upon them' - but speaking as someone who's lived very closely with depressive disorders and bi-polar for the last 15 years (I don't have them but people close to me do), it's certainly a very Neanderthal approach to take. Finally, I don't believe that any topic should be beyond the reach of debate, and humour and satirists, there can't be any 'holy ground' - but if you're going to go into certain areas, make sure you've got the intellect to make it worthwhile - (Chris Morris, for example, and his dissection of the moral hysteria surrounding paedophilia) - Boredom spectacularly failed to make the grade with his post, hence my getting a bit pissed off with his stupidity.

No. I'm not Bernard Manning and I don't find racist gags funny in the least. But mental disabilities are fair game?

I think that they were thinking of setting one up, and then changed their minds. Ha ha, that's funny! If only all those stupid people with mental disorders could just pull themselves together eh? Got any nigger jokes whilst we're in this territory?

So most crashes are caused by people driving under 40 miles per hour? Hmmm Maybe we shouldn't have speed limits but speed minimums so all you speed nut danger junkies can race around at top wack happy in the knowledge when you crash into someone at 60+ (120+ if you believe some cocks on this forum) you weren't breaking the law. That's not the point that's been made, as you very well know. In perfect conditions, 40mph on an open road is too slow, certainly when I did my test I was expected to reach 50mph under such conditions. However, the average fossilised remains propped up behind the wheel, myopically starting dead ahead (and probably unable to move their neck at all, come to think about it), pootles along at 40mph, never making any effort to perhaps slow down further to allow vehicles behind to pass, or actually travelling at a higher speed more appropriate for the conditions. This in itself however, whilst annoying, is tolerable. It's when they get to a 30 zone or even a 20 zone however, and they carry on at exactly 40mph, even past a school with the 20 zone in effect, that you have to wonder if the person is even remotely competent to be behind the wheel of a car. I've overtaken a driver like this in a derestricted zone (not going particularly fast you understand, just more than 40mph), only to have them catch me up in the following 30 zone, because I felt it wise to travel at less that the posted speed limit because there were a lot of children around. Not to this old geezer though, it was still a one-size-fits all 40mph, whatever the conditions and whatever his surroundings. There should be basic driving competency test at 65, and every five years thereafter. Not a full driving test, just an examiner sitting in with someone and letting them drive their own car around a route they're familiar with for 15 minutes or so, to see if the person involved is still possessed of the basic skills required to drive safely.

'The Pledge' and 'Requiem For A Dream' spring to mind. Oh and 'The Mist' as well.

District 9 has the benevolent sort of CGI, where it's a necessary part of the film and it's not flashy in any way, it's also convincing and natural, it's part of telling the story. Overall, the CGI in District 9 is absolutely exemplary.

You'll never find a real Chinese person who eats the fluorescent goop they sell in their takeaways, that's there purely for our benefit. Sweet and sour chicken balls is not a Chinese speciality food. Some of the early Ken Hom stuff (often on YouTube) shows what the original Chinese dishes looked like and how they were made, either that or date a Chinese person